This Game is Overrated

[Sephiroth]

It is overrated. It deserves to get much love but is only even more popular because it is cool to hate other popular things, the anti-hype-hype.

More importantly and incontrovertibly, the sheer number of people who didn't get, for example, that the "Sephiroth" the party follows for the first disc is a clone (as demonstrated by browsing any Final Fantasy-related message board about ten years ago) attests to poor storytelling.

What you don't get is that he isn't a clone and the Final Fantasy VII you think of never existed and also was not retconned in that way. Just as people don't know what canonicity means nowadays. Or the incredible number of people that ignore flat-out stated facts.