Final Fantasy VII is one of the most important video games of all time.
It brought the Final Fantasy series into the third dimension, set a framework for the kinds of stories contemporary video games could tell, and quickly became one of the best-selling games of its console generations. By all accounts, it’s a masterpiece, and one that sent waves throughout the industry and the medium. The same cannot be said for Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, the game’s cinematic follow-up.
If Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children accomplished anything, it established a set of guidelines for video game adaptations to ignore. The film, a 101-minute (later expanded to 127 minutes thanks to the Complete Edition rerelease) animated mess purports to tell the story of what happened to the heroes of Final Fantasy VII after the credits rolled. What it actually tells is the story of a biker gang trying to summon the ghost of their older brother while the heroes of Final Fantasy VII sit around in the background.
The film largely ignores the actual cast of Final Fantasy VII. Cloud is there, and gets to take on a couple of both old and new villains in some genuinely electrifying fight scenes, but the rest of the cast is given basically nothing to do. Tifa throws one or two punches, Yuffie pops up for exactly two minutes, and Barrett, the dogged environmentalist from the original game, is revealed to be an oil miner in an offscreen phone call. Hooray…?
Advent Children bills itself as a “reunion,” a fanservice-laden return to a beloved video game world and an opportunity to revisit the characters of Final Fantasy VII. That explains why it’s totally incomprehensible to a layman, but it does leave one wondering why, exactly, it’s totally incomprehensible to devout Final Fantasy fans. I played Final Fantasy VII, all 40-odd hours of it, and I still don’t understand what Advent Children is about, or who, exactly, it’s for. To fans, it’s frustrating to see beloved characters either sidelined or totally misunderstood. To newcomers, it’s a story about nothing. To everyone, it’s nonsense.
If Final Fantasy VII laid the foundation for all RPGs to come, Advent Children tore up any existing foundation for what video game movies should be. Similarly baffling titles like Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil series at least have a modicum of identity and are able to become enjoyable cinematic experiences on their own. Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel’s infamous Super Mario Bros. may be despised, but at least it’s about something. Also, it’s worth noting that Resident Evil and Super Mario Bros. were both directed by professional filmmakers. Advent Children was co-directed by Takeshi Nozue, a phenomenal cutscene director, and Tetsuya Nomura, the character designer behind Final Fantasy VII and eventual director of the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy.
Nozue and Nomura have both done incredible work. In fact, they’ve both made semi-coherent films based on video games (Nozue’s Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV is a sincerely exciting fantasy epic, and Nomura’s Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover is… well, it makes more sense than most Kingdom Hearts stories). Unfortunately, Advent Children represented the filmmaking debut of both directors, and they each seem to have come into the project having learned the exact wrong lessons from making video games.
Final Fantasy VII turned 25 earlier this year. The Final Fantasy VII brand has continued to grow in that time (a remake of the cult classic spinoff Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is headed to modern platforms later this year, and the three part remake of the original game will see its second entry next year). Fortunately, it seems that nobody – Nomura and Nozue included – remembers Advent Children.
Opinion Writer
