The Future of Single-Player Final Fantasy

What if we retired the 'should it be fantasy or science fiction' argument and did something different? There's a bot on Bluesky called NESBot that posts links to resetera threads and one that caught my (and a lot of people's eyes) yesterday was this: Ever since Final Fantasy VII released and hit cultural paydirt, this question of "Should FF be more fantasy or science fiction" has exploded out and like, I kiiiiinda bristle at the question every time since both "sides" of these genres have been present from the start of the franchise and I'm tired. Up front, I absolutely will not malign people for having an opinion on the franchise as a whole while having also missed the first 5ish entries because this is not a chronological series and there have been 11 mainline intervening games. That is a higher percentage just mathematically speaking! But that said, it's at the very least important to point out that both space and time travel have been in the DNA of the games since that first entry…