Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete Review – Long Title, Long Movie

Video game to movie transitions have never had it easy. With every one announced it seems like there’s something tailor-made to ruin the whole experience. Be it a bad director, a script that completely misses the point of the source material, or just plain being a bad movie there’s always been that one genre killing deathblow.  So it comes as no surprise that the original Final Fantasy film, titled The Spirits Within was doomed to fail from the start; despite actually being a halfway decent movie and exhibiting some of the best CGI ever made at that point in time, it was a total bomb at the box office and doomed Square’s aspirations to enter into the movie industry; hell, it nearly killed the entire company.  In 2006, Square tried again.  Unlike Spirits Within, Square’s second try at a game movie was a little more on the mark; while still using extremely advanced CGI, they actually set it within the universe and timeline of an existing Final Fantasy game – the most popular RPG of all time, in fact; should be easy money, right?  Released only on DVD, Advent Children was a hit sales-wise, moving over 1.4 million copies worldwide.

That didn’t stop people from complaining, though.  And oh, the complaints rained down.  Criticisms of the film’s length, its reliance on action scenes, its lack of meaningful plot development, and even on Cloud’s mental state were all levied against Square’s far more successful CGI film outing.  When the PS3 was announced to have a Blu-Ray drive, Square Enix and director Tetsuya Nomura devised a brilliant evil plan; instead of simply moving the film to Blu-Ray, they would update and revise the film and capitalize on gamers’ dreams of a Final Fantasy VII remake on PS3 for extra sales.  And so, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete was born.  I received my copy last week, packed in with the Final Fantasy XIII demo, and here’s what I have to say on the subject.  From this point on, this review will assume you’ve already seen the original version of Advent Children, so if you haven’t, prepare to be spoiled.

For a quick recap – Advent Children takes place two years after Final Fantasy VII. After the defeat of Sephiroth at the Northern Crater, a mysterious illness known as Geostigma began to creep across the planet, infecting and slowly killing anyone unlucky enough to contract it.  The disease, caused by overexposure to Jenova-tainted Lifestream particles left behind in the wake of Holy, the White Magic spell cast to divert Sephiroth’s Meteor, manifests first as a black skin discoloration before evolving into a more cancerous infection, leading to weakness, vomiting, and eventual death.  While initially an airborne disease, the two years since Meteorfall allowed the Lifestream particles to settle, limiting hot zones to areas around Mako reactors; hence the reason for Midgar’s abandonment and the subsequent establishment of Edge City.  Why am I telling you all of this?  Oh, because most of it wasn’t in the original film.  In the original Advent Children, Geostigma was present, certainly, but it seemed to be present only as a plot device to weaken Cloud and prevent him from kicking the villains’ asses the first time he met them.  In Complete, Geostigma is established as a far more considerable threat, with an infected villager falling victim to its degenerative effects only minutes into the film.  Complete also elaborates a bit more on the film’s villains, Kadaj, Loz, and Yazoo, showing a bit more of Kadaj’s motivations and (most importantly) where they came from, which helps them feel a little bit more like villains and less like walking plot devices.  They won’t win any awards for “best villain ever”, though.

Now, you may notice that I’ve refrained from using the word “remake” in this review thus far, and there’s a reason for this.  Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete is not a remake of the original film; it’s more like an expanded Director’s Cut.  Normally when a company advertises “30 minutes of never-before-seen footage!” in a DVD release of a film, they’re bluffing; most of the length is hidden in special features, outtakes, and the like.  Surprisingly, Square was being truthful about this; the full runtime of Complete clocks in at just over two hours.  Despite my early fears that most of this new footage would be wasted on action sequences (considering the original version’s over-reliance thereon), the bulk of the changes made to Advent Children Complete are actually plot development, exposition, characterization, and context.  Scenes across the board are altered, re-shot, expanded, and elaborated to help the film’s story flow better.  For example, in the original film, the Turks Reno and Rude are major characters, helping Cloud along with his quest, despite the fact that the two groups were recurring enemies in the original video game; no explanation for their change of heart is ever given, they simply work together as if they’re suddenly friends.  Complete, on the other hand, elaborates considerably on the positions of ShinRa president Rufus and the Turks, who feel real remorse for the problems their company caused in Final Fantasy VII, and consciously choose to work with Cloud to atone for their actions.  Also greatly expanded is the original film’s subplot featuring Denzel, a young orphan friend of Cloud’s who happens to be infected with Geostigma.  In the original film, Denzel’s presence was totally random; he wasn’t in the original game, he wasn’t even given a proper introduction, he was just…there, and everyone treated him as if he had always been around.  This has been rectified considerably in the Complete version.

The last piece of the Complete puzzle is, of course, Cloud, the poster boy for every spiky-haired JRPG hero of the past 10 years.  Cloud’s attitude in the original film was a major point of contention for a lot of fans; at the end of VII, he managed to overcome his guilt for the deaths of his friends, using their memory for strength in the final duel against Sephiroth.  In Advent Children, though, the confidence he had regained through his friends was completely gone, rendering him a depressive loner who wants nothing to do with his former allies.  Complete doesn’t remove this entirely, but it does put his emotional shift into a better context; Cloud’s Geostigma infection, combined with his feelings of remorse over the death of Zack (personified quite well by a flashback to Crisis Core) resulted in a frantic search for a cure for the disease.  These changes to the storyline put Cloud’s personality into better perspective and at least give a reason for why he’s acting as strange as he is, even if they don’t necessarily excuse his sudden emo-fication.  The usage of Cloud’s memories of Zack as a driving force for his character – which was also not in the original cut of the film – is a particularly effective device, especially in the way that it helps Crisis Core feel more like a piece of the canon.

Of course, there are changes to the film’s action sequences as well, with the climactic motorcycle chase and the final duel with Sephiroth receiving considerable makeovers.  I won’t spoil the changes to these scenes, only to say that the addition of blood to the Sephiroth duel was a particularly nice touch.  Other little details throughout the film are small alterations to present scenes to add blood, dust, and dirt onto the characters following fight scenes, new musical pieces that harken back to the original video game, and an entirely new arrangement of One Winged Angel (how many times can Uematsu arrange that song?) for the extended Sephiroth duel.  However, with the good comes the bad.  As a Blu-Ray, you would expect Advent Children Complete to output at 1080p, and it does…to a point.  All of the Complete scenes, meaning anything new, altered, extended, or changed in any way, output at fully re-rendered 1080p and look beautiful.  However, the old scenes, the ones Square didn’t take the time to upgrade for the director’s cut, are simply upscaled; they still look quite good, but compared to the new scenes, there is a noticeable quality shift, especially in HD.  It’s disappointing to think that they worked as hard as they did on the new stuff, only to cheap out on the old scenes.

In the end, Advent Children Complete does one thing above all others; it takes what was essentially a long string of well-animated CGI fight scenes occasionally broken up by a few lines of dialogue and turns it all into a decent, watchable, full-length movie.  It won’t win any Oscars for acting or writing, but it’s a considerable improvement from the original cut of the film.  However, considering I did pay $80 for this (and the Final Fantasy XIII demo disc), I can’t help but feel a little short-changed; Square Enix’s commitment to the PS3 this generation has been decidedly lackluster, and an $80 director’s cut of a film I saw three years ago isn’t exactly the best apology for being deliberately passed over time and time again for RPG goodness of any kind.  The American version of the Blu-Ray will be out in June, minus the demo, and should cost considerably less, so take that as you will.

Final Thoughts: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete improves on the original film in every conceivable way, adding context and plot to a film that originally featured very little.  It’s certainly not the best film ever, but if you’re a fan of Final Fantasy and VII in particular, it’s certainly worth seeing.