The characters weren't used very effectively. The story revolved around 3 characters. Cloud, Tifa, and Aeries (even after her death). The rest were ignored.
We have a massive side quest about Yuffie, meet her father and learn how Wutai was plundered by Shin-Ra. We learn about Vincent's past with the Turks and Lucrecia. We visit Red XIII hometown and learn about his father and his race.

We learn about every single character in the game, apart from Cait, who is really Reeve. It is very unfair to say it all revolves around 3 characters when it plainly does not. Obviously they are the MAIN characters, but that is to be expected. You can't tell an effective story if you are constantly finding silly reasons to get them all involved.


There was no importance in the other characters. Cait Sith sacrificed himself, the sad music played, I was sad, then the game played with my feelings when another Cait Sith popped out of nowhere instantly.
This is to do with the silly translation. It is much clearer when you know the actual dialogue.


Was there any sort of relationship between Cloud, who is supposed to be the main character, and any of the minor characters?
Cloud isn't supposed to have. He is a cold hearted mercenary. Making him suddenly social machine 2000 would not be his character anymore than it would Squall. Also, there is a limit to how much story telling you can do in a game.

There was absolutely no character development.
This is simply inaccurate. You find out all about Yuffie and her peoples past, you visit her home town. Same with Red XIII. Same with Barret (there is even dialogue about his wife and why he hates shin-ra). You learn about Vinent and his past (again having too much dialogue with Vincent or an Auron damages their character). Every single character had a full backstory except reeve/cait sith.

Sephiroth was very over-rated. Yes he killed Aeries, but he accomplishes nothing.
That might just have to do with the fact he was stopped by your party, which was the object of the entire game. He almost destroyed the planet.


The guy who gets his own hands dirty or the guy who manipulates others to do the biddings for him? Yet, Sephiroth is like the king of villains in the Final Fantasy series because of his sword and long white hair.
No. It is because his character is cool, the music is cool, the story he had was very well written. His dialogue was also good and he did have a purpose. He wanted to be God and was bitter at beng merely an experiement. he lost his mind.
VII is most likely a lot of people's first Final Fantasy game and people fell in love with it because it was a great game for it's time.
A story does not age.


As you can tell, I'm a huge IX fan
A game that had far less character development than VII and far less dialogue overall.