Not just FF7. Mystic Quest (Final Fantasy Adventure) [1] was my first Final Fantasy game (I only played a little bit FFXIV ~30 years after) back around 1991/1992 on the orig. Gameboy, and it also had the tree of life paradigm. Though you can regard it as a spinoff, the Mana series, it featured things like moogles, chocobo's, tree of life, Excalibur, ...

One of my first RPG games, along with Hero Quest (a simplified clone of Warhammer Quest).

One thing it couldn't do though was walk diagonally, which you could with Zelda/Link (forgot the exact name) on Gameboy. I got stuck on that game (IIRC clueless what to do, where to go). In Mystic Quest I only got stuck once, with the palm trees where you had to make the 8 to find the dungeon. I didn't get the clue to it, but then again my native language wasn't English.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Adventure

That's probably more true outside Japan than inside it. By then, just to mention one factor, Miyazaki and Takahata had already smashed the Japanese box office multiple times with "militant" environmentalist films like Nausicaa and PomPoko. In fact, I remember the whole environmental theme being a bit of a clichè in my part of the world (Western Europe) by the late '90s - for us, those themes had really exploded in the '80s as part of the debate over nuclear energy.

Honestly, when I was a kid, I didn't get the scenario. What the hell was genova ? Is sephiroth the good guy ? Then why is he trying to meteor us to hell ? And who is really cloud ?

But it didn't matter, because it was so incredible to play.

I had to replay the PC version later as a teenager to get it. Unfortunately this version was incredibly buggy.