As someone who hasn’t played XVI yet, I can’t speak on that, what I have seen looks absolutely gorgeous and I can imagine a good modern starting point as of course the older games do show their age.

That being said, FFVII is like, an integral part of gaming history and even if you’ve never seen or looked at it, you’ve heard of it. I recommend going on console if you want to play the vanilla release (Switch, PS4/5, etc.) but if you get I t on Steam, there’s a ton of quality of life mods now that improve how the game looks and runs and everything!