Go back to basics
* Their fantasy-future settings are as old and cliche as fantasy settings were when they abandoned those. Either go back to old school fantasy (I am purposely avoiding thinking about FFXII), or try an entirely new direction, like dimensional or temporal hoping plot lines.
* Allow the player to assemble the group themselves. Look at the jobs systems from other FF games they made everything deeper. How about you introduce the character with a short descriptive paragraph, and allow the player to pick a base class that character can start with "Bob, protagonist with a silly hair cut, but a troubled past: pick class - Fighter, Black Mage, White Mage, Thief". From there the player can specialize into more esoteric classes like Dark Knight, Dragoon, Summoner, Blue Mage, Red Mage, Monk, and Ninja through the game either by leveling up or giving them to us as rewards for being OCD about completion. Either way the actual characters and their personalities will remain the same, how they behave in battle and what equipment they use will be the big differences.
* Stop messing with the battle system. Turn based may be slow, but real time didn't feel right to me either. So what did square do? They put the fighting on auto-pilot, which was frankly criminal in the first part of FFXIII when it left the player with nothing to do. If we're going back to basics stick with turn-based combat.
* Character Groups. Back in the mists of time I played a game called Final Fantasy II on my super nintendo. Your group consisted on five whole people. Then some years later I played Final Fantasy III on the same system and the groups were four people big. Still not bad! Then Final Fantasy VII came out on PSOne... only three characters. Since then we've generally been stuck with three characters at a time. Find a way to bring us one more character, please. If not let us swap in and out like FFX.
It's been suggested elsewhere they make a remake of the original Final Fantasy. It's not a horrible idea, but I would rather see them take the game's framework and expanded it with the epicness and over the top elements they've gotten so good at over the years.
