Although neither has been released in the States yet *cough*bit torrent*cough* I’ve just recently finished watching two movies in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII series – Last Order, and Advent Children. The first is a 20 minute cel animation, the second is a feature length, hyper-real CG render. Two different mediums, same basic flaw: what was the point?

First it needs to be said that I loved Final Fantasy VII. I invested over 80 hours in it. I got all the chocobos, I got all the limit breaks and summons, I moped for several hours when Aeris was killed, and I was even dumb enough to try one of the resurrection formulas. I loved FFVII. I also subscribe to the notion that Holy’s solution to the planet’s troubles was the annihilation of human kind, so I’ve always kind of scoffed at the notion of a sequel. But if it was a good enough sequel, a worthy enough sequel, who knows? Maybe I’d rethink my position. Not today.

First for the good. Advent Children is stunningly beautiful. The visuals are everything Square and the fans would want them to be. Nothing visually clashes with the original, it just builds on it. There are also bits in it that touch at the heart strings of those of us who still worship a game that is nearly a decade old – most of which involve a certain flower girl and the surprising moments she shows up in. Cloud’s (or should I say “Kew-rowd-o’s”) farewell to his old acquaintances is extremely moving. It shows us with subtle facial expressions you wouldn’t think CG could accompish that this tortured, hardened soldier is really just a child looking for a mommy. Plus Tiffa and Yuffie look totally hot, and not in a Jessica Rabbit kind of way.

But the rest of the film is wretchedly flawed right down to its premise: did FFVII need a sequel? The answer is a resounding “no”. Advent Children doesn’t bring any new problems to Midgar, nor does it answer old enigmas. I just rehashes the same issues and conflicts the game very clearly settled. Jenova needs to be destroyed once and for all – again! The last spiritual remains of Sephiroth must be cleansed with “One Winged Angel” playing in the background- again! The reunion of SOLDIERS needs to be thwarted – again! Cloud needs to deal with pain of his past – AGAIN! To top it all off, no one seems to have the motivation to do anything they are doing and dialog that preceeds important events makes little or no sense (Cloud says “I’m going to go finish fighting the bad guys!” Marlene gets upset and screams insistently “But Cloud, you have to fight the bad guys!” Cloud finally agrees “You’re right, I have a responsibility to fight those bad guys!” and so on…).

Last Order is also an utter waste of time. It attempts to expand on the events of Zach and Cloud as they are captured by and escape from Hojo after the Niebelhelm disaster. Unfortunately it actually seems to have less detail than the game’s version, a lot more fighting, and merely rewrites most of the plot to make less sense. One such moment is Cloud’s Mako/Jenova abilities before he’s been experimented on (Only SOLDIERs are treated with Jenova cells. Cloud was only a grunt).

The soundtrack in both of these projects is completely out of place. All Final Fantasy games are scored in a classical style that rarely lends itself to guitars; however, most of the fight sequences in Last Order and Advent Children are accompanied by some of the worst generic hard rock riffing I’ve ever heard. The rest of the soundtrack that isn’t lifted from the game sounds like elevator music. Nobuo Uematsu has scored several thousand hours of RPG goodness. Are you telling me he wasn’t available to fill in some gaps in a movie? Feh!

Though, I think Advent Children’s worst sin is something no one seems to be mentioning – its commercialism. Everyone in Midgar, a steam powered city in ruins, suddenly has cellular phones. And not just any, but a specific model that will remain nameless in order to not give it anymore press. After all it only spends 57 seconds of the film in close up gently descending through the water as is slowly rotates and shows off its various physical features (the excuse is that we are hearing the messages of all the people Cloud is avoiding). 57 seconds! Think about that. A TV spot is only 30 seconds, tops.

In the end the only answer I can find is that Square-Enix wants to redeem its advanced CG movie studio from the embarrassing FF: The Spirits Within by making a two hour cell phone ad based on its most popular game ever. The bad thing is they couldn’t write an original script for either of these movies. The good thing is, Cloud looks so real you wonder if he got to keep the phone after shooting was wrapped up.