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More Final Fantasy Bits
tenchiken writes: "First the bad news, Square has announced that they are selling off Square Studios. This is the group that was responsible for the FF Movie and also a forthcoming short for The Matrix.
Better News. Final Fantasy X, the first FF for the new PS2, is shipping tommorow (in stores Wed). You can find reviews at GameSpot,Gamers, IGN, etc. The reviews are all positive, and I will be waiting in line on Wed morning to pick up my copy.
Square's new online game for the PS2 FF11 is also coming along nicely. Playonline Has a 'webcam' up feeding 24x7 images. The pictures look great. The above pages are Japanese."
CowboyNeal and I both have our copies of FFX on reserve and are planning on some time
off to watch LotR and play FFX this week.
I'm assuming FF (the movie) will make stupid amounts of money (counting video and spin off products). Why sell off the unit that helped make that a reality, given that a sequel would probably make a pile of cash too? What's the logic there? Helloooooooo brain..... It would be disappointing to think that a wonderful character like Dr. Ross, so capably brought to life in the movie, may not make it back to the big screen. Frankly, the FF characters were more interesting than a lot of the drek Hollywood plants in front of us the rest of the time.....
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I hope this happens to more cgi movies, since studios are forgetting that movies TELL A STORY! The story in FF just plain sucked. Remember how great Star Wars was, even though Chewbacca looked like a Chuck E Cheese reject? And remember how good Jar Jar looked, and yet Phantom Menace paled in comparison to Star Wars. It's all about the story. Actors, effects, style - they're nothing without a solid storyline.
. . .look forward to new features from Square Studios from whatever studio buys them. And I'm sure they will be bought.
I view "The Spirits Within" more as another stepping-stone than the culmination of CG. I start to drool when I think of what an innovative, risk-taking studio like Miramax could do with the tools provided by Square Studios.
Now that a lot of the development is done and the tools have been created, directors can finally tell their stories exactly as they imagined them.
This is exciting.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
I very thoroughly enjoyed it, and bought the DVD (my first DVD, at that). The animation was superb, and the story was decent too. Certainly better that the majority of SF movies. Sure the characters were cut from card stock, but again, they were at least as good as the characters in the majority of movies SF, animated, or otherwise.
Did people not like the movie because of the theological/spiritual concepts involved? That's what a couple of people have told me.
Maybe people just aren't ready for animation that approaches (but not yet reaches) photographic quality. Seeing such life-like images but knowing that were not actual people may have made a lot of people uncomfortable. I know that I've at least seen a few invectives against "digital actors".
For the record I have never played any FF games, but I am an animation fan, and I am also a pagan, so the whole "Gaia" concept was quite familiar and comfortable for me.
They didn't give Aki "another" eighth spirit. It was there all along, from the very beginning of the movie, which is why she was having the dreams in the first place. The phantom spirit within her had already been transformed and was trying to communicate with her through her dreams so that she would know what the phantoms were. The only reason the "spirit within" her was never discovered until the end is because the scanners were never turned on her. She was always the one operating the scanners, and she always had them turned away from herself. At the end of the movie, she was down in the crater when Dr. Sid scanned the area, and so the phantom spirit inside her was finally detected.
And I guess the movie could be considered "preachy" but then that's a very relative idea. If you're not a Christian, then the "Omen" movies are preachy. Heck, even "Spawn" is preachy. It does, after all, presuppose that Christian myth is true.
And as for "Aliens", it was a decent movie, but really it's just a decent shoot-em-up movie. It's not lame, but it's also not exactly what I'd call intellectually challenging.
Oh well. I guess it really was a case of a movie being marketed to an audience that expected and wanted something completely different.
Hello all.
As someone who has played through and beaten multiples times (for different endings, and to get items and secrets I missed the first time around, or to play with different characters) all of the Final Fantasy games starting with the original NES one up to FFVII on the PS (at which point I stopped), I have a few words. My comments will probably be unpopular and modded down, but be that as it may, what I have to say needs to be said.
In short, these games are not intellectually stimulating or satisfying, and most-certainly not for intelligent people. Regular enemies are too easy to defeat and when you do unfortunately sometimes suffer heavy damages, it is all too easy to heal. Beating any boss usually only involves casting your most powerful attack and heal spells over and over again, and using a magic-replenishing item when you've run out. Every now and then you get a boss or enemy that maybe only a certain kind of magic works well on, or you can only attack a certain part of the enemy, but you can discover this information very quickly and easily and then go back to the usual spell-casting and healing routine until it dies.
The stories are also pretty weak, compared to something like Lord of the Rings! I feel I need not even defend my position on this issue!
After buying and beating tons of these games, I finally came to the realization that they are a complete waste of time and money. Well, unless you actual are dumb enough to find these games challenging. (Well, Final Fantasy 1 on the NES was pretty challenging if you didn't spend lots of time with mindless level-upping but instead only fought enemies you met naturally in achieving your objectives. But newer Final Fantasy's balance things much better so that your levels progress at a decent rate in the natural course of play.]
Read real fantasy fiction if you want a great story, like Lord of the Rings! If you want combat with real tactics, I can at least say that StarCraft against an intelligent human involves a great deal of intelligence and tactical thinking to win, not just mindless level-building, spell-casting, and healing. (The regular campaigns are pretty weak and easy, however, and the story is also really lame. So again, read books if you want a real story.