That was one of the most stupid things I ever heard. Just because a company makes an ass-looking game by the end of a console's life, does this means that piece of shit is the BEST the console has to offer?
May I point you to some "sweet" looking PSX games?
Saturn DOA looks a LOT better than FF revenge. The character models have a very, very good amount of polygons, the game runs at 720x448 AND at rock-solid 60 frames per second.
Anyway, the PSX also used quads, for a good deal of time. I remember one of the biggest features in Tomb Raider III was "models that are made of real triangles!". The difference is that, internally, the PSX splits the quad in two triangles for cheesy and fast texture warpin... err, I mean, texture *mapping*, whereas the Saturn would use an actual quad perspective effect to map a quad texture to the 4 screen coordinates.
A good example is Shining Force 3, and the field levels. The small mountains have a good shape, and sometimes they even look slightly curved, since the Saturn did a subtle curving effect if the 2D quad was convex. Too bad few game developers noticed that they could use this to reduce polygon usage.
I think it could do FF7, with some changes, of course. The exploration and world-map modes can be done easily, but the battles...
The transparency effects during battles would need some cleverness to be reproduced without having to use the god-awful mesh transparencies, but actual transparencies are very possible: anyone who played the Saturn version of Grandia can tell that, since ALL spells in Grandia are 3D and use nice transparency effects (gradual transparency with additive effects).
But transparency overlapping would not be possible, I fear, since even in Grandia, you can see sometimes that the transparent objects won't show other transparent objects behind them, so some spells that abuse on it would look weird, unless they were redesigned.
Anyway getting a game with that amount of polygons (in the battle scenes) running on the Saturn is a task I think only some skilled programmers could get done. Like a few people at AM2, Sonic Team, Team Andromeda/Smilebit and a few scattered dudes from other companies, like ppl from Game Arts, the insane Tecmo dudes (they seem to squeeze performance from anything they touch) and a few others.
The average joe with a good idea, little programming experience and homebrewing Saturn dev tools and these libraries that are floating around simply can't do it. No way. For such project, one would need a *SOLID* set of libraries, prolly customized, and would need to go for ASM all the way.
I seriously doubt a Saturn game engine made with C++, the GCC compulers and the GLP libraries that are floating around the net can have enough performance to run something at the same level as the first Panzer Dragoon.