My best friend in high school, who was a huge SEGA fan, was also a big original Playstation fan. He turned me on to Tenchu and Wipeout, but he dropped the ball on FF7. He really tried to get me into it, but I guess my problem was while the music and graphics were great, and the story was interesting, I wasn't all that invested in the characters and I found the gameplay to be not all that exciting. I guess its because I'm more of an action RPG guy. I loved stuff like PSO and Kingdom Hearts at the time, and Skies of Arcadia (while turn based) had a certain speed and rhythm to its combat. But FF7 just didn't do it for me. I do own the game, and have played around 6 hours of it, but I never could get back into it and complete it.
Oddly, that same friend convinced me to buy FFX and the same thing happened. The graphics were nice and I got into the story, but the gameplay bored me. Guess I'm not a turn based type of guy. Unless they throw something in their that mixes things up.