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Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Sunday, 09 October 2005   
Visual:
 
 10.0
Audio:
 
 10.0
Acting:
 
 8.8
Writing:
 
 6.8
Score:
 
 9.0
Writer(s): Kazushige Nojima
Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children is exactly what anyone who has played Final Fantasy 7 has been hoping for. After a disappointing Final Fantasy: Spirits Within, which nearly made Square-Enix bankrupt, we, the Final Fantasy 7 fans, are finally blessed with a movie based around the characters and timeline of Final Fantasy 7. Though personally I wish they would have just made the game into a movie I am not disappointed at what they have created.

The movie takes place 2 years after the battles in the Northern Crater between Sephiroth and Cloud and the group. Cloud has isolated himself from everyone he knows, Barret has gone off to look for an alternative fuel source to mako, Tifa helps run the “Strife’s Delivery Service” out of her “7th Heaven” bar, while watching Marlene, Barett’s six-year old daughter and helping serve as an orphanage. Meanwhile all around in the city of Midgar people are suffering and dieing from a mysterious disease called “Geostigma”, with no cure in sight people are losing hope and faith, Cloud is also one to have been suffering from Geostigma along with Rufus from the Shinra Corporation. Cloud receives a phone call from Rufus asking for Clouds protection from new enemies, Kadaj and his two brothers Yazoo and Loz. Meanwhile Kadaj and his brothers are looking for their “mother”, it’s pretty easy to figure out who their mother is but I don’t want to put too many spoilers in this review so I won’t give out the name. Now it’s up to Cloud and his friends to figure out what’s going on and how to stop it from happening.

Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children is a full motion cgi movie and I can’t believe how well done it is, it’s simply amazing, way better than Spirits Within in my opinion. Everything is well detailed, from the sun rays beaming into the church, the grass and flowers on the church floor, the characters, everything is beautifully done. You see every strand of hair, all the facial expressions go exactly with the character and their mouths move with what they say. The camera angles go great with the fight scenes, for example when Tifa is fighting Loz in the church, the camera angle swoops around the characters perfectly to show every angle and there’s even a few slow motion pauses which add that little bit needed to go over the top. For a full motion cgi movie I couldn’t believe how well this turned out.

The voice acting was excellent, there was not absolutely one time where I thought, wow that was cheesy or that was done horribly, usually I don’t like watching movies in Japanese just because I don’t like to do a lot of reading and sometimes I feel like they add the wrong tones to their words at the wrong times, I think I just feel that way because I don’t understand Japanese. But in the case of Advent Children, I decided to go ahead and watch it in Japanese and it changed my whole point of view on watching subtitles, the characters sound concerned when they need to and evil when it’s the right time.

Not only were the voices done beautifully but the soundtrack of the movie was done astoundingly. You’ll notice quite a few familiar songs from Final Fantasy 7 were thrown in here but they are no longer just midi/mp3 files they are fully orchestrated this time and even gave me chills the first time I heard them come on in the movie. Besides the songs from Final Fantasy 7 there are some heavy metal songs thrown in which, though I don’t care for heavy metal one bit, I thought went quite well with what was going on in the movie at that particular time.

Overall I say this movie is a must for any Final Fantasy 7 fan, it might be a bit difficult to catch on if you haven’t played the game but you still might be able to, if not, I’m sure you have a friend that wouldn’t mind explaining or let you borrow the game. The story line isn’t very strong but it still does a good job of capturing what a lot of people wanted to see, it’s just too bad that it was so short that you won’t get to see a whole lot of every character as you might expect. Like I said, a definite pick up for any Final Fantasy 7 fan and a maybe if you haven’t played the game. Now, I’m off to watch this again!