Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children Is More Relevant Today Than It's Ever Been

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Square Enix has been pushing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children loads ahead of the release of Rebirth. In a 🐎way, the 2005 film acts as the foundation for everything the remake trilogy has tried to accomplish. Back in the noughties, Advent Children tried to imagine a universe which had sat on the backburner for the better part of a decade, but was still stuck in the brains of video game players all over the world. With the Compilation of Final Fantas♕y 7, a metaseries set to include all manner of films, shows, and games - there was hope that the seminal RPG may remain a superpower for years to come. And it has, with Advent Children receiving a 4K print for what is, underneath all the nostalgia and hype, a fairly mediocre film.

As a kid I begged my mum to pick up the movie on DVD because I was obsessed with Final Fantasy 7 to an embarrassing degree. The idea that pixelated avatars I only knew from this PS1 game and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kingdom Hearts were being transformed in a major motion picture proved to be very exciting for a ten-year-old kid. So I watched it over and over and over, oblivious to its flaws because I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Years later, I🅰 and most other ꦰfans have turned on it. In the original game, Cloud begins as a distant soldier but grows into a confident and warm-hearted ally rising above his own inner turmoil. Advent Children abandons all that development in favour of turning the protagonist into a moody teenager with Sephiroth flu.

Dilly Dally Shilly Shally

Sorry, the film calls it Geo Stigma, an ailment that wasn’t present in Final Fantasy 7 before and the remake trilogy has been reworked into the far more palatable Mako degradation. Most of these ideas are solid in context, but the film failed to give them enough time or provide good context for how characters, the world, a🔯nd people within it had changed since the downfall of Shinra. Their HQ sits in ruin, and Cloud’s buster sword remains rooted in the ground acting as a reminder of his past failures, but not once does it feel like he’s stopped to cut himself a break. Tifa is well-developed in the film and Aerith acts as a heartfelt ghost of Cloud’s past that propels him through the narrative, but otherwise we don’t see much of anyone.

I mean, the Turks get more screen time than Barret, Red XIII, Cid, Vincent, and Yuffie combined - all of which mostly show up for the final battle to throw rocks at Bahamut. The entire film is little more than a glorified mess of plot points conjured up so Sephiroth can return and take back what is rightfully his. Newcomers Kadaj, Yazoo, and Loz appear as followers of Sephiroth, all obsessed with taking ownership of Jenova’s head, having fights with certain c𒆙haracters in a selection of exciting yet ultimately soulless action sequences. It’s a strange, visually stunning film that tries and fails to reintroduce Final Fantasy 7 to a new audience, which explains why it was released, and we didn’t hear about a potential remake for another decade. There was the PS3 tech demo, but that’s a story for another article.

Final Fantasy 7 Advent Children - Cloud holding flip phone

For all of its narrative fumbles and inconsistent revivals of certain characters, Advent Children was at least moving in the right directio🌊n. I adore how it envisions a ruined world in the years after Shinra’s downfall, and how a lack ༺of Mako energy means that everyday people struggle to piece their lives together without it, while many are falling ill thanks to new side effects. It’s compelling on the surface, and it’s hard to deny the imagination of certain designs and action choreography, but when the whole thing feels patched together in the name of fan service with no interest in moving this universe forward, it ends at a standstill. It makes the original game worse in retrospect, but only because it learned the wrong lessons from it and failed to give the cast a makeover driven by anything more than mid-2000s angst.

Geo Stigma? I Hardly Know 'Er!

Speaking to , creative director Tetsuya Nomura said the remake trilogy is inevitably going to link up with Advent Children, meaning when the trilogy ends, we could be mere moments beꦆfore the beginning of the film. Or at least, a modern interpretation of it. It’d likely abandon the controversial character designs and focus on the immaculate tone of both Remake and Rebirth which bring your party members and their iconic looks back to life in a way that somehow honours the PlayStation original while flawlessly surpassing it. Linking up to Advent Children doesn’t necessarily set everything in stone however, especially with FF7 making it abundantly clear that it isn’t afraid to shake up canon while also remaining true to its most iconic beats.

Final Fantasy 7 Advent Children - Tifa fight scene

Perhaps the remake trilogy will use its collective success as an opportunity to revisit parts of Advent Children, to establish a standalone canon that explores similar events in better ways. I wouldn’t turn it down. I’m a Kingdom Hearts fan, so I’ve long been on board with the weird, multiversal nonsense that Remake is going for. If anything, it’s tamer in comparison. There is no way to accurately predict how Advent Children can or wil🌸l fold into the remakes considering we have no idea how the trilogy will end, and that will determine so much. But I do know enough about Remake and Reb💛irth to say that rewatching Advent Children, and being aware of the plot and events of games like Crisis Core and Before Crisis, will go a very long way.