Post by BlazeHedgehod on Jun 8, 2006 4:06:20 GMT -5
Dammit, I know they do this late at night to try and minimize announace, but I had a journal all prepped and everything. The minute I hit submit, it was "LOL, NO."
Finally, finally, I got to see Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. How was it?
Shallow in parts, goofy in others, but also pretty cool.
Essentially, it adds very little to Final Fantasy VII's overall storyline in general and instead just gives you an excuse to watch everybody kick a lot of ass. However, playing FFVII beforehand is a requirement. Luckily, the DVD comes with "FFVII: Reminiscence", which is basically an entire-game recap, using the actual game cutscenes. The entire DVD defaults to Japanese, and a lot of the extras and stuff are in Japanese regardless of options (for example, Reminiscence is in Japanese with english subs).
However, I switched it to english. The dub wasn't as bad as everybody has said, but I might re-watch it one more time (before we give it back) with subs just to make sure. Infact, I might be a bit dastardly and try and rip the whole thing to VCD - I've been meaning to try that, and with our new HDD giving me enough space to rip an entire DVD, it might be the time to try it out.
However, my birthday is also coming up, like, in less than a month, so I think I'll hold off.
In a way, Advent Children all kind of makes sense. Word has it from Nomura that the "movie" birthed out of a short, 20-30 minute mini-movie centered solely around Cloud and Tifa. It then makes sense that almost all of the character-developmental scenes in the movie primarily centers around Cloud and his interactions with Tifa. Anything that doesn't involve Cloud or Tifa simply serves to set up the next extraordinary battle sequence.
And the battles are great. Well, most of them. There are a couple that move so fast it's hard to tell what's actually going on. It's a bit of a sensory overload, but they're wonderfully choreographed.
I'm a bit bummed, though. I thought disc 2 would contain Last Order, the anime-tized retelling of Cloud and Zack's escape from Niebelheim. No such luck! Infact, Disc 2 overall is kind of hilarious - it's really useless. A handful of Advent Children Trailers, some deleted scenes (most of which were seen in trailers, but never used in the movie itself - and none of the delete scenes last more than 30 seconds), and previews for all the "Compilation of Final Fantasy VII" games.
Besides all that, I guess I enjoyed myself. I can see why movie critics wouldn't "get it", though. They weren't there - they didn't experience Final Fantasy VII when it was the coolest thing ever. Watching Final Fantasy VII Advent Children without any prior knowledge of what came before is like skipping ahead to the epilogue of a book after reading the summary on the back cover. That, and, I'm sorry - but the directing of the movie is pretty disjointed. It really feels like a sequence of cutscenes from a videogame spliced together. The scenes themselves play out alright - Nomura kind of overdoes it with flashy camera work, but when scenes change - their transitions are horrible and disjointed. The movie could use much better editing work, in this regard.
We also rented Flight Plan, which was a decent little mystery. They really do a good job at twisting what's going on, but it kind of fizzles out near the end - they kind of abandon the mystery element and basically go, "This is what's happening. This is how the final climax is going to play out. Mystery over!" - but it was still pretty enjoyable, I thought.
Been playing San Andreas again a lot recently. I guess that's all you need to know on that. Trying to get to the mission where you re-visit the Liberty City; that, and I'm trying to get to the third island. However, I'm really starting to dig the overall plot of this game much more than I was in GTA3. I skipped Vice City, but San Andreas continually surprises me at how improved it is over GTA3 in nearly every regard.
There's also this. It's my typical ADD disorder, as inspiration and creativity strikes and I obey it's call. Thankfully, I'm reigning it under control.
Shallow in parts, goofy in others, but also pretty cool.
Essentially, it adds very little to Final Fantasy VII's overall storyline in general and instead just gives you an excuse to watch everybody kick a lot of ass. However, playing FFVII beforehand is a requirement. Luckily, the DVD comes with "FFVII: Reminiscence", which is basically an entire-game recap, using the actual game cutscenes. The entire DVD defaults to Japanese, and a lot of the extras and stuff are in Japanese regardless of options (for example, Reminiscence is in Japanese with english subs).
However, I switched it to english. The dub wasn't as bad as everybody has said, but I might re-watch it one more time (before we give it back) with subs just to make sure. Infact, I might be a bit dastardly and try and rip the whole thing to VCD - I've been meaning to try that, and with our new HDD giving me enough space to rip an entire DVD, it might be the time to try it out.
However, my birthday is also coming up, like, in less than a month, so I think I'll hold off.
In a way, Advent Children all kind of makes sense. Word has it from Nomura that the "movie" birthed out of a short, 20-30 minute mini-movie centered solely around Cloud and Tifa. It then makes sense that almost all of the character-developmental scenes in the movie primarily centers around Cloud and his interactions with Tifa. Anything that doesn't involve Cloud or Tifa simply serves to set up the next extraordinary battle sequence.
And the battles are great. Well, most of them. There are a couple that move so fast it's hard to tell what's actually going on. It's a bit of a sensory overload, but they're wonderfully choreographed.
I'm a bit bummed, though. I thought disc 2 would contain Last Order, the anime-tized retelling of Cloud and Zack's escape from Niebelheim. No such luck! Infact, Disc 2 overall is kind of hilarious - it's really useless. A handful of Advent Children Trailers, some deleted scenes (most of which were seen in trailers, but never used in the movie itself - and none of the delete scenes last more than 30 seconds), and previews for all the "Compilation of Final Fantasy VII" games.
Besides all that, I guess I enjoyed myself. I can see why movie critics wouldn't "get it", though. They weren't there - they didn't experience Final Fantasy VII when it was the coolest thing ever. Watching Final Fantasy VII Advent Children without any prior knowledge of what came before is like skipping ahead to the epilogue of a book after reading the summary on the back cover. That, and, I'm sorry - but the directing of the movie is pretty disjointed. It really feels like a sequence of cutscenes from a videogame spliced together. The scenes themselves play out alright - Nomura kind of overdoes it with flashy camera work, but when scenes change - their transitions are horrible and disjointed. The movie could use much better editing work, in this regard.
We also rented Flight Plan, which was a decent little mystery. They really do a good job at twisting what's going on, but it kind of fizzles out near the end - they kind of abandon the mystery element and basically go, "This is what's happening. This is how the final climax is going to play out. Mystery over!" - but it was still pretty enjoyable, I thought.
Been playing San Andreas again a lot recently. I guess that's all you need to know on that. Trying to get to the mission where you re-visit the Liberty City; that, and I'm trying to get to the third island. However, I'm really starting to dig the overall plot of this game much more than I was in GTA3. I skipped Vice City, but San Andreas continually surprises me at how improved it is over GTA3 in nearly every regard.
There's also this. It's my typical ADD disorder, as inspiration and creativity strikes and I obey it's call. Thankfully, I'm reigning it under control.
