I just finished the Tomb of Raithwall (hello my second jobs!)
I was watching the series of cutscenes after Raithwall, and I'm still in awe of the tone and dialogue. I always had high respect for XII's storytelling, but after a decade it's actually better than I remembered it.
I grew up with FF in my childhood and teens, and to have a game like XII at the dawn of my 20s was an assurance that this series would grow with me and be a series worth carrying forward into adulthood.
But then XIII and XV devolved into broken shounen anime gobbledegook.... I had actually been questioning whether my reverence for the series' storytelling was a foolish young person's opinion and this was a series for mindless tweens all along.
No, this game exists, and I'm looking at it with 30-something eyes. Seeing is believing: someone actually took FF storytelling seriously once. It could have been a series for adults, or at least smart teens. They just abandoned that effort with later entries.
Aside from the mature tone, it feels like the DNA of classic FF. A ragtag team of heroes, expressing their inner sentiments in wonderfully staged cutscenes. I know it could use more party comraderie, etc, and I don't claim XII has the perfect storytelling. I know it falls apart in the last half. But it was the right trajectory for FF, storywise, and they completely abandoned it to make C-tier children's anime. XII makes me hate the braindead XIII and XV all the more.