Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Sony 109 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 04/25/2006 Reviewed: 05/23/2006

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When I was a kid my parents would not allow silly things like Nintendo games in our house. It was my fault, sure, I had made a transgression that got my Nintendo privledges suspended, but it was my playing Nintendo while suspended that got me a permanent ban on all videogames forever. In my later years I would covertly smuggle consoles into my house, using various monies from various activities to purchase them on my lonesome. I bought a Playstation around the release of Final Fantasy VII. We only had one TV in the house and, because of that spiteful fact, I was only able to play on Tuesday nights when my dad worked until 10. I would rush home from school on those days and plop myself down in front of the living room TV for as long as I could, only stopping to scramble over a tangle of wires, rushing upstairs to my room when I heard the key in the lock. If you're reading this mom, and I doubt you are, then I'm sorry. I guess I wasn't an ideal kid. But at least I didn't do pot!

As I grew up, my interest in RPGs waned. I will say that this is in part due to my shortening attention span and having less free time available to me, but it's also because RPGs started taking themselves so damn seriously. Instead of being hardcore focused on stats, and leveling up, and new magic spells, somewhere along the way videogames decided they were totally important and everyone was coming to them not for the gameplay, but for yet ANOTHER trashy throwaway story about a gang of plucky youths going out to stop the dark emperor from alternatively taking over/destroying the world. It's like when cheesy action movies started to think they were making important statements instead of being about 5 minute sequences of Arnold Schwartzenegger firing a belt-fed machinegun at Colombian terrorists. Of course, now that these games were important they couldn't be just about that. They had to edit in suitably "complex" themes of betrayal, friendship, TEN LOVE TRIANGLES IN EVERY GAME, the usual sort of stuff. RPGs started to think that they were high class literature and tried to ape the greats as best as they could. Only I guess Chaucer doesn't translate into the Japanese all that well. Instead of complex characters and plots we're still given the same rehashed garbage about superbeings trying to take over the world. Only now the superbeings are just outstandingly effeminate guys who often sprout angel wings in their final forms.

Advent Children is like the pinnacle of this theory of game design, the very apex of pompous assery. It is beautiful, no doubt, but it is so clouded by how great and important it thinks it is that it doesn't even bother explaining to its mundane audience why it's as perfect. Obviously, in this sort of situation, the people who deserve to 'get it' won't need to be told HOW to 'get it' and, with that sort of logic, it's not really worth wasting your time explaining your incredibly complex and intricate plot when you could be using that time to make more retarded excursions into ANTI-GRAVITY SWORD FIGHTING. Let me put down an example for you. In the movie one of the key plot points is a disease called Geostigma. We know Geostigma is bad because we're told it's bad. We never see anyone die from Geostigma, or even exhibit any actual symptoms. As far as we know all it does is really mess up your complexion, like a really potent version of acne. The character with the most apparent Geostigma poisoning in the game has no trouble walking around and firing a pistol when the situation calls for it and another poisoned character, whose arm is wholly swallowed by the black globules of Geostigma, is still able to swordfight to the higher degree than anyone could legitimately ask for. Despite flaws like this, Advent Children is still convinced that it has one of the greatest plots that mankind has ever known. It must be!! Why else would it not bother explaining it to anyone?

So you could make the excuse, I guess, that this movie is more about the fight scenes. I don't believe that for a second, but it's got a TON of fight scenes so let's dicuss. Most of them take the most lackluster, nondescript, budget-rate Steven Segal "he can't actually do kung-fu anymore so we'll have to fake like he can" stance to its fight scenes that I'm not sure why anyone would even bother with it. The final sword fights, especially, are so low rent that we see more sparkly flashes that SUGGEST there are swords flying off other swords somewhere out there than we do actual sword fighting. I guess we're supposed to be so distracted by the fact that all the characters in the film have learned to fly, literally fly, that we won't concern ourselves with silly things like a good fight scene. The only halfway decent fights in the movie are the bare fisted ones, Tifa vs. a Clone and The Turks vs. a Clone. And even then, Tifa's fight is so burdened by excessive slow motion and Matrix-esque effects that it's barely worth your time. I guess RPGs, and their movies, just can't get me excited anymore. And I'm gonna take a stand and say it's not because of my ADHD eaten brain, or my nostalgia for NES days gone-past. RPGs got too full of themselves and plot-free, action-free movies like Advent Children where nothing really happens but they totally act like it does are the result. If I want to watch a stupid movie, I'll watch one like Bloodsport, where you totally get to see Chong-Li break some Japanese dude's face in.