To be honest with you I think the storyline in the Lord of the Rings is about 20 times better than the storyline in ff7.
That's not the point. The point is that it's the same basic formula. Lord of the Rings was simply executed better(?) than Final Fantasy VII.

And for the record, I dislike the way Lord of the Rings was done, and while the story itself was intriguing, it lost a lot of power in the way it stretched on tediously for many more pages than it should have.