This is how I wish more people looked at it... It seems to me that people over-sensationalize EVERYTHING about this game. My first FF's were VIII and IX, so they have a special spot in my heart, but I'm not going to rip someone apart for disliking them.
HOWEVER. FFVII does something to its fans that few games do, and, out of those games, it is less deserving of it. And that is total fanatical devotion of elephantine proportions. There is nothing exceptionally great about FFVII, even from the narrow view of just the FF franchise. It is mediocre. It borrows elements from the first six FFs, and has the plot of FFVI without any of the mood or finesse. The villain himself is Kefka on a small scale as a ridiculous Griffith (from Berzerk) lookalike who cries for mother, hates himself for essentially having awesome powers, and basically just kills one girl, sets fire to a town, and tries to summon a meteor, as opposed to Kefka commiting genocide and basically turning FFVI into 'Mad Max: RPG Edition'.
If one were to zoom out of the FF series, there are still countless villains that are better than Sephiroth. Of course, this argument is hard to make an impact with when FFVII fans are so fixated on the FF franchise that they never touch or look at anything without 'Square-Enix' being slapped on it somewhere. So I'll just suggest a few RPGs that do more that aren't Squeenix-made; Shin Megami Tensei I, II, & III: Nocturne, Fallout Series (besides Brotherhood of Steel), Persona Series, Lost Odyssey, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, etc.
Sadly, the one thing that FFVII did differently from the rest of the FF games at the time was also poorly-executed. Being the first FF with polygonal models in 1997, the only game I can name with graphics of the same level was already five years old, 1992's Alone in the Dark, and I would argue that the graphics for that game were better because at least you could see how to get from one place to another, a graphical problem I had with FFVII on quite a few pre-rendered environments. In my opinion, FFVII should have been developed an extra year or so to touch up the story and graphics to an at least average level for that time in gaming. It really steals from whatever atmosphere or mood they were trying to go for.
Most of the people I asked about why they liked VII, eventually told me that hey had never even played it, and made assumptions based on the CGI eyecandy-fests that were Crisis Core and Advent Children.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying FFVII is an abomination. I've played worse RPGs, just, not many, admittedly. No matter how I look at FFVII or how many times I try to play it again, all I can think about is how people see this as one of the 'best games ever', if not 'the best' without even taking a glance at the games of the time or before it and comparing them.
