As a long-term fan of the games I was delighted to find out that there was a massive budget film coming out by the same people.

The movie was originally released in Japan and then re-shot (so to speak) to accommodate English voice acting nearly a year later. Obviously this introduces a bunch of issues but to be fair they did a good job of not screwing that part of it up. Anyone who has ever seen an overdubbed Godzilla movie knows what I am talking about.

The story follows up on the events that took place in the game Final Fantasy 7, arguably the best of the entire franchise. I know that for real fans the name Sephiroth needs no explanation as for many of us, he was the best character ever.

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And therein is exactly the problem the film had reaching a wide audience. People who were not intimately familiar with the story of FF7 had no friggin clue what was going on in the movie. There isn't enough time for the entire backstory and the information they did provide in the film was perplexing to say the least. I was confused for a lot of it despite having completed FF7 many different times. They removed 25 minutes of the film in order to get it to a reasonable length and then later re-introduced it, presumably to sell more DVD's (not gonna argue with that)

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So the fact that very few people actually understood the story is a massive mistake for any film to make but on the plus side it was pretty much unanimously praised for having exceptional animation. Some critics said some snide things like "it is visually stunning, and that is the only good thing about it." Unfortunately, even though I am a fanboi BIG TIME, I have a hard time disagreeing with this.

Now i fully expect to not have people agree with me about this but I think that I am just being honest here. This sort of adventure, in my mind, needs a game in order for it to be interesting. It just doesn't hold your attention regardless of how beautiful it is. It was, for most people, a convoluted mess. There is no arguing that it is just exceptional animation to the highest degree, however, for me and most other people, that simply wasn't enough.

4 / 10