The N64 had a lot of texturing issues that dramatically reduced the quality from what it "should've been". The PlayStation on the other hand was great, except for the fact that textured polygons were just ridiculously slow, so most games used a lot of shaded polys, e.g. the characters in Final Fantasy 7.
Looking back, nearly all of my favorites from that generation (Tales of Destiny, Symphony of the Night, etc) were really just 2d games with higher quality sprites than the SNES. Funny how that works out.
If I'm remembering this correctly, the Playstation had another large problem in that it used integer coordinates for everything, making it very difficult to avoid the infamous "wavy textures" with textured polys. I think a decent portion of the time, shaded polys were chosen because they ended up looking better, not just because they were faster. If you haven't already, check out the fascinating (and long) developer retrospective on Crash Bandicoot, where (amongst other, more interesting things) they mention their rationale for using flat shading on Crash:
I'm really fond of the PlayStation's brand of 3D as well: There is something really charming about low-res, low-poly 3D, with nearest neighbor texture scaling and 2D "sprites" everywhere. I have some degree of nostalgia for the N64, but that combination of little texture memory and gratuitous bilinear texture scaling is not nearly as appealing.
I think that a lot of gamers feel that way. In retrospective it’s funny to look at those times, see how 2D games were much better, but nonetheless pushed away by their 3D equivalents.
Today we probably take 3D for granted, but we forget that back then it was jaw-dropping to see Mario in 3D and jump in something that looked like an endless world.
These days I just prefer good games over games that use a specific art style or technology. The 2D/3D worlds got also mixed together and I don’t think that it has that much meaning compared to the 3D defining times, i.e. there are a lot of 2D side scrollers that use gorgeous 3D backgrounds and the marketing hype is long gone.
Looking back, nearly all of my favorites from that generation (Tales of Destiny, Symphony of the Night, etc) were really just 2d games with higher quality sprites than the SNES. Funny how that works out.