This game is utter crap.

The field controls are awful. Pressing up doesn't always make you go up. This might be understandable due to the perspective changing from screen to screen, but often times you will be shown a perspective that is almost exactly the same as the screen before and the controls will change on you for absolutely no reason. So before when you were pressing up to go up, you will now be pressing left to go up.

Likewise, the battle controls are bad as well. For some reason sometimes it will make you press a direction 3 times just to select the next target, even though that target is adjacent to where the cursor started. The controls in this game are illogical.

The story is bad, and if you like it, you should feel bad. The characters have annoying personalities, and are uninteresting. Barret and Tifa are literal terrorists who bomb innocent people and this is shrugged off like it's nothing. The whole Cait Sith story was the worst. The main story with Sephiroth is at best nonsensical, and at worst a travesty.

The materia system is dumb. Some combinations arbitrarily don't work. Even without any of the "secret" materia, they are overpowered in general and make the game far too easy. Everything about this game is too easy. The only challenge in this game is trying to move your character through the field maps with any consistency.

People also like to pretend that Final Fantasy VII had amazing mini-games at the Golden Saucer, but that couldn't be further from the truth. All of them are extremely poorly designed and/or just plain boring. I suspect that the real reason people look back on those mini-games fondly is that the main game is such a piece of garbage, that playing the mini-games was a small reprieve from the onslaught of terribleness and disappointment, and that CLOUDs their judgement.

The graphics are a mixed bag. The character/enemy models in battle are okay, but most of the spell effects are lackluster. The field backgrounds are actually pretty nice, even if they are low res, but the character models on the field/world map are horrifyingly bad.

The soundtrack is great, and has a few classic tracks. It's the only truly good thing about this disgusting game.

For a lot of people, this game was their first RPG. They look back with nostalgia and an extremely fuzzy memory and think this game is better than it is. This game was bad when it originally came out in 1997. Time has not been kind to it.