Playing earlier games in a series: things you like and don't like

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Let's say you're at least somewhat familiar with a series and have, at the very least, played later entries in it. However, you eventually got around to playing an earlier entry (this doesn't have to be recently, you can recount your experiences from years ago if you want). How did you feel about it in comparison to your experience with the newer entries?
To clarify, I'm not talking about completely starting a series from the first game and finishing entries until the newest. I'm speaking purely in terms of jumping backwards here.

I'll give two examples in the form of my cases:

1) I had gotten Crash Bandicoot 2 along with my Playstation a little after Crash 2's release. About a year later, I got Crash 1. I was pretty confused by the differences, since I had figured Crash had always had his High Jump and Sliding. Plus the save system and lack of death animations was pretty weird to me compared to Crash 2's. That said, to this day I still feel that Crash 1's earlier stages were mostly easier for a beginner to grasp the controls and get used to over Crash 2's which feel at least a little bit tougher.
2) For whatever reason, I had skipped Etrian Odyssey III, and while I tried emulating it on a tablet, it felt like shit since I had to swap controls so often for mapping, so I eventually bought a real DS cart. I had played all entries besides III, so I was surprised to see several things that I thought were "firsts" from EO4 originally start in 3. There's some things I feel are kinda iffy and the class balance is kinda wack, but for the most part I like it.
I wasn't sure why people hated sailing though, since I figured it'd just be similar to EO4's airship, but HOLY SHIT was I wrong.
>timed movement
>have to pay to sail every time
>need to locally meet real life people to do stuff like guild cards and sea quests without using shitty NPCs
Fucking hell.

Well, that's my cases. What about you?