FF is not GoT.

[Fenral]

But I respectfully disagree. You can make many generalizations about Final Fantasy, but your vision of what Final Fantasy 'should' be isn't always what Final Fantasy 'is;' [...] I don't think it's really anyone's place but the developer's to make the decision on the tone of the story.

Only thing I have to say to counter that is that there was a pretty long stretch where each numbered Final Fantasy was aware of the themes of the games preceding it, and up until 3.2, FFXIV pretended it wasn't. Pretended. After 3.2, I'm much more willing to believe the devs do know what they're doing, but for a while it was like we had regressed back to FFII levels of death and nihilism without acknowledging that VI and IX were also a thing that happened.

The other thing to take into account is how SquareSoft used to operate, back in the day. They had a number of producers working on a number of different brands, each with their own "series" that was pretty much theirs to do with as they saw fit. Hironobu Sakaguchi had Final Fantasy, Akitoshi Kawazu had SaGa, Koichi Ishii had the Mana games, etc. Tetsuya Takahashi had Xenogears, which he packed up and took with him to his own company as Xenosaga and now Xenoblade.

Final Fantasy happens to be the one S-E brand that has survived long past its creator's time on the payroll, and to this day it continues to get passed around to different producers and directors trying to recover the magic it lost. Which is not to say that games since haven't been good in their own way, just that there hasn't been a consistent hand at the wheel since FFIX, and everyone has their own ideas on what to do with it.