Well, the thread has derailed into the typical FFVII debate.
I'll just enter in and say, while I agree with Arbitor365's concept that FFVIIs story and characters are overrated and multiple games, even when it was released, were better, I think we went overboard. I'll just say two things.
One, Just play Suikoden. The original one. It came out a year before FFVII and featured many similarities (including a concept similar to Materia, similar plot points and etc). If they didn't take ideas from the game...there's some crazy coincidence going on there. But all I'm going to say there is, the gameplay and story are better than FFVII. As well as the graphics in my opinion, simply because it was a more advanced version of 2D sprites while FFVII was a really ugly early version of 3D which was hard to see and even play at times (but was later perfected in FFVIII).
Two...people go on and on about which Final Fantasy game has the best characters and storyline. Frankly...I find them all to be bad. They're all rather cheesy, overly dramatic and have the same ridiculous plot points. Someone important always dies halfway through, someone always 'betrays' you, someone always 'saves your party', there's always a 'chase scene', etc. There's a reason people make massive parallels to the games and Star Wars...because it really does seem like Lucas fricken wrote the scripts for the game. And that's not a good thing.
So really...why do people need to defend the script for FFVII? Even the creators said the game was unfinished, rushed in development and wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. Its pretty evident to me the majority of the reason its so popular is hype, not so much content. Even for a Final Fantasy game, there's plenty of other better ones.
Six upcoming games you should look into:
