Review of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

Before I write this review, or even watch the movie in the first place, I want to state my own history with Final Fantasy 7 and the overarching franchise first, for perspective. I grew up with Nintendo consoles and MMORPGs, never owning anything Playstation until I was in high school, and that's when I began to rapidly explore everything I reasonably could in the Final Fantasy franchise. That said, I deliberately put off 7 specifically, instead playing every other mainline game before it. I was (and still am) a bit of a contrarian, and when things become incredibly popular, I tend to get skeptical andmore critical, and I genuinely didn't think 7 would live up to the hype.

I played it for the first time as a sophomore in college. And to put it short, I was right.

Don't misinterpret me, I thought it was very good, but not great, and far from the masterpiece that the Internet had led me to believe. In particular, I'm not a fan of the characters - and of relevance to this movie, I don't think Cloud or Sephiroth are particularly engaging, mainly due to having bland personalities. Granted, they have genuine character development and backstory, but that's not enough to endear them to me, considering how much of the game has them both act too stoic and cold to leave a positive impression. By this point in my life, I'd experienced so many colorful and fantastical worlds from all the other Nintendo RPGs and MMOs I'd played, so despite how much good there was about the game, FF7 came off about as dark and smoggy as the city of Midgar itself. At the time and still now, I swear by 5, 6, and 10 as being the peak games of the series (for single-player games, anyways - 14 is its own beast entirely). A year or so later, I played Crisis Core, and while I think it made the story retroactively better, by virtue of fleshing out the backstories for both characters, I'm still annoyed that this wasn't a bigger role in the original.

And one last note, having now played through Final Fantasy 14's story through the conclusion of Endwalker, I genuinely think that Emet-Selch fills the same antagonist role, purpose, personality, and everything tangentially related that Sephiroth had in 7, except so much more improved, to the point where I can confidently call him the greatest fictional villain, and I won't be able to separate my opinion of him from Sephiroth as I watch the movie.

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Within the first ten minutes, the movie confirms my existing opinion with this absolute "gem" of exposition: "He hated the planet so much that he wanted to destroy everything." This line, exemplifies why I don't like Sephiroth as a villain. To me, it doesn't matter what a character's backstory is if their immediate goal is as shallow and naive as this. Compare this to Emet-Selch, who's end goal might be virtually the same, which does come off as fatiguing for the order of ascians alongside him, but he opens up more about his personal struggles, and how it ties into his past and present person - all while being amazingly entertaining. When people say how much they like him as a villain, I sure hope they're referring to his intimidating presence, because I didn't ever get anything like that from the base 7 and Crisis Core.

My biggest problem with the first half is how it keeps setting up new elements without explaining or even showing what they are in relation to the overarching plot. First, it keeps hyping up geostigma as some kind of threat, but *what is geostigma*? Is it a disease? Magic? Bile? Can it spread from person to person? How does it manifest? How many people have it? I can't take this seriously when I don't know how severe of a threat this is. Also, who were those three people on motorcycles, and why do they have the worst case of one-dimensional personalities? Their prattle is completely hollow. I genuinely don't want to compare this to the "you don't understand me" emo edginess of the mid-2000s, but there really is nothing to understand with a lot of this drivel. On top of that, there's so much waiting and delay and emptiness between major events. I was thirty minutes in when I started seriously considering upping the playback speed.

In the context of a standalone movie, this is heavily flawed. Now, how is it in terms of a sequel? It's horribly unnecessary. The plot of FF7 was wrapped up about as perfectly as it could have been, with Cloud defeating Sephiroth in an iconic duel (that's undermined by being an unloseable fight, but that's besides the point). This movie unties the plot and adds the most obvious contrivance to keep milking the FF7 brand - that being, Sephirith didn't actually die, he's in the planet all along! Oooh! ...Give me a break. That's a cop out, not a concrete foundation to a sequel to one of gaming's most beloved stories. And this opens itself up to the next big plot twist of the movie, the incredibly predictable revelation that Aerith didn't actually die, she's in the planet all along! I didn't know anything about this movie's plot beforehand, yet I hate that I called this from so early on.

(In retrospect, I'm not sure if he really was in the planet, mainly because the movie doesn't explain that part. One of the characters just transforms into him, no reason is given, other than, he's a remnant... whatever that means.)

Speaking of characters, everyone in this movie is incredibly flat and uninteresting. As much as I think Cloud himself is a lukewarm protagonist, I can appreciate how he has some legitimate, albeit subtle character development in the base game. Right before the final boss fight, he states to the team, quote, "Let's mosey!" It sounds dumb, but it's brilliant, showing that Cloud doesn't need to keep his cold persona to be a badass soldier, and can embrace his country-boy upbringing more freely. Why does he have to backpedal to being an emotionless supersoldier for this movie? In fact, he's even worse in this one, almost coming off like a flanderized parody of Cloud that assholes like me would cite about the original game. And Sephiroth is even worse. When he appears, he just spouts the most cliche emo one-liners and attacks. He's just a villain for the sake of being a villain. Still better than the three guys before him, on the grounds that he wasn't obnoxious.

So, what did I like about this movie? Well, actually a few things. First, Reno was solid, the exception to my ranting about the characters above. He couldn't salvage every scene he was in, given that they were already too dull to begin with, but his presence never made them worse and often enhanced them with some much needed silliness that perfectly contrasts his legitimate skill as a mercenary. But the big thing are the fight scenes. I will complain that there is too much downtime between action, but the action hits incredibly well when it does happen. From Tifa's encounter in the church up to Cloud's engagement with Sephiroth, all of them are incredibly choreographed and entertaining. Specifically the moment where everyone helps throw Cloud up into the sky to pierce through a monster's big glowy energy attack, it's honestly more silly and over-the-top than I was expecting and yet that made it all the better, I unironically love it. But still, there's not much action to go around, even the fight against Sephiroth was too short to be impactful.

Still, as a complete package of a movie, this was honestly terrible. It's going down in my memory as a worthless footnote in a part of the Final Fantasy franchise that I already think is too overrated. Play the original game and Crisis Core, but leave it at that.

(Footnote: I originally wrote this review for a community event at retroachievements.com and its Discord server, wherein watching and reviewing this movie was one of the tasks. My username there is MeloDeathAtmoBlack rather than epicninjask123 like it is here.)