What does Advent Children mean to you?

[silentfuzzle]

It also doesn't make sense that a guy whom the novella reveals is using the last of his will power to stay existing and even forgot his original form can somehow fully resurrect when one of his shadow copies gets his hands on what little of Jenova is left and come back ten times more powerful when he died back when he had the full body of Jenova, knowledge of the lifestream, and had absorbed a health amount of it. Rule of Cool can't save such sloppy writing that was obviously just there so fans could have their rematch fight; despite common sense dictating that it's all bulltrout and Cloud should have beatdown what logically would have been a very weakened Sephiroth. Apparently there is a novella somewhere that reveals that Jenova is secretly Cells sister.

I’m not sure what you guys are arguing about but didn’t Sephiroth appear as several horrible monster-human hybrids in the game? How is appearing in the movie as a normal human that can fly, wield a sword, manipulate children, taint the Lifestream, and die after a single omnislash more powerful than his form in the game where he killed a lot of people, summoned an asteroid, required ~nine people to defeat him, and had all of Jenova or whatever?

Denzel is kind of a jarring experience since he would appear to such people as to coming out of nowhere. Similarly, the three Sephy clones also come out of nowhere, but at least fans can guess their origin at least. I'm not even against the idea of writing separate stories to expand smaller characters, but these two sets of characters were important to the main narrative, so to have it removed from the main event and left for supplement material is just a bad move and you don't even need to be some award winning author to see that. I simply feel the film should have spent a few minutes getting the viewer up to speed on what's going on because a film is usually meant to be a self contained experience.

I agree that I would have liked one more scene of introduction for Denzel. One of the few additions I like in Advent Children Complete is where Cloud decides to take Denzel home from the church. But I disagree that excluding the rest is a bad move.

He saved the villain with the same kind of technique he wrote for the first installment - a skill that is not even the ordinary Reunion but simply the shapeshifting ability he used. Sephiroth resisted the lifestream and travelled through it in FFVII already. Then he made use of Jenova's body after initiating the Reunion he shapeshifted the body into an exact duplicate of his own to run around in it while regenerating inside of a giant crystal. Sephiroth has the power to, let's call it in a funny way, use his consciousness like Wireless Lan. He can exist lose of one specific body and project himself into bodies and control them. Which is one of his greatest powers as it is one of his basic "a highly powerful entity with Jenova cells can willingly control the cells, even when not in his own body" aspects.

This is precisely why a detailed explanation of how Sephiroth came back to life and where Kadaj, Yazoo, and Loz came from didn’t exist in the movie. It’s complicated, it’s strange, it would probably ruin the pacing, and at the end of the day, probably only diehard fans of FFVII would care about it in this detail.


As it is, the movie explains that Kadaj is a larval form of Sephiroth and his similarity to his brothers suggests that they have a similar relationship with Sephiroth. The only thing Kadaj is missing to transform is Jenova, and when he gets Jenova, he transforms. At the end of the movie, Kadaj disappears back into the Lifestream, which suggests that’s where he came from in the first place.


I think this is explanation enough when the details of how Sephiroth came back to life have nothing to do with Cloud’s story, which is what the movie is ultimately about. This isn’t lazy writing. Most authors agree that you shouldn’t info dump stuff that doesn’t matter into your story. The author needs to know all these details to create a cohesive world, but he isn’t obligated to bore his viewers with them. In this case, fans who care about the details can go read the novella in stories where those details advance the plot. What's in the movie is enough for its story… unless you want to sit there and claim that excluding boring, irrelevant explanations is bad writing.


While Advent Children is a sequel, it also functions very well at introducing newcomers to Final Fantasy. This movie was my introduction to the games, and I don’t think it would attract new people as well if it hit them with more complex details and terms from the game.


(Sorry, Sephiroth. I’m on your side. I’m just defending the movie from a different perspective.)

For example, I feel FFXV would have been a better game as a narrative had Kingsglaive remained within the game. The film was okay, but I didn't feel it warranted being its own thing. After playing FFXV, I feel it would have made the earlier chapters more exciting, and easier to invest in the story and world, had it remained part of the earlier chapters.

Just throwing this out there because it’s my goal to say it as much as possible. Kingslgaive is garbage in almost every way, and the game is lesser because Noctis was excluded from the events that take place within it.