No way in hell do the walking-around character models hold a candle to the other games in the series, but the in-battle ones were way better in 7. I wished they kept them like that in 8 and 9, at least for the in-battle sequences. 8 and 9 kind of bugged me with how pixelated the battle models looked, they looked exactly the same as the non-battle ones. It gets really apparent if you check out some close ups, like clouds face vs squalls face in a battle. Cloud's face can't look pixelated because it's probably just like five polygons stuck together. Squalls has way more polygons, makes for better articulation and texture, but there wasn't enough power to make enough polygons to make them look as smooth as 7 looked.
Also, I popped GTA3 into my PS3 the other day, I was actually struck by how good it still looks. The upscaler may very well have been in effect, but you can't make a PS2 game look THAT much better with upscaling, I don't know if it even works with that game. Sure loads faster.
