These people you are complaining are a minority compared to you duckers that rant about it daily
E33 doesn’t deserve its fans, and I don’t mean that disparagingly to E33 and Sandfall.
Its fanbase will just not allow the game to stand on its own merits and love to use it as a cudgel against the JRPG genre as a whole.
It’s perfectly capable of standing with the greats by its own merits.
The subsection of its fans that instead label is at “the real Final Fantasy” are honestly extremely disrespectful to the game itself because they refuse to just accept the game as a result of being inspired by FF and a multiple of other games that innovated its systems into something unique.
The other section using it as the “see these games don’t have to be anime cringe!” Example also again are using the game to disparage the games that inspired it.
I love the game for its own merits, but good lord you guys need to learn how to enjoy something without being utter snobs and hostile about it.