Final Fantasy: The Movie

Epiphani writes: "It's been known for quite some time that Squaresoft was in the process of making a full length CG movie, however I never imagined it would be like this. 'Next to the beautiful Pacific Ocean, Square has selected Harbor Court in downtown Honolulu as the home to more than 150 computer graphic artist from all over the world, including Hollywood, Tokyo and Europe. There, surrounded by state-of-the-art computers and software programs, artists are able to transform their vision into reality set on a computer screen.' Square has really outdone themselves this time, with an amazing voice cast and unbelievably realistic CG -- this one is sure to be a hit considering Square's emphasis on plot. Be sure to check out the featured trailer (req. quicktime)."

Comments

IF it ever comes out...

[Godai]

Last thing I heard about this movie was that it was 2 years late and a few million over budget. Sure, the scenes look nice, but it seems it's taking them 6 months to do that single, break-taking scene. Uh, that is not good. Another thing: I like - rather, used to like - the Final Fantasy series quite a bit, but as much I think Square's got some killer CG artists, I can't see this flick doing all that well in North America. There are really only two audiences for this movie: fans of CG (geeks) and FF fans. Are there enough fans betwen the two groups to make Square back its investment? I'm not sure...
Wood Shavings!

Can't wait!

[MikeFM]

Waiting for this movie is right up there on my list w/ the new Star Wars and Matrix movies. 2001 may be a great year for movies much like 1999 was. 2000 has mostly sucked. :)

Re:Can't wait!

[webrunner]

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie is currently set ofr either 2001 or 2002, isn't it?
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This is news, alright.

[webrunner]

Yep, this has never been featured on /. before.

Never mind the fact that the 'new trailer' has been up for months.

Really guys, for all the flack we're giving the Patent Office for not checking into 'prior art', I think the /. crew should be checking prior art itself. This isn't meant to be a troll, or flamebait, but I for one am concerned at the frequency of old or repeated news on /. recently. It's crazy.
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Can't wait, but...

[Zone5]

While I'm eager to see this movie, and I'm sure many other geeks are as well (be they anime geeks or FF geeks), I'm not sure how the general North American movie-going public will accept it. Let's face it, whenever a movie like Forrest Gump wins Best Picture while Fight Club is almost univerally hated, you have to question the average person's taste and capacity to enjoy something different. Square has always done a great job with warped plots, which should make this movie different enough to trouble the average nimrod who laid out $10 to see a pretty animated film expecting another Toy Story.

Re:Can't wait, but...

[Masem]

Americans think animation is for kids. And because the FF film will be animated, it will be regelated to a kids movie, but probably, knowing the FF series, a PG rating, which means NO ONE besides diehard nerds will probably see it. Only a few times has an animated movie (traditional or CG) ever made everyone sit up and take notice; Chicken Run, Toy Story and sequel, and some early 90s Disney are some examples. The fact that Oscars will finally give animated movies their own catagory next year is doublefaced; there must be at least 8 animated works to have this award given; typical year only sees 5 or so.

Re:Can't wait, but...

[skoda]

I agree that most adults consider animated films 'kids' movies, but with that, the movies you mention are about the only ones capable of making people 'sit up and take notice'.

Don't get me wrong, I love animated films, and have seen most of the US released animated films. But until the recent films from Dreamworks, most of the non-Disney animation has been mediocre at best.

But now, with Chicken Run, Prince of Egypt, TS1, TS2, and the wonderful Veggie Tales, "adults" are seeing more high quality 'cartoons' causing them to pay more attention to this genre of film.
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D. Fischer

Re:Can't wait, but...

[Sloppy]

Americans think animation is for kids

I dunno... who do you think watches The Simpsons, Futurama, King of the Hill, and Family Guy?

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Re:Can't wait, but...

[Masem]

Teenagers.

And if you pay attention, that's the demographic they are going for.

Re:Can't wait, but...

[Masem]

I can name several animated films of late that have been 'looked over' by adults and only got mediocere outcomes in the box office.

"The Iron Giant". See this ASAP. It flopped at the box office due to poor advertizing by the WB, but if it was advertized as well as it was made, it could have been an Oscar contender. It was *not* a kids movie ("Duck and Cover" is mentioned), but instead, better seen as a "animated sci-fi movie", even though the main character is a kid. But the WB advertized it that way, and it came off boy-centric, and basically flopped. But most animation buffs agree that is was better than any animated work this decade.

"Balto" (hi matt!) had a few hokey parts, but for most matters, it was a good general (non-kids-only) movie with good effects and good story. Again, poorly advertized to audiences.

Re:Can't wait, but...

[Reality Master 101]

What's wrong with Forrest Gump? If you thought that was a bad movie, then you basically didn't get it.

Or is it just popular movies that you dislike?

--

Re:Can't wait, but...

[Jonathan]

I think Bruce Sterling put it best: "Forrest Gump is like Stalinist propaganda: it suggests that the ideal citizen should be obedient and stupid". I want characters that question society, not just drift through it aimlessly.

Re:Can't wait, but...

[Masem]

Anime kicks most American animation, but as the box office shows, when it comes to feature films, audience will only go to American animation (given the failings of Princess Monokoke and the general distaste for Pokemon and the candy-coated anime). Anime has almost always been beyond kids, almost to the point of being NC-17 (or worse!), and while I appricate it, I don't think that even enlighted Americans would appriciate it.

Final.ee

[kwashiorkor]

It's about time that they decide to just make a movie. It's practically what their "games" are anyways, except their games have endless waves of non-sensical button mashing "fight" sequences. Fun for the whole family!

Their tech for the movie looks really nice.

Except in the typical wacky fashion of Square's marketing campaigns, they talk about how well they render the clothing on the models in the "character" section, and don't mention a thing about the characters. I mean, who cares what the movie is about when there's redering deformations to talk about.

-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with

Re:Final.ee

[webrunner]

Fortunately, Squaresoft isn't entirely in the 'movie business' for games. Other titles like FF Tactics, Vagrant Story, and Chrono Cross are much more interactive. In fact, Chrono Cross takes 'old school' a step further and even has a SNES/NES style 'gather elemental quest items' section.

Sure, FF8 is as interactive as a petrified tree, but FF9 at least looks to reverse that a bit, and Square does have a lot of other games.

Remember, it's SquareSoft, not FinalFantasySoft. "RedHat is not Linux" "Final Fantasy is not Squaresoft"

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I'd like to know more about their Iron

[Sawbones]

In reading the bits and scraps I've found about the movie for the past year or so I've only ever managed to find two interesting tidbits.

1) The rendering horsepower was/is supplied by something like 2 full floors of sgi onyx boxes. That even with that it was limited to something like a second of film rendering per day and that they anticipated technological advances to be able to render the entire film in time.

2) Square developed a few new algorithms to help with animation. Namely one for hair blowing in the wind (sort of interesting) and the way cloth folds and bends as a "actor" moves (very interesting).

Anyone else with unsubstantiated rumor/facts? :) Or better yet, a more indepth site for details? :)

Re:I'd like to know more about their Iron

[hkon]

In the credits for "A Bugs Life" I noticed that Pixar uses Sun Microsystems for rendering the final theatre quality version, however they use SGI workstations. I would imagine that Squaresoft has a similar setup. Pixar probably has several fully loaded Sun Enterprise 10000 machines that do their rendering.

You would think so, but I guess they got a better deal on E4000 servers, as they used 100 of them for A Bug's Life. See http://www.sun .co m/smi/Press/sunflash/9812/sunflash.981215.2.html for more info.
Since then, they've got a new one, tho. 120 Enterprise 4500s, which are $223,000 EACH.... http://www. sun .com/smi/Press/sunflash/1999-08/sunflash.990810.2. html

Someone mentioned that he thought the Final Fantasy people used Onyxes, but that'd really surprise me, since the Onyxes usually are used for realtime graphics things, and not rendering. It would seem kinda pointless to put a really high-end graphics system in a box that's gonna do cpu-intensive things only. Unless, of course these boxes can use some of their graphics hardware for rendering nonrealtime stuff as well. You'd probably want to have one Onyx to see quick previews without having to push it through your rendering farm, but that won't be production-level quality.
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Re:I'd like to know more about their Iron

[Sawbones]

You're right, my bad. They didn't use Onyxes, they used Octanes. I can't find the original site I got that info off of, but here is a paragraph from www.thegia.com:

In development at Square Honolulu, dozens of the world's top graphic artists are slaving away on SGI's hottest machines, rendering what may very well be the future of entertainment. Square, in fact, is the world's largest consumer of SGI machines, outclassing even effects shop Industrial Light and Magic. Over a year was spent in research and development before work on the film itself began. Entire floors are filled with artists -- each with the greatest rendering weapon known to man, a Silicon Graphics Octane. Even so, rendering is proceeding at the horrendously slow rate of only a few seconds a day. The end result, however, should be well worth it.

The second-a-day part was right though :)

Re:I'd like to know more about their Iron

[tolldog]

"each with the greatest rendering weapon known to man, a Silicon Graphics Octane."

HAHAHA. Hardly. The Octane is good for hardware renders and animating on, but not for render boxes. I use both Octanes and VALinux boxes. Give me the Linux boxes any day. The price/performance runs circles arround the Octanes.

Re:I'd like to know more about their Iron

[KFury]

2) Square developed a few new algorithms to help with animation. Namely one for hair blowing in the wind (sort of interesting) and the way cloth folds and bends as a "actor" moves (very interesting).

Knowing today's IP climate, they've patented the algorithms...

Kevin Fox

Re:I'd like to know more about their Iron

[CaseyB]

Square developed a few new algorithms to help with animation. Namely one for hair blowing in the wind (sort of interesting)

This is not surprising. If it's a typical Japanese animated film, this effect will be used in every shot. :)

actors on strike? who needs actors?

[MenTaLguY]

...hollywood will have to actually finish their beef with the Screen Actors Guild to atleast get *something* into their commercials.

Either that, or we're going to start seeing a lot of CG spokespersons in commercials from here on in...

Re:Urgh

[Tower]

Huh? It looks like it is all from the submission. The quotes line up. Hemos actually *didn't comment* (a first, I know). That's all...

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The best thing about CGI.

[Julius X]

I've seen the trailer for this, and I have to admit it looks beautiful. Even though, part of me is itching to say that it still doesn't look completely real.

The fact is that CGI movies shouldn't look real. There is a certain magic that CGI can create in a film that makes it look...perhaps more than real... CGI can allow things to look real enough, but then allow us to go beyond what is actually possible, and then take us there.

That is what I'm looking forward to about Final Fantasy. A movie that doesnt even pretend to be a cartoon, and a film that will take us past where reality has ever gone.

-Julius X

Re:The best thing about CGI.

[cvd6262]

People say the same thing about digital movies. They look too real.

We are used to seeing light projected through cells onto screens. Some say that film simulates the way the eye dissects images, so it looks better than digital.... Bunk.

Re:The best thing about CGI.

[talesout]

That sounds like the same thing I hear among audiophiles. "Digital recording doesn't give you good 'compression dynamics'".

What they are really saying is that Digital recording doesn't change your sound as it's laid down. Non-digital will 'compress' sound as you hit the high end of the audio spectrum and make it sound 'flatter'. Personally, I've always felt you should go for the sound you want and hope the recording device can pick up exactly that sound. Don't rely on the recording device to compensate for something.

Same principle to digital video. Use it and make your statements through the acting, expressions, and other elements of the film. Don't worry about looking or sounding 'too real'.

Technophobes piss me off!

Re:The best thing about CGI.

[Apotsy]

It's not "bunk". Film caputres light on a logarithmic (it takes four times as much light get twice the recorded brightness) scale, which is similar to the way the retina sees light. Video cameras, on the other hand, see light on a linear scale (twice as much light gives twice as much recorded brightness). That's what gives video its tell-tale look. Film really is closer to the way we see.

I've never actually heard anyone say video looks "too real". I've just heard proponents of digital video claim they've heard people say that. I've yet to actually meet someone who said it first-hand.

Re:The best thing about CGI.

[Apotsy]

I am not talking about the way the image is stored, I am talking about the way it is captured!

I mean that in order to get twice as much signal strength out of the light-sensing elements -- before it is quantized -- it needs to be a logarithmic scale.

With film or other photo-chemical light sensors (such as the human eye), in order to get twice as much chemical exposure, you need four times as much light.

With CCDs or other photo-electric light sensors (such as older, tube-style video cameras), in order to get twice as much signal strength, you only need two times as much light.

THAT is the reason why film and video look so different. It's because their brightness response curves are so completely different. And film, not video, is a closer match for how the human eye responds to light.

Re:The best thing about CGI.

[Apotsy]

That would not help. Current analog video standards like NTSC have some gamma correction already. And still, things recorded with film and video look different. Think about the way the evening news or things recorded with a home video camera look compared to things recorded on film (like movies or large-budget prime-time shows). The differences you see are due to the logarithmic vs. linear scale. The way video systems are currently designed, they clip values to maximum brightness at much lower intensities than film, effectively throwing away data at the top end of the brightness scale. There is no way to recover that data after the fact.

You could, theoretically, build a video camera with a very large linear range and then post-process the data to simulate being captured on a logarithmic-response sensor, but so far, no one has built a device like that. It wouldn't be too hard, though. It could even be done in-camera. Have the CCD sensor output data in a 32-bit-per-color-component linear scale, and then before recording it to tape, have a DSP or other chip convert that data into a 10-bit-per-component logarithmic scale. There are even existing file formats, such as Kodak's "Cineon", that would do nicely. A system like that, if it also had comparable resolution to film, say 4000x3000 pixels (see this resolution chart for more info about film resolution) might actually serve as a replacement for film.

The thing is, nobody's even talking about those things I just mentioned! Some people are actually ready to settle for plain-old HDTV, which is nowhere near as good as film, both in terms of brightness range and resolution.

Speaking of resolution, let's talk about that for a second. As I mentioned earlier, 35mm film has scannable info on it all the way up to about 4000x3000. On the other hand HDTV, which is what Lucas is using to shoot the next Star Wars movie, is only 1920x1080. Worse yet, those Texas Instruments DLP projectors that have been put into some theaters have so far been limited to 1280x1024 resolution. That's pathetic! Imagine if they installed one of those in the Mann's Chinese theater in L.A. -- one pixel on a screen that size would be as big as my head! Yet some people are so enamored with the word "digital" that they have been running around proclaiming that digital cinema has "arrived"! Ugh.

Re:it's gonna be wonderful!

[webrunner]

Okay, let's try this again. Hopefully it'll actually work this time.

It's a bit complicated, but here's a little chart:
Japan: Final Fantasy USA: Final Fantasy.
Japan: Final Fantasy II USA: Never released.
Japan: Final Fantasy III USA: Never released.
Japan: Final Fantasy IV USA: Never released.
Japan: Final Fantasy IV Easytype USA: Final Fantasy II
Japan: Final Fantasy V USA: Final Fantasy V (HORRIBLY TRANSLATED) in FF Anthology
Japan: Final Fantasy VI USA: Final Fantasy III, and VI in FF Anthology
Japan: Final Fantasy VII USA: Final Fantasy VII
and the rest are the same.

Also, here are some other "FF" titles that are interesting.
USA: FInal Fantasy Mystic Quest Japan: Final Fantasy USA. (This is much like Mario Bros 2)
USA: Final Fantasy Adventure Japan: Seiken Densetsu
USA: Secret of Mana Japan: Seiken Densetsu 2 (yes, SoM is a sequel to FFA)
Japan: Seiken Densetsu 3, USA: Not released, buty ou can get a translated version off the net.
USA: Legend of Mana Japan: Seiken Densetsu: Legend of Mana.

Seiken Densetsu means, essentially "Legend of the Holy Sword" by the way, as a reference to the Mana Sword.

Final Fantasy Legend 1, 2, and 3, in the USA were originally "SaGa", which made it's way to the PSX in SaGa Frontier.

FF Tactics is called FF Tactics in both Japan and North America.

As for FF Movie, it's not really an FF movie - it's not really Final Fantasy in any sense, they're just using the name a bit more freely. But it will probably still really really kick ass, anyway. It's worth 7 bucks just to see the effects of 3D realism on a crowd.
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Re:HEMOS

[Tower]

Yup, and a couple of them don't even make any sense... like this one, where there doesn't seem to be anything wrong, or the other U PUNCTUATIN' U CAPITILIZIN' crap...

He (the <=12 yr old doing this) could at least be relevant. OOG_THE_CAVEMAN was actually funny... this is crap.
[please do not feed the trolls] (shoot! too late!)
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Kick Ass!!!

[imadoofus]

It looks to me like this movie could live up to the hype that something like episode 1 generated. I will definitly be in line for this one!

Re:it's gonna be wonderful!

[webrunner]

I was going to mention the Wonderswan but I haven't heard anything concrete one way or another about an american release. And these are more remixes then re-releases- they'll have SNES-calibre graphics on NES games, much like Super Mario All Stars.
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Re:Oh ... my ... god...

[webrunner]

Final Fantasy: The Movie never confessed to trying to be a game, you know. And it's not japanimation, it's being developped in CG in Hawaii, which is in the United States.
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More FFM Pictures

[dew]

There's one at Ming-Na's website (she's one of the lead vocalists) not on the main site (picture), another from Animation Artist herepage for the movie).

The dmoz category for the movie is here with a fair number of links to sites about the movie (like the GIA).

David E. Weekly

Other places to get the trailers

[Hadean]

In case you haven't seen any yet (and you can't get on the site), you can get them here and here.

(hmm.. the trailer is months old... how's that new?)

Re:QuickTime Rant

[webrunner]

I've always wondered what the quicktime facination was. Maybe it's the Macintosh angle (this is the movie industry, after all), or the 'user friendlyness' of it. Maybe filesize? But really, quicktime is a lot slower than others. Plus, it doesn't /ask/ to change file associations and things- I have a SB Live, I don't want Quicktime software midi synthesis. And I have the 'free version' - I don't need to be reminded of "Pro" since I don't do anything that pro would want. I ended up pirating Pro just to get rid of the annoying nag screen that this supposed 'free' software has.

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Common Lisp used in Final Fantasy

[lispbliss]

just had to point out that Square used Allegro Common Lisp for the movie. The link below has a nice discussion about why they chose Common Lisp and has a picture of the cool photo realistic computer graphics they have in the movie. http://www.fra nz. com/success/customer_apps/animation/squareusa.php3

Re:HEMOS

[webrunner]

At least it's a video game referene. You don't see that too often.
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Real time on a PS2

[SIGFPE]

If you were at SIGGRAPH 2000 you may have seen a shot from this movie running *real time* at HD resolution on a Sony box consisting of 16 PS2's running parallel in one box. It was pretty awesome! The camera was movable by the viewer and the image quality was pretty much the same with wonderful lighting, texturing and hair dynamics.
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Re:Real time on a PS2

[spitzak]

The Siggraph demo was at HDTV resolution, but was nowhere near the quality of the actual movie renders. It basically was a high resolution image of high-resolution texture maps but otherwise like a game box. An obvious indication that this was not used to generate the movie is that you could use the joystick to move the camera around while the action played, obviously an unnecessary feature for final renders of the movie.

The box was quite impressive. I was told it was 12 PS2's running in parallel, each doing a video-sized piece of the image. There may have been more PS2's coordinating it.

Re:Real time on a PS2

[Emil Brink]

"The box", which is called the GScube by Sony, contained 16 modified PS2 rendering pipelines, and also 16 PS2 Emotion Engine CPUs. It weighs in at a neat 512 MB of video memory. ;^) Since then, Sony has apparantly decided the box was to weak, and upped it to 64 rendering pipes. Yummy. At SIGGRAPH, it was fed data from an SGI Origin 3x00 server. I've read somewhere that the incoming bandwidth into the GScube is somewhere around 2.1 GB/s. Whoo-hoo.

FF Movie = Starcraft?

[DesignMerc]

Looking at the trailer, doesn't it look more appropriate for a Starcraft movie than Final Fantasy? I know the most recent FF iterations (not counting Tactics) have really gotten away from the medieval feel but now it's gone completely sci-fi.

Dammit, I want swords, magic, demons and CG chocobos!

Re:actors on strike? who needs actors?

[skoda]

CGI News Anchors are a reality. Well one is, anyway: Ananova

Neat, but weird.
-----
D. Fischer

Re:QuickTime Rant

[Chemical]

I completely agree. I cannot understand how Quicktime became the standard for Internet video. The software is terribly bloated. The codec is overly proprietary. And you must use Apple's software to view movies, which is only available for Mac and Windows, with apparently no plans for supporting more platforms. The absolute worst part about it is that Nagware viewer. Every time I want to view a QT movie, I gotta see that goddamn nag banner, unless I want to pay to "Upgrade" to QT Pro. The Pro version, by the way, is a total ripoff as it simply adds a few features that Microsoft includes for free in WMP, and it still sucks.

I cannot understand how something as open as the internet has adopted, with wide open arms, something as closed as QT. Maybe one of you could enlighten me because I can't figure it out. Does QT offer better picture quality? Not as far as I can tell. It looks no better than MPEG1. In fact Mpeg movies run significantly smoother on my system. Is the sound quality better? Maybe, but I can't tell. Better compression ratio? Not by a long shot. Divx;) offers nearly DVD quality video, much better video quality than QT, in a much smaller file. RealVideo offers very high compression ratio, and the picture quality is still fairly good. I know RealVideo very proprietary too, but at least their player doesn't constantly nag you to upgrade, supports more than Mac and Windows, and is actually good.

If anyone cares to explain to me how Apple keeps their stronghold over internet video, please feel free. I would really like to know. I pray for the day when webmasters see the errors of their ways and start using Mpeg.

Re:G*%Am$N Quicktime !

[isaac_akira]

Apple would appreciate that if there are more systems available to view content generated by their systems

Cept of course linux is a teeny tiny market. Obviously not having support for linux isn't hurting the use of quicktime, since just about all the videos on major web sites are in quicktime format (as you say you "keep running into stuff [you] can not look at"). These sites would not use it if they were concerned about a significant portion of their users not being able to see it.

Re:And

[talesout]

Wow, one more reason not to vote for the nutbar.

Re:The trailers have been updated

[webrunner]

the A and B trailers (mere half second glimses) are updated regularly. However the 'featured trailer' - the REAL theatric-type trailer - has been up for a while.
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Re:Final Fantasy

[tolldog]

Rendering will never be the next distributed app.

One reason is the fact that companies do not want data files outside of the company. Imagine if you had the Toy Story scene files and all the fun you could have making your own scenes with Woody and company and posting them on the web.

The second main reason is that it takes horsepower, memory and storage to render files. The frame sizes, depending on quality and resolution can result in several MBs. The memory required to make those frames can be on the order of 500 - 1000 MBs. Also, industry standard is an hour a frame for rendering film quality for CG.

Third and the greatest reason is that the renderer is not free. They are either in-house solutions and will never leave the company or they are licensed from whomever makes it to that company.

I have thought about this. I would love for fans to be able to render, heck, it would save us money on machines. Sadly though, I don't ever see it as a posibility.

Re:My hopes

[The Cunctator]

Wow, that's some bad moderation. Who was Carbonite trolling? The large contingent of people who thought Titan AE had a good plot? The movie was pretty, even beautiful, but certainly not well-plotted.

That's probably true today...

[2nd Post!]

Though I certainly can't verify it.

But the problem is that the FFMovie is at least a year, if not more, old. Someone knowledgeable know how long they've been working on it?

I would hazard a guess, that at the time, an Octane would have been the price/performance leader-that, or at least some other non-Linux box.

Think 2 years ago, what was a top of the line system on the Intel world? Probably some sort of P2, 300MHz. An Alpha would have been the preferred render box, perhaps, though at the time SGI was certainly a very popular choice. Jurassic Park, for example. Though I do remember hearing that Linux boxen were used for some movies. Anyone with more information? Maybe I'm misremembering my history.

It may very well be that they switch over *now* to Linux boxen to do their serious number crunching/rendering. Say, beowulf clusters of Athlons in a supercooled and controlled chamber? Regardless, you may be right about Octanes. SGI is not something I know much about.

The nick is a joke! Really!

Re:Will it live up to the games?

[Junks Jerzey]

I hope they concentrate as much on the plot as they do in the RPG's. Sure, I play them for the graphics as well, but the main point to an RPG is to lose yourself in the ever-twisting plots and sub-plots

No offense intended, but the plots in Square games are what you expect from an angst-ridden high school girl. They're so overwrought, so pointedly attempting to be all-encompassing and full of meaning, that they can only be taken seriously by people who haven't done much reading. And then actual gameplay involves pigtailed schoolgirls fighting wiggling, oversized cartoon frogs and foodstuffs, following the all the usual video game cliches (big dumb boss monster every so often, etc.).

Realistically, the Square's plots don't hold much water if you look at them outside the scope of video games.

FF Numbering Scheme Revealed

[_xeno_]

The original skewwed number started when Squaresoft was finally able to create an English localized copy of Final Fantasy IV. They hadn't done so with FF2 and FF3 for a variety of issues (mostly because the NES was nearing the end of it's US life when they were released, if I'm not mistaken). To avoid confusion for the American blokes, FF4 was renumbered FF2 since it was the second American release.

They then started translating, but never released Final Fantasy V (at least the SNES version - more later). They instead moved FFVI over and called it FFIII to again avoid confusion.

As everyone knows, there was a lot of hype about Final Fantasy VII - enough so that it would be more confusing (at least Square's marketing dept. thought so) to renumber it "4" to properly line up with the US releases.

After Final Fantasy became more popular in the US, they decided to release the already-translated FFV in the US. The data-files were already done; they'd already ported the code to the PlayStation for the Japanese re-release of Final Fantasy IV through VI, so they released it under the "new" naming scheme. (They didn't rerelease IV in the US which was annoying, since FF2US is actually FFIVJapan Easy Type version, with a watered down translation.)

It would be nice to see an official translation of the origianl FFII and FFIII, assuming they don't screw it up (since they're away from Nintendo of America's "we're a children's game company" policy, that's more possible). Keep in mind that FFVII was also the first Final Fantasy with a really decent translation.

One of my favorite examples of how Nintendo watered down FF3US is the scene where you meet Cyan behind Zozo or whatever, in the World of Ruin. If you pick up the key he drops, and open the locked chest, in the US version you find a book about machinery. In the Japanese version you find a porno mag. (In both cases, Cyan tries to hide it and blushes :) ) (Keep in mind you can't see the mag, but the text calls it such.)

Another decent example is the "dancer" that runs into Cyan at some point in the game. In the Japan version, she's a hooker.

Hope that gives some people some ideas of just what we in the US have been missing from the FF series.

Celebrities suck

[gad_zuki!]

Gamers in general will be drawn to this, and depending on the marketing campaign curious onlookers too. The CGI is very nice, but I can't stand those damn celebrity voices, I can't stop thinking "James Woods" or whomever. Why is it that once an animated movie reaches a budget over 5 mill suddenly Jewel and Drew Barrymore "star" in it. It really distracts from the story as these people have more or less been typecast in their most popular roles, while real talented voice-only actors go ignored. Smart move Sony.

You didn't get the point

[samael]

At the time, I bumped into an interview with Tarantino. Apparently he'd been near the Gump people at the Oscars and had said "You _were_ kidding, right?" and they'd been delighted that _somebody_ got it.

They _weren't_ being serious. It was a satire of the american dream.
_____

Re:Bad News

[talesout]

That's not a bad idea, although I doubt Taco would allow anything that made that much sense to actually happen. How could he feel morally outraged at people complaining if he actually did something to try and fix things?

Re:Will it live up to the games?

[Junks Jerzey]

I feel compelled to respond, becuase you obviously haven't any Square games other than the Final Fantasies. I'll grant you that the plots are sometimes a bit cookie-cuttered (Final Fantasy 7's extensive backstory is an exception), but what about Square's other main development team, the Chrono/Xenogears people? Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Xenogears are all incredible games with very deep and philosophical plots.

You should think before you make broad assumptions.

I was talking about other Square games, especially Chrono Cross. That game is like a junior high philosophy dicussion gone bad.

Re:Final Fantasy? Neverending Story?

[Valdrax]

At the time the first Final Fantasy game was released, it was an all-or-nothing prospect for the fledgling game giant SquareSoft. If Final Fantasy didn't make it, they would've been dead in the water. So, for Square, it very well could've been a "Final" Fantasy.

Fortunately, Final Fantasy did well and so did it's 8 sequels and spin-off games, and so did Square's other games, such as the Seiken Densetsu series. After Final Fantasy II, why change the name of a best-selling series?

(As an aside, Neverending Story Part Two makes a lot of sense if you think in terms of chapters.)