LogFAQs > #970351970

8's probably the closest to 11.

5, 8, and 11 are probably the most popular overall, with 3 and 4 on a tier a hair below that

2's probably the most widely disliked, due to the massive difficulty spike at the endgame (although it's not quite as bad in the remake, and when you know how to handle certain enemies)

6 kind of gets forgotten about, being sandwiched in between the much better entries (4/5 and the remake of 3). I wouldn't say it's bad, but it's probably my least favorite main entry.

7 is pretty easily a 100+ hour marathon, and is relatively slowly/leisurely paced with you exploring the same areas multiple times (going back in time to save a region, then exploring it again in the present day to see how it's changed).

9 tried to revamp the series as a portable, multiplayer oriented game for the post Monster Hunter era. There's still a single player campaign, but a lot of the game's content is postgame - farming rare drops to finish quests and grinding levels in order to fight legacy bosses in randomized dungeons.

despite the series reputation for being grindy, it's probably not too bad if you're playing any of the games 4 or after. Well, with the exception of the job system in 6 and 7 being completely fucking terrible since you only get 1 job exp point per battle (and only if you aren't over the area's level cap to get job experience) and need like 200 or 300 job exp to master a job and need to master multiple jobs before you can get to some of the skills that you'd actually use, and postgame content like the monster medal dungeon in 3 GBC or aforementioned stuff with 9.

Also, I feel I should point out that the translation patch that I used for SNES 1+2 was super glitchy (I think a newer version got released more recently, naturally after I finished both games, but IDK how much better it actually works), and the patch for 6 SNES is also a bit incomplete/glitchy too.