Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

Final Fantasy VII, the game, will have a special place in my heart for the reason that it was the first RPG I ever completed. It holds powerful sway, so much so I've beaten it 100% many times, worked hard to raise gold chocobo's and even defeated the "unbeatable" Weapons. Sitting down to Advent Children I came into it with mixed thoughts. On one hand I knew it would never capture the charm of the game, but since it had all the same characters it must have some good parts. Was I right? No, I was horribly wrong. I watched this movie both subtitled with Japanese audioand in English. But never have I felt more empty and broken then when I finished this movie. The story itself is like a poorly written fanfiction compressed into a short movie. Character development is null because those characters developed DURING THE GAME. I thought perhaps I was being too critical on the game as a hardcore otaku, and so I watched it trying to pull away and look at it as "fanboy-ish" as possible. Did it work? No, no it failed horribly. Even as a fan of the game I hated this movie, hated what they did to my favorite characters and what they did to an ending that I thought was very well done. The ONLY thing about this movie that I thought was decent was the art. But that's to be expected, animation quality nowadays is top-notch and since FF7 is a serious fanbase it's not hard to expect that the quality of the animation would be top-notch. So would I recommend this movie to anyone? No, definitely not

Title: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Anime(?): AC is a digitally animated film that was released in 2005 by Square-Enix (famous for the Final Fantasies, duhr!), and directed by Tetsuya Nomura (Kingdom Hearts, FFVIII, FFX, duhr!). The original version was released in Japan in 2005, and it finally made its way Stateside in April of 2006 thanks to Squenix NA and Sony. There have been several super-deluxe ultimate editions released, as is Squenix's habit, and I'm not even going to bother covering those. Story: I would assume that you know this, but maybe you've been hiding under a rock. Basically, it's two years afterthe Planet was almost destroyed by Meteor and Sephiroth, and now there's this disease called Geostigma striking the children, and Cloud's living life as a delivery man and being generally emo and such before he gets dragged back into things c/o three silver-haired men (ZOMG SEPHIROTHS?!). In case you couldn't sense the sarcasm permeating the review up until this point, I'm not terribly impressed with this movie. The plot is very lacking, and I expect more from Squenix because I know they can deliver better than this. No one gets any development (except Cloud, and that's only to from emo to zomgkickyourassSEPHIROTH!), which is disappointing, especially because we have the three silver-hairs who could've been developed pretty nicely, but are pretty much cardboard cutouts. This applies to the rest of the cast, too. The plot is essentially something I could have found on Fanfiction.net, and about as well thought-out/executed, too. It boils down to Cloud emo, fight, fight, Cloud emo, silver-haired guys, fight, fight, Cloud emo, fight for the kids, fight, fight zomgsephiroth! Come on, Squenix! You've done better than this! Basically, it was very obvious that they did this simply to milk FFVII for everything that it's worth. Art: It's Squenix, so it's guaranteed that the visuals are going to be astoundingly beautiful, which they are. The guys look prettier than the girls, for crying out loud! I have a problem with the way they chose to cut this, though. Several people, both in the AC thread and in earlier reviews, have compared the editing to that of a music video. And it's not that far off. The cuts are very confusing, as are the angles, and it takes a few viewings to get used to it. Music: It basically comes down to strings and choir background vocals mixed with hard rock. Not all that impressive, really. There are some good tracks ('For the Reunion', 'Aeris' Theme', whatever that one song is that plays during Tifa and Loz's fight, the AC version of One-Winged Angel), but it's not enough to save most of the soundtrack from repetition. Decent, overall. Length: The repetition of the plot causes this to drag a little, despite how fast it moves along. The dragging is really obvious at the end, which is similar to Return of the King's in how long it takes to wrap up. Nomura admits this was originally planned as a twenty-minute short, but it just ended up expanding and expanding, and you can tell that it got a little bloated as it did. Seiyuu: This is one of the saving graces of the film. I could watch this just for Rufus and Kadaj's seiyuu. And there are some top-tier seiyuu (Maaya Sakamoto as Aeris, most notably, and the guy who did Roy Mustang as Sephiroth) as well, and everyone else in the production carries their roles wonderfully. Dub: However, what I said above doesn't go for the dub. The voices are amazingly bland when compared to their Japanese counterparts. Aeris and Tifa's voice actresses, most notably, deliver their lines like robots. The only ones who get close to their Japanese counterparts' performances are Kadaj and Sephiroth, and even those are pale imitations at best. Performances like these are the reason I went to/usually stick to subs. Overall: This was a disappointment to me, especially after I went out of my way to get a legal version. I'm hoping this doesn't carry over to the other Compilation of FFVII titles (though, from what I know thus far, Last Order didn't fare much better than this, and I've heard the same for Dirge of Cerberus, while the recently-released Crisis Core is said to be the best of the bunch). I know you're trying to get everything you can out of this, Squenix, but really, could you at least try for some quality? Story: 6/10 Art: 8/10 Music: 8/10 Length: 6/10 Seiyuu: 10/10 Dub: 4/10 Overall: 42/60; 70% (D)

I was kinda sad due to the lack of references made to Aeris. She is my favorite FF7 character after all. I am, on the other hand, furious due to the fact that Tifa got a considerable amount of screen time, and the rumors that the boy was their son. He does not look a thing like Cloud or Tifa, but you know there is such a thing as "when there's smoke, there's fire" right? Cloud is even more handsome in this movie, since his features were enhanced. Actually everyone looked great. I was glad to see Barret, Vincent, Yuffie, Cid et al. I was kindasad that they got little screen time, but then again they were just supporting characters anyway. I was wondering what happened to Cait Sith though. Why did he ditch his body? That's how people knew him so he should stay that way. Who knew the turks (especially Reno) were a bunch of good looking people? Back when they were in chibi like form, I imagined Reno to look like some idiot but he was actually cool. Kadaj et al weren't bad either. Really nice to look at, but we all know he's evil deep inside. The story was a bit hard to understand at first, but then again I find myself always like this. I didn't get the virus aspect - maybe I wasn't listening enough. I was too distracted by Cloud anyway. That Sepiroth and Cloud fight scene sure did bring some memories. I love that background music that goes "Sepiroth!" Super cool. I held my breath in some spots and it was really exciting. The fight scene was well "choreographed" and it was short enough to keep you asking for more, but not too long to make you wanna skip the whole fight scene. To summarize, I love it because of the superb graphics, great music, great fight scenes, and of course, the wonderful Cloud Strife.

Quite frankly, there is little to no story with this anime. And the argument you have to play the game is ludicrous. James Cameron has said that you don't shouldn't have to watch a sequel without any viewing the previous installment. Should Terminator 2 really not have had any plot and just leave it to the first movie for it? It doesn’t really advance Tifa and Cloud’s relationship either nor does it really develop the characters. Most the characters featured are just Cloud, Tifa, Reno, and the bald turk. Cloud just doesn't have the charisma to really carry the movie. And Sephiroth is still 100%delusional that Jenova is his mother and certain elements of the plot are of course predictable but on the other hand still leaves question. Hell, I didn't really care about Sephiroth anymore. I never get why they needed to bring him back. I also didn't like the Geostigma angle. It was really a dumb plot device that was only selective. It really did nothing to effect Cloud's performances in the fight scene. And there’s no point to what the kids are doing rather than just having super speed and being puppets to Kadaj when possessed by him. The movie doesn't give me any reason why I should care about Denzel or Kadaj's useless henchmen more than Red XIII, Barrett, or Cid. The rest of the main cast just shows up at the resolution for the big fight at the end and that’s it. They really make no other use for the characters. Their presence was so useless that I felt the movie would have been the same without the rest of the cast. Despite its convoluted attempt at a plot, the quality of the 3D art and animation cannot be denied, though in my opinion, I didn’t find it enough to make up for any of the bad qualities. You already know by screen shots and previews that the CG is good. But moving on, I think the re-designing and refraining from more anime-esque design characteristics did help a lot to make the characters more realistic though the anime use of hair styles and colors are still present. Tifa has a whole new outfit. Instead of wearing a mid-drift and short shorts like she wore in the game, she now wears a pretty descent dress that makes her more like a legitimate warrior than a street gang member from Final Fight. Cloud’s outfit is of course slightly changed. He wears something like a trench coat but really not. He’s really wearing something capey, if that is all a word. And the villains look like emo kids. Hell, they are stupid emo kids that need to be killed in Mexico. The praised fights that has been acclaimed for, I found repetitive and most of all, unoriginal. To me, saying that Advent Children has awesome fight scenes is like saying the IrateGamer has the most original catch phrases. It's pretty much a rip off of Matrix. Some scenes have some cliché’ shots like when that one guy finished off Tifa at the church. I just found the final fight scene Matrix Revolutions with swords and I thought it went unreasonably and ridiculously over the top in like in the movie of Prince of Tennis, Futari no Samurai when Ryoma and Ryoga have their tennis bout. Though not at the same drastic level of stupidity. It’s also cool they brought in the materia feature but I didn’t think was used properly enough. It is also nice we do get to see the limit break techniques. It was really cool when villains summoned I believe Bahamut from another game. I haven’t played the game in awhile so my knowledge of the summons is kind of rusty. I thought the design was awesome and was really breathtaking, but the actual fight and the way they beat him by the cast pushing up Cloud into the air for more boost was just, a huge WTF moment to me. Granted the art and animation is excellent in it’s own right, like the plot, there is too much that is still unexplained and elaborated. When the hell did they get semi-aerial abilities in this? Some people may think its cool and I will agree for visuals it is, but it kind of leaves too many questions.You do hear the argument you never apply physics in anime, but at least Dragon Ball, Macross, and Gundam have foundational principles in relation to their physics that make the action easier to follow and understand. They got the composer from the games back to do this one and a majority of the songs you hear from the game, you’ll also hear in this movie. Especially the final song (One Winged Angel) when you fight Sephiroth int he end of the game. The music is well appropriately placed and sets the atmosphere very well. So I got nothing much to say on the music rather than that and I think it was a great idea for Square to do that. However, my main emphasis will be the voice acting in both the Japanese and English dub. Personally, I think the dub sucks. Granted they got some big names like Rachel Leigh Cook and Steven Blum to do the characters, but they weren’t really good. I don’t think Steven Blum as Vincent Valentine sounded natural and too scratchy and just didn’t really match his character like how I didn‘t think he did GTO very well. I just feel that this casting gives me the notion along with Blum's selection to play GTO and Wolverine that the fan base and industry of North American voice acting overrates him big time just because he was awesome as Spike in Cowboy Bebop. Yeah, he was great in that role, but doesn't meant he'd be great in others. The delivery of the lines in English are just broken. Rufus talks like he’s William Shatner, and Sephiroth has little to no charisma in his voice. The actors aren’t really that dynamic in English.. The Japanese version I thought was ok. Toshiyuki Morikawa (who also plays Griffith in Berserk and Vorg in Hajime no Ippo) as Sephiroth was ok. I just think Miki Shin’ichiro who has played Sephiroth in other games did a much better job. He had that dynamic delivery I’m looking for and a distinct able charisma. Keiji Fujiwara as Reno was excellent by portraying a character who is really laid back and informal. Though the Japanese version is much better, or so you would expect, it’s not really the best acting I heard in anime granted that the Japanese track has hired a few big name seiyuus. I think Cloud's voice was good, but I just don't think his personality gives him any charisma to really carry the movie as I said earlier. In the words of the great Yoshiyuki Tomino, “People go to the movies today to see movement more than story, and then you end up with something like the third episode of The Matrix.” When it comes to this anime, truer words can never be spoken. For my personal standards of when I want to watch something, I like to see an engaging story. Especially in the case of Final Fantasy. I think Square could have done this, but they didn’t. I say personal enjoyment of this anime is probably based more on your own personal expectations between story and/or animation itself. But I don’t think Square’s reasons are enough to justify a terrible plot with no point.

Merchandise

Links may contain affiliate references

Studio

Producers