I never liked FF7 all that much, and Xenogears suffered from a translation that, while adequate and free from obvious errors, had a writing style I didn't care for. I'll certainly endorse Vagrant Story as being very good, though. Incidentally, my 3 most favorite JRPGs of all time are Final Fantasy 6, Lunar Eternal Blue (the original Sega CD version), and Disgaea: Hour of Darkness.

I've always been confused by the broad message of acceptance (even/especially of alien species) and how that contrasts with his disapproval of homosexuality.

I'd link you to the LJ post that pointed out the economic unrealism to me, but it's flocked. Basically, they have a rich high-tech Capitol and twelve downtrodden low-tech Districts, and with that much tech there is no reason for poor people to be living like that - it would make more sense for tech to be cheap and go out to as wide an audience as possible. The cultural unrealism is around the Games themselves - 24 teenagers, a boy and a girl from each district, fight to the death in a usually-hazardous-in-itself arena once annually. Winners get to be celebrities with PTSD; losers, obviously, die. In some districts these are habitually chosen by lottery, but in others select kids are trained and volunteer. This whole thing seems obviously abhorrent to our audience, but I don't think it's completely implausible for a society to work like that for the following reasons: * The Capitol, the ones who run the whole thing and threaten contestants' families and so on to ensure cooperation, has brainwashed itself into seeing this as retribution for a bloody uprising some 74 years before the novel starts. I think humans are pretty good at being brutal to outgroups they can conceptualize as evil or as having wronged the ingroup. Not punishing children for the sins of their ancestors is a fairly recent development, still isn't practiced effectively, and doesn't seem unlikely to be lost in a history like the one preceding the story. * The parts of the Games that ordinary Capitol people see (the "interesting parts" that are handpicked to air, the interviews under duress where contestants must be appealing in order to have a chance of being given resources while they're in the arena, etc.) are not crafted to highlight the nastiness. They are crafted to make it look like an exciting, if risky, action game full of fascinating young people. The fact that the contestants with training beforehand are a) volunteers and b) are most likely to win and therefore stay in the public eye f