Final Rant

They're showing the Spirits Within movie on Animax. It still boggles my mind how this crappy Alien rip-off made it into reality. What was going through Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi when he came up with it?

Now that Final Fantasy has captured the imagination and hearts of gamers everywhere, we will immortalize the game in movie form! But true to Square tradition, we will NOT give the fans what they want. We will not use the beloved and familiar settings and characters from previous FF games.
Here's the BIG IDEA! We will throw away the fantasy elements, magic, midieval worlds full of wonder and mystery, evil villains with grandiose plans of world domination, powerful magic, weapons and summoning spells. Basically, everything that makes Final Fantasy a FANTASY, we will throw out.
Let us instead place the spotlight on the cool tech demos featuring our new animation studios' generic character models. I love Aliens and tech crap, so let's make it as close as we can to those movies. Let's make most of the heroes expendable marines. Death is good! Heroes dying is cool! A little death never hurt anybody! Anyway, kids will surely dig these faceless grunts since we're going to hire famous Hollywood actors to give them character!

Of course, our heroine has got to be gorgeous. She's gotta have great hair. The hair's gotta be perfect. That's because that's the only part of her body we're gonna show off. We haven't fully developed female character models yet, so we can't really show her off that much. It's OK, since we're getting the actress who played CHUN-LI in the Street Fighter movie to voice her! WOOHOO! When we finally pirate some guys from Tecmo's Team NInja, maybe then we can slip in a second or two of our heroine in her lingerie. Maybe even a volleyball game. Mmm. Nah.

Anyway, we'll set the story in a ruined Earth. There's an Alien threat, and our heroes are working to beat it. That's all I can say since I really have no idea how to work it all out. Let's just kill off most of the heroes since drama is always good. And put in LOTS and LOTS of tech crap and machines. That's what Final Fantasy is all about, after all. Machines and mecha and tech crap.

(After watching the rough cut)
Damn, it's depressing. Almost everyone dies, it's all about spirituality and faith and there are no great action sequences or magic or stuff that makes for exciting adventure. I LIKE IT!!! It's PROFOUND!!!

But I guess we need to add in some Final Fantasy stuff after all. Okay, let's change the name of one of the characters to Cid, since ALL the FF games have a character named Cid in them. (Note: Change Doctor Baba-Uta's name to Cid). I guess that will satisfy fans, right? RIGHT! YEAH! Okay, send it out the theaters! YYYEEEAAAAHHH!!! We're gonna rake it in!"

End result. Without the Fantasy, the Spirits Within movie was just... Final. The movie was a colossal flop, even into the home video market. It did so bad, Square Animation pretty much died soon after the theatrical release of this flop. Sakaguchi lost his job as VP of Square (he has since gone off to form a small game studio called Mist Walker) and it seemed that the beloved title had lost a bit of its luster.

Well, not really. Gamers still bought the games and their love of the characters moved Square to finally break their STOOPID tradition of never revisiting their past games. Final Fantasy X was popular enough to warrant a sequel, and soon, after all these years, a return to the most beloved of FF's, Final Fantasy VII, is about to happen in cinematic splendour with the CG movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. No crappy space marines. No tech crap. No faceless generic monsters. No spiritualist mumbo-jumbo. Okay, maybe a little, since this IS from Japan. But everything is in; Summoning Spells, Gunblades, spiky-haired heroes, hauntingly beautiful Flower Girls, silver-haired villains and LOTS of action.

Ah. All things come to those who wait. And we've waited a long time.