Mainly because of its fan[boy]base. All too many little children started out with FFVII as their first Final Fantasy, not realizing that they had great (better) games long before Sony Playstation came out.
This is in comparison to other FFs, mind you:
Music? Meh. Not as good as other Final Fantasy games or games of its time.
Characters? Crappy. Very little development or background. The two big American Final Fantasy games before this (IV and VI) had more characters with more development. Hell, FFVI had fourteen characters, and most of them had bigger backstories than most FFVII characters
Battle? Not bad. Not much different than FFVI, other than the three characters instead of four, and the addition of Limit Breaks. The long-ass Summon cutscenes did get annoying though.
Graphics? Yay, it's 3D. Yay, they got to 32-bit graphics. They still sucked. Because of Squaresoft's rush, the graphics weren't nearly as refined as other games that were released at about the same time.
Character Development? Crappy. I mean c'mon, the only things separating one character from another were what weapon they used and the Limit Breaks. Other than that, one character was a carbon-copy of all the rest. You could take all the Materia off of one character and put it on another, and there wouldn't be much difference. The characters barely advanced -- it was the Materia that gained new abilities. This is in direct contrast to every prior Final Fantasy game, in which the character him/herself gained abilities.
Weapons? Oh look, a gigantic sword, so big and unwieldy that nobody could ever realistically use it. Oh look, the bad guy has one, too. Oh look, there are guns -- and apparently, being shot with a machine gun doesn't do any more damaged than being punched or hit with a staff. Wait, what?
Sidequests? Apart from having completely friggin' useless bosses, mediocre, irrelevant minigames (and an entire city devoted to them), and a Chocobo breeding system that doesn't show its value unless you know from an outside source how to use it ... well, apart from all that, it didn't have much for sidequests.
Antagonist? Crappy. No, he wasn't a rip-off of Kefka, not at all. Kefka was a madman who actually controlled the world for a year before your party managed to get it back. Sephiroth is just a momma's-boy who bitches and whines about his dead mommy being used for something he disagrees with, then uses her to do the same thing he disagreed with her being used for, only for him to absorb the power instead of somebody else. But ooooh, he's got a big sword and long hair and a trenchcoat, whoa is he badass.
Protagonist? Crappy. The "who am I, waaaaaaaaah" crap got old quick.
Plot? Abysmal. Not only was it confusing, it was full of holes -- hell, they had to make movies and games staged before and after FFVII just to give backstory on FFVII's plot and characters.
And worst of all, of course, is the fanbase. The typical FFVII fanboy started playing Final Fantasy games when his mommy and daddy bought him a Playstation while he was in middle school and he saw some of Squaresoft's marketing of FFVII, something that they hadn't really done before. It was a new game on a new system, and as such got a lot more attention than others of its type. Final Fantasy X is the same way -- even here on the forums, you can see that there are a lot more people interested in FFVII and FFX than any other.
All in all, it's a good game. But when it's compared to other Final Fantasy games, it's barely in the top half.
Originally Posted by Sasquatch
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