@“Tradegood”#p152494 It’s not that Zack’s Expanded Universe characterization straight up doesn’t work on its own merits, but I think the original game’s insinuation that behind this idealized image of him he might not have been a strictly terrific human being is more emotionally complex and believable, and for sure Cloud’s unhinged response to his death makes a lot more sense in the context of seeing his hero gunned down like a dog than getting the closure of a heartwarming speech about being his living legacy. The darkness of the original game’s portrayal and the way in which the player unravels it reminds me of some of the missable late game flashbacks in FF6 that turn Shadow and Locke into tragic characters and so on.
btw I also feel like Barret is a little too goofy in Compilation media. Yes he was basically Mr. T in the original game but every over-the-top outburst would also have an edge to it connoting his very real and justified anger. The remake deflates him a little too often I feel like, which is maybe just a greater casualty of filing down the edge and negativity of the original game in general - the sense of a dying world overflowing with despair is greatly softened.
@"tokucowboy"#p152250 [Abel Ferrara’s a wacky guy](https://thefilmstage.com/abel-ferrara-on-how-the-pandemic-led-to-izeros-and-ones-i-and-creating-his-own-genre/) lol
It looks really nice! The buttons and back especially give me a PS1-flavored nostalgia. Silver and grey are very FF colors for me. Obviously for the PS1, my favorite era, but I had a silver PSP-2000 back in the day that I played a lot of FF on as well. So just feels right for Rebirth.
@“sabertoothalex”#p152545 I‘m here with you on this 100%. very hot controller. I’m all for creating your own fondness and specifically tailored controllers and peripheral experience. Yes that controller is the perfect blend of the iconic silver PSP 2000 that many of my friends had, with some muted PS1-style grays. silver PSP reminds me of Guilty Gear, and the same kid who played that brought the PSP 2000 in to our German 1 class to play rammstein off of it and our boomer german teacher said the lyrics “mean nothing, make no sense, meaningless” etc.
@“treefroggy”#p152525 In the English dub of Advent Children he’s voiced by Jet Black from Cowboy Bebop doing an obvious Mr. T impression and greets Cloud by shouting “WHAT UP, FOOL” on his voicemail. So I feel like that’s pretty close
Friend of the show Phil Salvador got interviewed about his very good FFVIII blog over at Polygon:
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One of the core messages I’m gonna be writing about in the blog is the idea that I think one of the reasons there’s been such a backlash to Final Fantasy 8 over the years is that it is a game that is about love and emotions and vulnerability. Early internet culture responded to the fact that Final Fantasy 8 is predominantly a love story by writing it off or saying it’s stupid. […] Now that we have such great diversity in who is expressing their opinions about this stuff, we have people who are more willing to embrace that.
I‘ve known a couple absolute FF8-heads over the years, from girls who swooned over squall super hard in high school or whatever, to grown ass adult men who liked two things only, HOCKEY and FF8, and they don't like seven or nine, it’s 8 for them. The jockiness of it was great.
The first time I saw Final Fantasy VII Advent Children - fansubbed, autumn 2005, at the first Friday afternoon meeting of the high school anime club during my freshman year, where the club president was a butch and proud lesbian who made special exceptions for Sephiroth and Inuyasha - I found it virtually incomprehensible. This might be due to the fansub quality, or it might be because I had never even gotten around to disc 3 of Final Fantasy VII. Either way I didn’t feel like I was qualified to judge it, but the classical-orchestra-slash-screaming-metal-guitar remix of “One-Winged Angel” lived on my iPod Shuffle for the next several years.
The second time I saw _Advent Children_ - spring 2020, the eve of _FF7 Remake_’s release, freshly locked down from Covid-19 - I decided I liked it semi-ironically. It was still mostly incomprehensible, even after I’d finally beaten _Final Fantasy VII_ on my PSP, over a decade earlier, in summer 2009. Its impenetrability combined with the fact that the film originally premiered at the Venice Film Festival, presumably to an audience of Serious Grownup film critics who felt like they were watching a top-level Scientology initiation video, was fucking hilarious to me, and after a decade and change of HD gaming I actually appreciated the level of detailed texturing and nuanced lighting in the CG art. I decided it decent brainless eye candy and such a specifically mid-00s-dated retro cultural artifact it was very amusing to celebrate it.
The third time I saw _Advent Children_ was at the Regal Commerce Center New Brunswick two weeks ago, with about a dozen other depressed baggy-eyed millennials in the theater, among whom every woman (and some men) cheered the moment Sephiroth appears two hours into the film, and then re-cheered when he says to Cloud, “Get on your knees. I wanna see you beg for forgiveness.” And now, fresh off a playthrough of _FF7 Crisis Core_ and better informed on the Final Fantasy VII Expanded Universe Lore than any grown adult reasonably should be, I think I like it… unironically? There is just no other movie in existence quite like this one. It is _absurdly_ dense, _absurdly_ portentous, _absurdly_ operatic. Tetsuya Nomura in the director’s chair is giving 110% trying to craft this epic sci-fi drama that’s _also_ a technologically boundary-pushing CG filmmaking tribute to Sakaguchi’s _Spirits Within_, that’s _also_ a post-_Matrix_ fantasy wuxia action spectacle with impossible martial arts choreography involving magic and dragons and motorcycles, that’s _also_ the most sappily openhearted fanservice document of all time designed to send every last person who has ever written _Final Fantasy VII_ fanfiction home beaming ear to ear. Kazushige Nojima submerses himself like a goddamn _ascetic_ in _Final Fantasy VII_ Lore and emerges with one of the weirdest, most kookily sincere anime tributes to Christian faith I’ve ever seen from Japan: sin, redemption, baptism, rejection of despair, transcendence beyond death, abandonment of ego and acceptance of unlimited love between oneself and the world and loved ones who have already passed on. This is a level of fever-pitched übergeek spiritual maximalism comparable to _Evangelion_. Insane, one-of-a-kind movie.
What a trip.
I’m posting this in the FF general and not the movie talk thread because I’m pretty sure Nomura or Kitase once described _Advent Children_ as “non-interactive software” or something equally wild. Madmen.
Someone please let me know when the full credits for Rebirth get uploaded to mobygames. I have a suspicion about who‘s personally responsible for the Kingdom Hearts-style of animation in that series, Crisis Core and now FF7R2. I think the rhythmic head nodding and exaggerated hand-wavy motion when characters are explaining things are signatures of Tatsuya Kando. Once you notice it in one game you see it in just about everything he’s touched.
