With regards to the VI versus VII debate, I'd like to throw a 500th hat into the ring, with an interesting case study.
See, I've talked a lot about the oddities of the original SNES translation, and one of the strangest ones was a case that affected Setzer. You see, in the original dialogue, Setzer basically says "thanks to the Empire, business has dried up," before deciding to put his support behind the party. However, Woolsey misread this as "thanks to the Empire, business has gone up." This led to him translating the line as Setzer claiming, "The Empire's made me a rich man." Consequently, the Woolsey line unintentionally completely changes Setzer's character and motivation: before, he's a completely neutral party, joining the group for the self-centered reason that the Empire has been bad for his career of sky piracy and gambling, and now, he's been a willful profiteer and collaborator, or at least didn't mind taking advantage of the situations the Empire has created, but is choosing to make amends for his actions, something he does with gusto for the rest of the game. Woolsey turned Setzer's arc into a redemption arc, by accident. But how was Woolsey able to make that mistake, if it's so significant in its effects on Setzer's character arc?
Because it's the only time in the entire game that Setzer really talks about his prior relationship to the Empire. One sentence. Everything else is left to implication and guesswork.
Because that's what happens when you have a game like VI, where you have an immense scope but the amount of text and story you have to work with is at a premium: entire, major character beats have to be glossed over, at least somewhat, usually with maybe one or two easily-missed sentences to vaguely imply something that sounds right. And that applies to a lot of ideas in VI, which are left largely undefined: what was Terra like before the Slave Crown? Why did Celes go traitor? Why were Leo and Cid so loyal to the Empire, despite the narrative framing them as sympathetic? Is Locke's whole thing supposed to be romantic, creepy, or both? How much does anyone know about Shadow? What was that whole thing with the fake Siegfried? What is Gau's deal? What is Gogo's deal? What happened to Banon? How did Kefka get so powerful so quickly?
This becomes a blessing and a curse, because while the game provides enough wiggle room to make up a suitable answer for yourself, and enough implication to at least guess why it happened, it also means that an actual suitable answer is just kind of missing. And when people play an older game, they accept that these things are true, and they're willing to play along. Final Fantasy VI came at a period in history, albeit near the end of that period, when it was accepted that a game story had to be at least a bit crap no matter what, due to the limitations of the hardware and the culture. It's hard to name a game from that era, barring maybe pure adventure games, where you don't have to end any given compliment about its writing quality with ", considering."
Final Fantasy VII is a different story. Final Fantasy VII came out three years later, the same year as the original Fallout, one year before Half-Life and Metal Gear Solid. At that point, people were starting to accept that a game's story could be simply, unqualifiably good, and that a game had enough leeway to tell a complex and interesting story for its bad writing to simply be judged as... well, bad writing. There's a lot more text in VII, there's a lot more cutscenes, there's a lot more time to flesh things out and give defined answers. We don't see what pre-Slave Crown Terra was like, but we're given a pretty good picture of pre-Nibelheim Cloud. We don't really know why Kefka became such a hardline nihilist other than "magic stuff, probably", but we're given a very clear point-A-to-point-B of most of Sephiroth's motivation. Locke/Celes kind of just happens, while Cloud/Tifa and Cloud/Aerith are completely believable; they're not good love stories by the standards of the time and the medium, they're just good love stories, period.
And so, in FFVII, when a character's dialogue gets garbled by translation or just major writing flubs ("let's mosey" being the memetic example), or when the game leaves a plot unresolved, it ends up off in a way that it doesn't in VI. Both games have a lot of bad writing, but in VI's case, there's maybe half as much of a story to have bad writing, and as such, it's easy for your mind to skate over it or fill in the blanks. VII's bad writing is longer, and it more often gives you the answer flat-out, which gives more room to be disappointed (i.e. Vincent sitting in the Cuck Coffin for 30 years), and since it so often gives definitive answers, that means that times when it doesn't, like Sephiroth and Jenova's relationship, or whether the ending represents humanity going extinct, feel more clearly unsatisfying.
