Moved to Discussion: Topic is not very debatable... More opinion driven
FF3 for epic story and character profiling. It was a bit buggy, but its fun playing it over and over again. Kefka makes for one hell of a villain, funny, annoying and hard to beat.
FF7 is also a very good play. Although I am a bit disappointed at the followup games, especially Crisis Core. The Combat RPG element is nice and all that, but story wise it was kinda lacking and it was a very very short game, considering Final Fantasy has a habit of sucking up a lot of time.
Frankly, after FFIX, the series was getting stagnant. Nothing new to the table except for massive graphical tweaks. The active battle concept wasn't even a new idea to FF people (at least to those who played Squaresoft games.. remember Chrono Trigger?)
If they branched out of the formula in the story department, I'd be re-enchanted. Otherwise, it's back to playing the old classics for me