Not a very well conducted debate to be honest, seemed almost like it was set up to blast Final Fantasy VII more than anything.
In the end the bottom line is both are aging games with substantial fan bases. Goldeneye should probably have "won" as being more overrated though given that it's had a remake which failed to sell, and has so far yet to carry any successful spin off property. Other games like "Perfect Dark" might have used a lot of the same code, but you didn't see an actual "Goldeneye Sidestory" or whatever being released successfully. On the other hand "Final Fantasy VII" has lead to literally decades of merchandise being moved, with other games... crap or not, being released to massive success not to mention multiple movies (like the anime movie versions of the Crisis Core story that never saw official US release... before you even get into Advent Children).
See, it's hard to say "Final Fantasy VII" wasn't all that, or hasn't stood up well, when you look at the juggernaut it turned into. Even if a remake was done, and it failed, it's impossible to say it hasn't carried more than Goldeneye ever did. Indeed Goldeneye is mostly notable as being one of the few movie tie-in games that didn't blow chips, it really innovated very little even if it did get attention due to it's liscence (as was mentioned), just about everything in Goldeneye had been done by someone beforehand.
Opinions vary, but I think this "debate" should have been conducted very differantly. I think part of the problem was Goldeneye was being treated as too much of a sacred cow by two FPS junkies.
That said, I was hoping for something a bit more recent and relevent, a Halo Vs. Mass Effect throw down (which someone mentioned dreading) would have been more entertaining.
When it comes to that paticular debate it's a hard one to call because your basically dealing with a shooter series that became a blockbuster by being the first mainstream FPS shooter that didn't blow chips on a console... and which was intentionally throwing out every sci-fi and shooter trope it could, and Mass Effect which was largely successful due to trying to imitate a series of RPGs the creator no longer had a single player liscence for, and which also proceeded to randomly toss out every science fiction trope they could. Halo being a retread of the space marine super-soldier, and Mass Effect being a science fiction shotgun trying to capture the magic of Star Wars without using any of it's IPs, and cribbing it's main bad guys/plotline from Fred Saberhagan's "Berserker" novels, hoping the audience would be too young to realize that and think yesterday's painful stereotype would come accross as being innovative (Saberhagan wrote a good number of Berserker novels and short stories, in the 1980s and early 1990s mentioning Berserkers among geeks playing tabletop sci-fi games like Traveller, was similar to mentioning Cthulhu in more fantasy oriented scenarios... more or less the quinteseential no-win scenario for all intents and purposes... even the development of the plot in Mass Effect bears some similarities to how the universe was eventually saved from The Berserkers... but I won't spoil plot details for those who might be interested in reading some truely classic stuff... which will also make you see Mass Effect from a somewhat differant perspective from then on if you had been lionizing it and the reapers as the most creative thing ever like many people hav... good series, especially when it was still an rPG as opposed to a cinematic shooter, but it is indeed highly overrated).
