Well if the rest of the plot after Midgard was a bit more than "Let's chase after Sephiroth and always manage to be too late while ignoring Shin-Ra until Disc 2 when Oh snap, Sephiroth is going to destroy the world, let's ignore that and stop Shin-Ra from actually trying to stop him from doing that because their EVILUZ and then will half bake a convenient solution in the games last five hours to go beat him up." then maybe I would care about it. Honestly I'm playing through it again and the rest of VII's story is kind of boring because the party is more focused on the generic FF villain stereotype than Shin-Ra, who proves they really are more of the threat to the world and their membership gets enough characterization to make you actually want to take them out.

Let's face it the first Disc is basically Midgard, and then 30 hours of "Dude, your Princess is in another castle" which isn't nearly as interesting as the tight objectives felt in Midgard, where the plot actually feels like you're progressing and getting things done instead of "sorry, you just missed him but if you hurry, maybe you'll catch up to him in the next town". The game spends the first five to ten hours setting up Shin-Ra as the big bad. It spends 30 minutes setting up Sephiroth and quite frankly the sociopathic CEO board that was willing to drop a city on top of another city to kill five people, and has reactors across the globe that are killing the planet for profit is a bit more pressing than the bishy pretty boy with a god-and-Oedipus complex who wants to become a god but no one knows how he'll do it and frankly doesn't really do much for 40 hours and then proceeds to do nothing the next 40 hours afterwards.

As a game, leaving Midgard was great as it finally gave the player some breathing room if only a little but from a story standpoint the main narrative is pretty boring until Meteor shows up and then the plot shoots itself in the foot shortly afterwards.