My response to the question, "is FF7 overrated?" (spoiler alert!)

If anything, FF7 is UNDERrated...it's even better than the fanboys say! :)

...But seriously, while FF7 is one of my favorite games, it is not without its flaws. The graphics, while good for their time, are not impressive by today's standards (or even by the standards of the later portion of the PS1 era!). More importantly, the game's storyline is not one of its strong points, either. Don't get me wrong--the ideas behind the plot were okay, and I really loved the surprises they threw in. I never played FF7 until the summer of 2004, and I consider myself very lucky in that no one EVER spoiled any of the surprises for me! I was caught TOTALLY off-guard by what happened at the end of Disc 1, and the idea of having Cloud turn out to be one of the anonymous Shinra troopers at Nibelheim five years prior was a STROKE OF GENIUS. Even so, the plot was too muddled to be any more than "good"...although it holds together, barely, you don't know everything that's going on unless you pay VERY close attention...for some people, I think, the storyline just degenerated into a hopeless mess of mako, materia, Ancients, SOLDIER, Shinra, Meteor, Jenova, Sephiroth, clones, WEAPONs, etc. I think the FF7 team tried to make the plot of FF7 too many different things, and it doesn't wind up successfully being anything. Is it a cyberpunk-type tale? Is it a swords-and-sorcery adventure? Is it a love story? A mystery? A psycho-drama? A messianic story with religious overtones? A horror story (to the tune of Frankenstein)? A Buddhist allegory? To be sure, it is all of these things to some extent, but like I said, I think the FF7 team simply tried to do too much, which wouldn't have been a bad thing, except that they didn't always do a good job of explaining things.

I point out the problems I have with FF7 because some of the game's fans talk about it as though it were perfect, and I take issue with that point of view. That kind of fanboyism pushes discussion of the game to an extreme, and people with moderate opinions of the game find themselves having to bash it in order to counterbalance the fanboy rhetoric and pull the discussion back to a middle ground (however, let's not forget that there will always be a significant minority who considers itself "rebellious" and "individualistic" by hating on something that's popular--the "lol FF7 sux am i cool yet?" crowd). Rampant fanboyism is a major reason why so many people say that FF7 is overrated!

With that said, I want to make clear that I consider FF7 nothing short of a work of art. The attention to detail in the game is commendable. You ever notice that the reason why Aeris' church is trashed is because one of Shinra's experimental rockets came through its roof? Or that Aeris is examining a leaky mako pipe in the opening sequence? The game's music is gorgeous, and there is plenty of gameplay with variety with all of the minigames. Most importantly to me, Cloud Strife is quite possibly the most complex videogame character there is. I, of course, take an orthodox Freudian view in explaining why Cloud is the way he is. When I was discussing my interpretation with some friends, one of them asked, "do you really think that Square intended to put such Freudian themes into the game?" My answer is no, I don't, but FF7 is open to interpretation like a work of literature, and the fact that we are having discussions like this, eight years after the game came out, is a testament to what Square accomplished--a work of art, indeed!