You did make it clear; I just think it's a totally indefensible position. There's absolutely no reason why any of the things FF7 did were 'unthinkable' for an RPG. The only reason would be if you irrationally believed that "hey, there are textured 3D character models running around on a pre-rendered backdrop in Resident Evil, but there's no way it could happen in an RPG because RPGs aren't allowed to make use of that kind of technology for no apparent reason".LVUER wrote: Unthinkable for RPG genre, that's what I mean (sorry if I don't make it clear the first time, though I've wrote it after that).
I mean: seriously, if a "big sword" is unthinkable for a JRPG, then the people who play and make JRPGs have the worst imagination ever. And apparently never read Berserk.
"Voices" is the only thing in your list which would have made FF7 take 10 discs - or any other RPG, modern or otherwise, for that matter. But I wasn't talking about that, and you know it - I was talking about the things FF7 actually did. Like I said: look at Vagrant Story, it has fully-textured 3D models running around in a fully-textured dynamic 3D environment, even, and yet it fit on a single CD for the original Playstation.LVUER wrote: It could take 10 discs... if you want an RPG that like RE or Tekken (I mean the characters models and textures, sound and voices, BGs, etc). How much discs do you need for FFXIII?
FF7 raised the bar within the RPG genre? Maybe. But so did FF6, and FF4, and Xenogears, and Lunar, and innumerable other titles. The bar is constantly being raised. Hell, even FFX "raised the bar" in some respects, given the voice acting in all the important scenes, despite the terrible characters, plot, unimaginative designs and setting and lousy battle system. You know why? Because it was the first in the series on a new system with new capabilities and the devs tried to do use them to better than their last game. Same with FF7.
Now, both games have their irrational fans and both games have people who think they're the best FF game ever, yet FF7 enjoys more popularity than FFX (thank Sanakan), so why is that? Well, it had well-designed characters and excellent music and a fairly compelling story, which helped, but I think a lot of it is still down to the fact that it was the first JRPG a lot of people gave a chance, and people remember their first whatever a lot longer than they remember other things. I expect for a lot of the people who think FFX was the best in the series it was the first FF title they played when it was new. What I'm fairly certain of is that FF7's popularity is not really directly down to any of these things you claim were 'unthinkable' - the 3D pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D fight scenes and so on. That's cargo-cult design ("game X had pre-rendered 3D graphics and it was good, so if we put pre-rendered 3D graphics in Rise of the Robots it will be good"), and it's something that Square seem to have been guilty of recently, but it doesn't work. Otherwise one of the many games which have done all those same things since, only better, would have stolen all those fans away.