That's a good point about the distinction. I'm still not sure I agree that every FF since X, or XII or whatever are entirely shallow and lacking in complex themes. Hell, I think Sazh's story is one of the 'realest' in the franchise. Which was certainly helped by the performance of his English voice actor, but that's still part of it.
I think it's fair to say that the core of a lot of Square's thematic ideas are interesting. But I also think that if you took a sip of Henny every time someone said "hero" or "honour" in Crisis Core, you'd be dead in, like, thirty minutes.
I think it's easiest to see when contrasting the OG and the Compilation in general -- you've got returning characters (.....all of them) who are reduced to one or two traits, and then increasing conceptual and moral simplicity. Much of the time, the story forgoes the labour of creating any kind of complexity at all by abstracting ideas to the point that it becomes nonsensical symbols and visual motifs: SOLDIERS are Heroes, Wings are for Monsters, Apples are Tragic. Meanwhile, the thematic and tonal content is inconsistent with or outright contradictory to the source material. Death is supposed to leave "no dramatic feeling, but great emptiness," yet Zack is lifted into heaven (....on an animist planet) to a rousing backtrack of earblistering screech pop. He's supposed to be likeable and objectively "good" (or supposedly a person who tries to be), but also we get to play through his participation in a genocidal campaign of invasion without his giving a second or third thought, and without sufficient world-building to explain how and why "good" people would associate this with "heroism," or better, giving Zack a more complex motivation to begin with. Imperialism, subjugation, corporatism, and all of Shinra's attendant demonry are bad, but also let's undermine this by giving child(er) Yuffie a quirky cameo in the middle of a slaughter and then have her skip off amongst the corpses of her people.
I mean, I don't feel like I'm extrapolating too much here. The destruction of the commons, privatisation, corporate imperialism, and so forth are all things that were intentionally included and reiterated. But it just seems like beyond the arcs in the original title, the narrative is unwilling to engage the elements it introduces on anything but a superficial level (so why have them?). Theme™ is delivered in service to the events of the story rather than the other way round.
We know that this is an organisation that runs Chiquita-style death squads, that probably pulled some shit like Pepsi pulled on Allende in the not-so-distant past, and has the environmental and moral integrity of Shell n dem all rolled together, but instead of tying that to the story's more fantastic elements, it comes across as garnish for character studies. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing...if it weren't for the fact that the characters less and less resemble humans than they do a collection of ten tropes in a trench coat trying to be a facsimile of human.
I'm not asking some kind of revolutionary manifesto of a game or something, but I just find it weird that the actors in Square's stories tend to exist so far outside of the contexts they're placed in. Most of them could be transplanted into other worlds altogether and have little or nothing about them changed because the world they live in has little development of its own and barely informs their characterisation. It just makes the whole universe feel two-dimensional, like nothing that happens in the narrative has any consequence or purpose beyond its potential for flashy sequences.
...That's by no means a shortcoming unique to Square, but definitely in addition to that, they lean so heavily on derivation that they have entire archetypes and character arcs distinct to their oeuvre. It's like queuing up one thousand copies of an image and watching the lines of its face slowly fade with each iteration as the ink disappears from the printer's well.
In Polygon's FF7 article, the embedded video with Tetsuya Nomura 
