Review of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children takes place two years after the events of the main game, in this time, Sephiroth has poisoned the lifestream and began to spread a disease through the mako that was released into the world when the main characters stopped METEOR. If none of this makes sense to you, don’t worry, the movie doesn’t explain it either. Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children requires a deep understanding of the source material in order to fully enjoy the movie, and that’s a pretty big issue right there. Story: The story is relatively hard to follow, but it’s kind of smart when you have allthe pieces to the puzzle, the problem is the fact that there’s a puzzle to solve in the first place. Three descendants(?) of Sephiroth are trying to find Jenova, who they consider to be their mother. There’s a subplot about all of the children in Midgar being infected with the Geostigma disease, which is that mako disease I had mentioned earlier. So, our heroes are primarily occupied with trying to save the children. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, the way the movie tries to deliver the narrative is reminiscent of a rollercoaster. It leaves out important details until way too late, sometimes omitting important details entirely. I can’t remember a single time that one of the Sephiroth descendants even mentions that “mother” is Jenova, and that’s kind of extremely important.
4/10

Sound:
Most of the sound work in this movie is generally solid. I watched the dub, so there were one or two scenes with some goofy interactions, but that’s more than made up for by some of the epic musical moments. One specifically I will not go into due to spoilers, but it gave me chills.
8/10

Animation:
The animation in this movie is near-perfect, for CGI in 2005 especially. The action scenes in this movie are STUNNING. Even if you have never played Final Fantasy VII, this movie is still worth a watch simply for its top tier animation. Final Fantasy VII Advent Children is visually wonderful.
10/10

Characters:
Most of what’s done with the characters is somewhat disappointing, you get plenty of Cloud, Tifa, and the Turks, but all the other main characters are designated to background characters that have a couple lines just to please the fans. Red XIII only has one line of dialogue to himself for god’s sake. Not to mention, you are subjected to far too much of those three Sephiroth descendants. Those three are the worst. They’re so whiny and I personally don’t see them as good villains by any means. For what characterization there is for the other characters, they all remain consistent with how you’d expect them to act in the main game. It’s just unfortunate that Cloud and Tifa are the only main characters that receive any development.
5/10

Overall:
Despite the lacklustre story, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is definitely entertaining. I enjoyed the action and some of the dialogue. If they tidied up the storytelling a bit, the movie would benefit highly. And unlike most movies that would just leave it at that, they went back and made Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete, practically a patch of the original movie that fixes up the story a bit, but this is a review of the original, and the original is a…
7/10