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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.
So needless to say I'm really concerned to hear that FFX has a ton of summoning. Has anyone played the import and can speak to this?
-- q
Man, this just seems like the ultimate geek week. First FFX, then LotR.
Yes, my girlfriend is a BitchX
Not being a fan of the games, I didn't expect much of "The Spirits Within", boy was I wrong. The animation was nothing short of breathtaking and I was actually surprised by the unpredictability of the plot. In short, the movie far outshined my expectations and I eagerly awaited a sequel.
Now I have to explain to everyone I told about this movie (who were also equally impressed by it) that there won't be a sequel. This is really a shame - we can wipe Circuit City out of I-Openers, but we couldn't make movies such as Final Fantasy profitable for the studio.
---
Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
I don't know why video game companies think they can go off and make a movie becuase they produced some cut scenes for their last title, in the same way I don't know why Hollywood thinks they can produce video games. These two things, despite sharing characteristics such as motion and sound are completely different.
Why video game companies are willing to risk large sums on a traditionally low yield business (movie making) when their own video game market is already larger than the revenue stream for movies.
The Final Fantasy movie was pretty bad. It had great hair and lighting effects, true, but who gives a rats ass when the story lopes along and the characters are 2 dimensional and sterile. Hollywood is already very good at delivering this type of garbage, I wouldn't recommend trying to compete.
FF7/8 both had disappointing performance on the PC. In addition, it was very much a console game, rather then a computer game (interface requierments etc), so I foudn 7 hard to control and use. 7 was also extremly slow on even the most modern of machines.
AFAIK, there is no plans for FFX to be ported to PC. In addition, it was rumoured that FFXI (online) was going to be multiplatform, but that appears to have been dropped (perhaps due to the fact that Sony now owns a large chunk of Square).
I wonder why they want us away from the computers?
So they can sneak in and install Magic Latern, of course!
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Any self-respecting geek would have bought his/her LOTR tickets long ago, and thus would not have to wait in line.
Helloooooooo brain..... FF the movie was a huge bomb, and lost 115 million dollars. Dropping the whole shebang only makes financial sense.
CmdrTaco's life consists of playing video games, watching movies (mostly Anime), and criss-crossing the country going to all the conventions/shows. Does he even have a real job anymore?
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Free version is up today.
Just go to http://ps2.ign.com and click on the link on the front page.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
When I'm sitting in front of my monitor, with the notebook sitting on the MIDI keyboard for irc, while watching a DivX of LotR and playing FFX via a TV card on my PS2, and waiting for email about the latest kernel release, how will I be away from my computer? ;-)
(Oh yeah, and just kidding about the DivX thing. Honest! ;-))
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
i actually did buy my tickets about a week and a half ago (dork alert). i'll have to wait in line again unless i want to sit in the back corners next to the speakers, or in the front row with my neck craning up to see the screen.
oh, and yes i am a geek (obviously), but self-respecting? that's pushing it.
-sam
burn the computers. go back to the abacus.
THE SPIRITS WITHIN
h tm
As of 8/9/01
Gross-to-Date: $31,711,932
Production Budget: $115 million
Source:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/data/finalfantasy.
I'll find out tonight if I get to go to a preview showing of LotR on Tuesday at 7pm in the biggest commercial theater in DC (the Uptown). I'm now possibly gloating at all of you.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
You guys ARE NOT monitoring slashdot 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!!
I want my money back!!!
It goes without saying that the release of both Lord of the Rings *and* Final Fantasy 10 during most college final weeks is a plot to undermine the youth of america. Oh well, I was destined to fail the finals anyways.
. . .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
Of course the difference being that Waterworld was so expensive because their first set actually *sunk*. I'm not sure why FF cost so much money. Rendering farms? R&D?
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.
... it came from here.
r acter=8
http://www.3dshop.com/cgi-bin/Gallery/gallery?Cha
- sigs are for wimps.
Why on earth would I want to go to a crowded theater full of screaming fans on the first day, when I can wait a bit and see it in quiet and soak up the atmosphere?
> Wasn't this iteration of FF supposed to require the hard drive addon? Or was that FFXI? Anyone know?
Nope, there's no need for a hard drive in this one, plus the load times are very quick (specially switching between gameplay and CGI).
If there's a hard drive requirement, it would probably be for FFXI.
- sigs are for wimps.
heh, that's exactly right. If I don't use, I'll lose it, so there's no time like the present. Luckily it happens to coincide with one of my favorite RPG series, as well as some movie everyone's been clamoring about.
Yes, Virginia, there really is a CowboyNeal.
before the movie was even released SS annouced they has DRASTICALLY underestimated the work involved and WOULD NOT be making another movie. While the animation was awesome the movie was just ok im my opinion.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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.
Everything I have read so far has led me to believe that this will just be another god damn summonfest like FF8, that was the best thing about FF9 was it wasn't summon oriented like FF8. Once you got the right gaurdian forces there was no point in really playing the game anymore, it was just "IFRIN I CHOOSE YOU!", I think I'll sit FFX out and play some more final fantasy tactics and chrono trigger. The greats never die :)
that's why they're called video games and not "intellectual stimulation for the masses"
Hmmm, you need to watch the movie again but you obviously didn't get it the first time. Aki is the first "spirit". The eight spirit was the one created by Gaia and the alien ghosts interacting. It wasn't until they found and incorporated this eight spirit that they could win.
This is the whole problem with the movie. FF has always had weird incomprehensible but involving plots. They unfold and surround you so you, in general, don't realize how stupid they are by the time its all over. The movie didn't do that. It didn't have time like a 40 hour game does.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
I wonder anyone would read this by now, well, who care. :)
:) but think about it, this movie can well be feature by 'real' actors/resses, I don't see FF movie has taken any advantage of the fantasy atmosphere created by orignal FF games.
:)
FF movie costs ~10M, only boxed ~5M - defintely not a glory history. The production firm shall take consequence of failure...
IMHO the failure of this movie is that it strays away from the major theme of FF too much. FF game series is sucessfully in bringing people to a whole new world of fantasy.
FF movie is too realistic - it's like "Alien" movies series with 3D render. No I didn't mean I see aliens in real life.
Well, my point so obvious to all FF fans. To layman like my girlfriend, she simply wonder why they don't use real people in the movie. 'nugh say.
At the toy'r'us they had it on the ps/2. I noticed that everyone had gathered around it and were ignoring the Xbox and nintendo. They had FF demo playing. The cinematics were unbelivable, best I've seen on a PS/2. The gameplay looked pretty sweet as well. Of course it was on one of those flat screen displays which didn't hurt the sharpness.....
As people said, it was not very FF-ish.
It wasn't even really a decent sci-fi movie.
They failed to explain a lot of things except
the whole crazy philosophy of it all.
Really, I feel this game was _most_ similar to FF7 with the whole nonsense about how people's spirits are really part of the planet, and that they must return to the planet's main spirit for the planet to survive and grow. The concept was, IMO, executed
rather poorly in the movie.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
You're pretty much alone in that opinion. It wasn't SF, it was cornball fantasy dressed up as SF.
Maybe people just aren't ready for animation that approaches (but not yet reaches) photographic quality.
I disagree. Me and most of my friends liked the work on FF, even though the characters were wooden (or rather, plastic). But it wasn't enough to carry the movie. IMHO shrek was the best CGI movie I've seen yet (Yes I have seen mosters Inc.)
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog