Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

"Video game movies don't have to blow"

Tokyo Game Show 2003, FFVII fans everywhere were treated with a minute and a half of kickass footage featuring a sexied up Cloud fighting a mysterious silver haired man in glorious CG. "This is not for playing" the trailer read. Holy cow, a FFVII book?! Board game?! Final Fantasy on ice?! Nah, it's a FFVII movie! A few months later the fans were told they'd have their precious movie in Summer 2004... and then two eternities after that supposed release date the FFVII fanatics were finally able to get their hands on it. Luckily SE was able to keep the hype up with nothing short of a dozen trailers, previews and commercials, which in retrospect wasn't such a good thing since a part of just about every scene in the movie was shown before it was released, but oh well. Now the movie has been released in all three major regions and it…simply…kicks…ASS!

Let's get one thing straight though, as a movie by itself Advent Children falls short in several categories. If you haven't played (and inevitably loved since it rocks so hard) FFVII then the movie isn't worth much more than a rental for the great action scenes. Not only will you have no clue what is going on with the characters and story, but you won't appreciate a lot of the smaller details. Because that is where much of the appeal of Advent Children comes from, seeing the old familiar faces and watching them kick the crap out of eachother. AC is driven by it's characters and action sequences, while the main plot is interesting it always seems like a seconday (and sometimes tertiary) concern. Not a whole lot is done with Geostigma or the new villains, though they serve their purpose and the plot is still completely solid. AC was never meant to tie up the plot concerning Jenova and Sephiroth, and as such there isn't any real conclusiveness with the story besides Cloud's character. If you want to fully understand Advent Children however you're going to have to search around on the internet for several short novels like "On the Way to a Smile" and "Maiden Who Travels the Planet" that are the only source for understanding what took place between FFVII and Advent Children.

Parading around onscreen are all of your favorites from the game, about sixteen of the classic characters with upgraded looks and some with new costumes. Unfortunately, as AC is mostly about Cloud, Tifa and Kadaj and their struggles, most of the other characters play only minor roles and are just there as fanservice. Still, they all get their badass moments and Cloud's friends all lend their hands in an amazing team attack while the Turks get their moment in the spotlight. You're bound to be annoyed by some of the character's lack of purpose in the movie (especially a couple who literally get about four seconds of screen time) but oh well, it is better than having them not in the movie at all right? Any attempt to give ten different characters decent screentime and major roles would end in failure anyways, the plot and the entire movie would be sacrificed to pure fanservice.

If there is one thing Advent Children does well though it's action sequences. About eight in total, all of the fight scenes are absolutely astounding. If you aren't used to anime-style action you might be put off by the giant swords, tremendous speed and power and ridiculous distances characters can jump, but this is a Final Fantasy movie. The action is very varied, in the space of 100 minutes you'll see fist fights, intense aerial sword duels, a massive dragon going Godzilla on the city of Edge, high speed motorcycle battles, and any and everything in between. Though all of them are impressive, some are definitely a level above the others. For example the second part of the Bahamut fight, it moves at too slow a pace and just isn't as exciting. At this point Bahamut completely loses his ferocity and intimidation as the sounds of his roars and the destruction he causes is scaled back and hardly audible, the movie completely focuses on Cloud's friends and whatever "omg super badass" moves they're pullilng off. Cloud's final battle against Loz and Yazoo also features physics that are just plain stupid as the characters and a motorcycle awkwardly float in the air while they unconvincingly bounce off walls and attack eachother at high speed and it becomes unclear whether time is in slo-mo or what. Still though, as a whole you're going to be very hard pressed to find action sequences better than these.

Going along with the action are several of the already awesome music tracks from FFVII remade to sound even greater and really set the mood for the movie. Turk's Theme, Aerith's Theme, J-E-N-O-V-A, OWA, you can't help but crank the volume up a few notches when these start playing. The all new music is a bit less impressive, while there are some great tracks ("Beyond the Wasteland") there is also some music that is simply "okay" and one or two tracks feel completely out of place. Like Divinity or whatever that latin-opera crap was that came on when Bahamut Sin appeared - but maybe I'm just too used to the old trailers where the awesome orchestrated version of OWA would kick into full gear as Bahamut appeared.

Advent Children's biggest weakness is the English translation. Rather than reanimating the lips to the English words SE dubbed it, picking lines that fitted the lips best and making the English voice actors say their lines to fit the lips as best as possible. And to be fair, they did a fairly good job compared to a lot of other dubbing jobs. But the painful truth is that dubbing can only be so good. The Japanese audio fits the lips absolutely perfectly, you can't even tell the words aren't coming from those lips. Switching back to English just feels horrendous, while their mouths mostly open and close at the right times for the words there is obviously more to it than that, and the characters simply don't look like they're saying the words in the movie. This kills the realism of the movie, all of those million dollar visuals SE created mean nothing when it is painfully obvious Steve Burton is talking and not Cloud.

Furthermore the voices range from good to mediocre to horrible. Cid isn't from Texas. Aeris shouldn't have less personality than an old shoe. And Kadaj and Loz are not surfers from California. Major roles like Cloud and Tifa only have decent voice actors, while the best and most accurate talent goes to Vincent, Barret and Sephiroth. The translation was murdered in the dubbing process as well, great lines like "Were we defeated by a memory?" are altered beyond recognition while other lines like "I will never be a memory" are very poorly executed and lose much or all of their impact. Luckily SE included the Japanese audio, so Japanophiles like myself don't have to suffer through all of this English nonsense. Still unfortunate though, the subtitles are more accurate than the English voices but are still sub-par.

What they did do right with bringing Advent Children over to NA is the special features. At a much better deal than any of the Japanese AC packages, the NA version features the Reminiscence of FFVII, tons of beautiful AC trailers (but why we couldn't be given a complete set is beyond me…), one of which was unreleased to the public, trailers for the other Compilation games, deleted/alternate/remade scenes, Making Of documentary and best of all the entire 20 minute Venice Film Festival presentation, a rather infamous short version of the film that people who've been waiting years for the movie will greatly appreciate. Definitely a very satisfactory set of bonus features, the only unfortunate (but also understandable) absentee is the video Last Order - but that is all over the internet anyways.

Besides the English translation and some questionable design/choreography decisions during the battles, there isn't much more to complain about. One just wishes the movie was longer, fifteen or twenty more minutes would only make the movie so much greater. Everything could be fleshed out more, most notably Geostigma and it's effect on the general population of Midgar and the secondary character Denzel. The movie could lose that slightly clustered feeling it gets too, at points it feels like you are being rushed to several scenes. The extra length is definitely not necessary though, Advent Children is still an amazing movie that is a worthy follow-up to the game. FFVII fans have been waiting for something like this a long time and god bless Square for delivering it. One hundred minutes of reminiscence, laughs, sadness, joy, you do not want to miss out on it.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/01/05, Updated 08/10/06