Played laxius power fully, LF(1 and 2 for now), tried millenium demo(not buying for now at least)
LP is the win no matter how you look at it, hands down.
Balance is 5(greatly balanced, all chars have their use, no one is overpowered, unless you equip someone a strong relic, which makes any character overpowered for as long as you wield a relic with him/her)
Progress speed is 5+(the pace was perfect - I didn't need to grind boringly, and it didn't rush too much, never made me stuck staying on 1 place too)
Maturity is 5(one of the most mature RPGs in rpgmaker, only a few good rpgmaker games compare to that... also it was good that game wasn't relying solely on adult themes, it had it, but it was only a part of the engine so to tell)
Story is 3+ till 5 (varying, depending on the part of the game it may get less interesting, but then come back up due to help of some twists, which could deserve a 5+ too)
Side quests are not rushed and at the very least rewarding + secrets are totally worth it.
PS: I don't count graphics, because the engines are simply different(and I actually prefer the old rpg maker style, I disliked most games made with new one for some reason, seems less mature and more 'fairy taleish')
About sound.. well, sound may be better in new games, but in the moments of need(
leona's death for example
- music was realy matching for the situation even in LP)
Now let's continue to LF(which I beat 1 and 2 as of now) -
Balance.. 3+-4(poor balance - lots of useless chars, some are quite overpowered and I don't even consider random/sarah/luci, since they are supposed to be overly strong, considering how much progress they made since LP1 - but making some 'random side chars' who were never ever mentioned in laxius story and giving them hax powers comparable to random and at some aspect even better is a bit wrong o-o)
Progress speed is 4(pretty good, unless you count pointless secrets, which I will explain a bit later)
Maturity is 3-(maybe even 2, considering how it dropped from LP series.. I realy expected LF series to become even more bloody, more 'adultish', brutal, considering how we saw the maturity progress in LP1-3, LP 1 had some bloody scenes, LP 2 had some bloody + adult scenes, LP3 had some realy gorish scenes)
PS: I don't ask for lax team to the rescue kind of maturity, but at least keeping it 16+ or so would be pretty good.
Story is 3 till 4(good continuation of LP series, but seems more like a 'filler' episodes, didn't finish the LF3 yet, but that grand commander stuff seems a bit childish compared to what quests random already got through, what losses he had, etc... Grand commander totally seems like a comical villain IMO.. it's more like I am playing some parody/comedy game..
Unless LF3 will develop into something much more amazing than 1 and 2, I will stay with opinion that laxius series should have ended with LP3)
And the worst of all in LF series - side quests + secrets(99% of them are totally not worth it, grinding monsters for 5 minutes seems better than completing a side quest which requires 10+ minutes of walking.. secrets, unless you count a few specific items - totally useless, with most having some consumables you can again grind out faster)
Basically in LF I only did the side quests for the sake of myself being completionist + some(10% or so) actually had some interesting plot to them or pretty good comical dialogues.
Also LF plot is much more predictable than LP(which is kinda bad, when you reach the twist and think 'finally it happened' and not 'wow, so that's how it turns out to be' - this is arguable, since I have much more experience in gaming right now, compared to how it was when I was playing LP series... so that may be it, but I stay with my opinion anyway o-o)
OHHHH and the most important, which realy touched me the most - CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT!!!(LP 1 till 3 you really saw how both physically and mentally random + co developed, you saw growth, you saw them living through some adultish problems for the first time, each character had his interests/hobbies, which also changed a bit...
And after that comes LF and oh... my.. seems like they all lost memory and forgot big part of their development or someone put the main characters through a time machine to make them a few years younger mentally. Just compare how maturely decisions are made in LP3, even despite some mistakes, it was all realy logical... in LF, I just found some solutions story wise to be realy childish, and only from time to time you saw some of the characters personality coming up, and most of those moments were actually comical, which is ironic)
Now for millenium(which I tried demo, so won't even start to judge it here, but will simply describe what I saw a bit):
Can't judge the balance/story/progress, but maturity seems on even lower level then LF(which is bad, unless you are realy young, but young auditory doesn't buy games, so what's the point of keeping it so childish? Oo), basically when I saw the millenium it really reminded me of Aveyond:
1) Possible to predict every step that is coming, none of the twists are realy surprising - check.
2) Not a single blood/curse word/adult theme was thrown/touched - check.
3) The plot start/idea is overly cliched and/or generic(gather something neccessary to kill big baddy - kill him, simple as that) - check.