Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children (Limited Edition Collector's Set)

overall the movie was great..the action and cg sequences were awesome...its by far one of the better cg movies ive seen and is about equal to Final Fantasy:The Spirits Within...my only complaint was the fact that it was animated with the Japanese language as the characters original language and then translated to English with voice-over..its more of an annoyance when u see the characters mouths speaking japanese..but you hear english...other than that it was well worth the money, and worth watching over and over....especially if you are a Final Fantasy fan..

Final Fantasy VII Advent Children is the best movie ever made by Square Enix I can't tell you how good it is you have to see for your self best hour in a half of your day no questions asked.

Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children (Two-Disc Special Edition)
This movie is awesome and worth watching. It is completely computer animated and is very Japanese Style. The movie is based off of the Game, Final Fantasy VII and so is rather confusing with out some Final Fantasy background. However, it is still a great, exciting watch.

Best movie ever, the only movies that come close are Lord of the Rings and Narnia... anyways, I want to start by saying the description is wrong, the movie starts in the city of Edge near midgar... Midgar is toxic and no one lives there any more (not since Meteorfall) except Cloud, who is hiding from his former friends and allies (and some enemies who have changed to the good side), because he is sick with Geostigma. Working as a delivery boy, former enemy Rufus Shinra and two turks Reno and Rude try to hire him as 'muscle'. Remnants of his old enemy Sephiroth are attempting to bring him back, and Rufus is trying to prevent that from happening by keeping the still-living head of Sephiroth's alien 'mother', Jenova, from the remnants. Although shinra and Cloud's gang enter an uneasy alliance, they find themselves fighting side by side as the remnants attempt to receive cells from their 'mother,'
therefore becoming sephiroth. The story is lax compared to the game, but the last half of the movie is not-stop action and the first half does have some plot points mixed in with action. i look forward to the blu ray version.

Note: This review is only for Last Order, the 20 minute extra that comes on the second DVD of the limited edition. The score is not far the average main feature, Advent Children.

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The first thing that needs to be said is that Last Order, a mere extra created to sell more copies of the limited edition release of Advent Children, is actually vastly superior to what it was designed to help sell. It doesn't say a lot good about Advent Children when it isn't even good enough to better an extra, but Last Order did do what Square Enix wanted and helped sell lots of copies of the limited edition release.

Last Order was one of the very first things I watched on my then brand new 19" monitor, and it was a wonderful experience. Up until that point I'd only had a 17" CRT monitor; one that had such bad brightness levels that it was near impossible to see what was going when watching anything remotely dark. The difference between the two monitors was staggering. But what impressed me more than my new monitor was this surprisingly high quality extra that I had discovered at complete random. The art, animation, pacing, music...everything about it impressed me. Watching it made me want to own it, even if it meant paying a daft amount just for 20 minutes due to it only being available with Advent Children.

The story is short and sweet since it wasn't possible for Madhouse to fit too much story into 20 minutes and make it flashy and fast-paced enough to do what Square wanted.
Sephiroth, the best member of SOLDIER (the elite of Shinra) has gone insane, killing nearly everyone in the village he was staying in to complete a mission. This leaves Zack, another SOLDIER member who had gone with Sephiroth to learn from the best and help complete the mission, with the unenviable job of attempting to stop Sephiroth before his insanity causes even more deaths.

Unlike Advent Children, which did an awful job of continuing the story of the most famous game (FFVII) Square have created, Last Order briefly covers the best part of the games story - the Nibelheim disaster. In the game the true story of what happened wasn't revealed in full until near the end, with a flashback near the start having mixed up the events prior to the big reveal. Last Order, however, gets right into what really happened, telling the story from the perspective of Zack; a character key to the main character of the game, and a character who barely featured in the game. The story in Last Order skips the build-up to what led to Nibelheim turning into an inferno because of time constraints, the focus instead being on what happened right after it started at the nearby Mako Reactor. The story also constantly switches from the Nibelheim events to what's happening in the present (of the Last Order story), showing Zack trying to flee from a small army of Shinra troops and the infamous Turks; the Shinra department that deals with the more dirty side of their business.

Aside from selling more copies of the Advent Children limited edition, the other objective was clearly to flesh out the character of Zack in preparation for his lead role in Crisis Core (the prequel to FFVII), and that was accomplished excellently by adding filler that showed him to be the sort of guy who'd laugh in the face of death and protect a friend no matter what. The game did give you an idea what type of guy Zack was by including an optional truck scene (FFVII players will understand what I'm referring to) that briefly showed Zack chatting away about the future shortly before the fitting and tragic end to his story, but watching the same scene in animated form, after having seen lots of filler flesh out his character, made it much more powerful.

Moving onto the fluff side, the OVA was as high budget as you'd expect an animation that only lasts 20 minutes to have been. The art is excellent throughout, the dark/gloomy colours set the mood perfectly, the animation flows without issue and the music is brilliant. Watching this really made me wish that Madhouse had been allowed to create an OVA with more than one episode - it would've been brilliant to see Madhouse cover more of the Nibelheim story.

Speaking of looks, the main attraction for FFVII fans is the Zack vs. Sephiroth fight and Madhouse didn't disappoint in creating an exciting fight with very little source material to work with. The fight, which lasted under a minute, put the sleep inducing sword contests in Advent Children to shame. It was paced perfectly, with no needless sword waving/building throwing occurring, and it even had a nice little extra on show for fans of the game - a low level limit break that any fan of the game would recognise. And it's also worth mentioning the music that plays during the fight and the end credits - the music, combined with the animation, made my cheeks tingle when I first watched the fight sequence.

All in all, Last Order is a very satisfying and highly enjoyable piece of animation for any fan of the game, or even anyone simply interested in seeing the best part of the game story without going through the game. If you want to watch something FFVII related, make sure it's this and not the flashy yet empty main feature.

Rating: 9/10