First of all, you should really mark spoilers. Even if it's something that's fairly common knowledge.

Now, on with my reply....

I wasn't all that shocked by that particular event. I've been playing FF games (and fantasy games in general) for a long time now, so (SPOILER)death of a central character is not a new concept to me by any means. In fact, FFVII is somewhat merciful in that respect since it only happens once. In FFIV and II it happens like every 5 seconds it seems. When it happened I was suprised, but I had a very "gee, that sucks, oh well..." attitude about it.

As far as plot vs. graphics, at the time I thought both were top notch. Now, 7 years later, both seem really bad. Not just by today's standards, but by their contemporaries as well. Take a game like Blood Omen, for example. It had an amazing and really fun plot that twisted and turned violently in not so expected ways. In fact, Alundra (which came out pretty much RIGHT before FF7) has a much better story than pretty much ANY fantasy game, just because they didn't hold back when it came to playing with your head.

Games that came out before FFVII had MUCH better graphics. Take Resident Evil. It used the same sort of style (real time 3D characters over pre-rendered 2D backdrops), but did it much better. This is especially sad because Resident Evil came out so far in advance of FFVII that there's really no excuse, and RE had characters that occupied LARGE portions of the screen. Square even bested themselves with Tobal No. 1, which had better graphics on average. Even the FMVs rivaled FFVII's.

FMV is another way they fell short of the mark. The scenes were frequently choppy and used a compression method that left more mpeg artifacts than you could shake a stick at. Again, Blood Omen really shines here because Silicon Knights was doing things that at that time were hard to do on a video game budget. By comparison, Blood Omen's FMVs aren't really a LOT better than FFVII's, but you have to consider that Blood Omen was a first generation PS1 title. It was released before FFVII was even announced. Technologies exponentially improve with time, and Square was working with a LOT of 3D animation studios on a budget that would make Jerry Bruckheimer jealous. Still, all they could seem to manage was plastic looking characters making jerky movements.

I liked FFVII for its gameplay.