Well although I'm might not as experienced in terms of RPG's as one had to be to answer this question, I can still say that I enjoyed ToS quite a bit more than FF IV, FF VI, the Golden Sun series, Baten Kaitos, Tales of Phantasia, all Mario RPG's except for Legend of the Seven Stars (since I haven't played it) and also FF I, II and V, although I haven't finished those, but played to a good part of them.

First things first. Get over yourself. I hate to break it to you but the world doesn't revolve around you and what you think. You made the blanket statement that Final Fantasy has never been gross disappointment. Well there are quite a few people that disagree. In my case FFVII was that game. I've seen people have similar feelings on FFVIII, FFX, and FFXII. I frankly could care less what you think and I have better things to do than get a rise out of fanboys. Frankly I'm damned sick and tired of stating why I think FFVII is overrated but I guess I'm humor you.

Final Fantasy VII had terrible characters, a poor story, bad gameplay, and suspect graphics and sound. I did not find Cloud likeable. His woe as me act got old. He co-opted Zack's life, slapped Aerith around, and just watched as Aerith was killed by Sephiroth, and handed him over the materia that allowed him to call done meteor.

Sephiroth, Like Jenova, can control those infected with Jenova cells. If you remember, cloud unwillingly was trying to kill Aeris first yet held himself back. When Seph saw that this was one act he could not force him to do, he did it him self.

Sephiroth is one the shallowiest villians in series history. After years of exemplary military service, he supposedly reads of his origins and decides to go on a murderous rampage. If he really read his origins, he would have known that his parents were Lucretia and Hojo. Every member of Soldier was implanted with Jenova cells, the only difference is that Sephiroth received them when he was in the womb.

He read all about Jenova, his true parent. Lucretcia and Hojo are like host bodies to his origin, yet jenova is where his power derives. Once he found the truth(where it is assumed Jenova was coercing him too) he saught her out. Crisis core also explains the many differences from how Sephiroth was concieved compared to others.

Tifa, where do I begin. She knew Cloud was not being honest about what happened in Nibelheim, yet she said nothing. She put all of Avalanche at risk. You think she would have at least tipped off Barret or maybe pulled Cloud aside and asked what the hell was going on. Hojo was essentially the real villian, most of the events in the game were the results of his actions. Although you never get an inkling as to why he did any of it.

Aparently you have never heard of "The Elephant in the room".

The gameplay was just plain broken. Your characters essentially only differed in appearance only. Sure they had different limit breaks but other than that, they could get the same skills. All your best melee fights could get all the best spells. They stripped the strategy out of party composition. FFVI had similar flaws but they didn't appear until your characters started to hit level 60 or so. The game just dumbed down in general. Only three party members, extremely limited equipment options. One weapon, one piece of "armor", and one accessory. There was no real reason to use anyone but Cloud, Tifa, and Cid. You didn't have to plan around any weakeness because thanks to materia, your characters had none.

Broken? Nonesense. The game just allowed full customizability to the restrictive classes of old FF. FFVI,FFVIII, FFX,FFXII all take this approach.

The whole point of going with rendered backgrounds was to provided detailed polygon models. Not in FFVII. You got beautiful backgrounds being patrolled by Popeye armed monstrosities. At least the battle graphics were nice for the time, unfortunately outside of battle you had to deal with stark contrast between the character models and the backgrounds. Resident Evil did a good job with rendered backdrops with polygonal characters. FFVII did not.

Have you seen the FFIV and FFIII remakes for DS? They look fairly similar in style. They were basically 3D renders of their bit like selves. Why is this so bad for some I don't know.

The score it of FFVII was actually one of the few things I did like about the game. I never could figure out why the sound quality of a 3 CD PS1 game was inferior to the 3MB SNES cartridge that was FFVI. There was no reason for the more capable PS1 to have worse MIDI sound quality than an SNES game. That was the case. Also where was the voice acting? After playing Lunar 1 and Lunar 2, I figured I'd get something from FFVII. What was all that space being used for?

Sound quality. I don't know if it was certain peoples games or TVs or what, but there was nothing wrong with my copies of FFVII. The sound of the music was damn sure better then the FFVI's quality.

I could go on, but I'm at work and I just got a delivery.