I don't want to disparage Xenogears too much, because it's one of my favorite games, but Xenogears is largely a cobbled together mash of everything from 2001 A Space Odyssey to Evangelion. Xenogears is undoubtedly more complicated than FF7, but whether it tells the story more effectively is highly debatable. And there's plenty of contrivance in Xenogears. Including probably a record setting use of unclear pronoun references to obscure plot details, which is pretty close to the same kind of contrivance you complained about with Tifa in FF7. I won't argue the better translation part. Off course, that's true. Although I would say a more competent translater might get rid of the excess of "howevers" which might be a literal translation but comes off pretty awkward in English.