My personal dissection of FF VII:
Pros:
-Great characters with strong, noticeable personalities. Many motives behind their intentions, good character development.
-The materia system is pure badassery, heavily customizeable, one of the best battle systems in the series, if not THE best.
-Lots of sideqests, minigames, there is a feeling of a wide world in the game.
-Sometimes challenging, unlike most of the FF's that I can easily brave with solely brute force.
-No character specialization (thank god)
-Far better storyline than any after-nintendo FF, save for FFX.
-Great atmosphere for most of the game - Midgar, Costa Del Sol, aw man, love 'em.
-The Turks, love 'em.
Cons:
-Terrible character design... all those squares, little characters, they made it hard to take the charcters seriously and care for them. What stopped you from making FF VIII looking characters? they would look far, far far, better.
-Music was meh compared to the other FF's save for some compositions
-Jenova-Synthesis, Bizzaro Sephiroth, Safer*Sephiroth... you call that final bosses? a freakin 1 minute defeat with normal attacks, not to mention Omnislash, Knights of the Round, Ungarmax... I expected more, Sephy.
-You call Sephiroth a villain?
-Cait Sith.
-Some parts of the game felt forced, unnecesary, and meh. Gongaga, for example.
-World map not very good looking backed by annoying music. The FF VI world map music should've been used.
As you can see, the pros are far more than cons, and those cons don't make the game much worse, it's a good FF, but far from the best.
Dissection : Sephiroth vs Kefka
Sephiroth:
Yep, evil, misanthropic, destructive, but... he wasn't that way forever. In my eyes he is part sadistic and evil, and part righteous avenger, sephy is very human and humanly motivated.. not evil by existence.
Kefka:
Anyone more evil in the whole series than him? no, never. Evil in blood, poisoned a whole kingdom just for laughs, rules by sheer brutality, destroys everything that he doesn't like, even for the smallest things that are wrong in his opinion.. causes world destruction... all that for no motive.. he just wants to kill because that's how he is! sephy at least has motives and is even part righteous.. Kefka is unmotivated, reasonless, misanthropic, pure evil.
I would go as far as not viewing sephy as the FF VII villain - the true villain and motivator behind everything in FF VII is Jenova, her cells, and Shinra, who rule the world without giving a damn about it or its populace, just look at its employees, Hojo for example.
This is my opinion, discuss.
