IFireflyI, I'm not going to go quote pyramid crazy. I disagree with you. You said that the graphics were "insanely good" and "if it didn't have the best graphics, it was close". Neither of those things are accurate. The whole point of using pre-rendered backdrops was to allow for detailed polygonal models. FFVII had the backdrops but the character models weren't detailed.
The scope of FFVII wasn't anything beyond it's two predecessors nor it's competitors of the time. Despite the unskippable summons cut scenes. I finished FFVII in 35 hours on my first play through and 50 hours to 100% the game. It took me longer to finish FFVI and FFVI on my first run.
A great deal of FFVII's 1181MB was redundant data. The overworld, towns, music, etc had to be on all three discs. Angel Studios port of RE2 to N64 was originally going to be FFVII. Square Enix turned them down. RE2 on N64 was on a 64MB cartridge. CDs, Dreamcast excluded, held about 600 to 650MB. FFVII had over 600MB of unused spaced available on the 3 CDs it shipped on.
