Ok, thanks for your recommendations! Maybe I'll give the DS ones a shot first, since I've already got one (and didn't most of the recent FF games come out on Sony systems anyway? I don't have a PS).

Secret of Mana and Super Mario RPG are the only sort-of-RPG games I've ever played so far...

Yeah, after 7 they are all on the PS through PS3.  Can the DS play old gameboy games?  You might like the Final Fantasy Legends series which was like Secret of Mana/original zelda.

In the NES or SNES days I loved the music and plot, good challenge too. Seven was fun too, as the story was enthralling and it was a revolutionary game when it first came out.

I played FFX and I agree with Yahtzee, you get the same experience by watching an anime movie and pausing every 5 minutes to fiddle around with the remote. The actual game play felt like just a delay in between cut scenes Every thirty seconds there was a cut scene where it showed scantily clad, highly flirtatious women interested in the main character. It's a cheap way to "draw you into the story" by trying to get virgin twelve year olds really pulled into the game since they are consciously and subconsciously wanting to get closer to the girls like Rikku or Yuna since they are the closest thing they have had to a girlfriend.