I liked it at the time but I have never played a ff game and I think part of the problem was people expecting ff7 the movie or something. I think if it was just called something like Gaia it might have not pissed off those people.
this, people were expecting ff6/7/8 the movie. instead they got kino and rejected it.
>Why did it fail?
Early "realistic" CGI didn't impress the audience. That and with such technology old school Hollywood couldn't make heads or tails of it. So much so that Tom Hanks spoke out against the movie, in fear of replacing real actors (which was hilarious since he did Polar Express a few years later). But since the movie bombed so hard, and Squaresoft going bankrupt, they sold the CGI tech to James Cameron and used it to make Avatar, while Square merged with Enix only to see every FF game past FFX suck horribly.
Other reasons:
It was a Non-FF in the FF franchise. No 'high fantasy', big swords, insane magic spells.
Trademark FF icons were not that prominent either. Like maybe see a Chocobo (a'la Lacoste) logo on shirt, but no Chocobos in actual form. As if FF was nothing more than an Easter Egg to it's own film, weird.
No deep villain arch, just one sided "grr gotta kill the ghost-aliens even if it means killing the Earth".... Instead of "Golbez is your brother!" arch.
>Trademark FF icons were not that prominent either
they had a Sid and that's more FF than a fricking chocobo could ever hope to be.
No the issue is the movie was bland and boring.
A boring movie might have been more successful if it had elements to appeal to the Final Fantasy fanbase. But since it didn't, you're left with a drab CG movie with nothing much going for it. >they had a Sid and that's more FF than a fricking chocobo could ever hope to be.
Frick all that. Start with fundamentals: color palette. Every single Final Fantasy game is full of vibrant colors. The movie is all drab grays and browns.
>I like the soldier's suits.
So did the concept artists for Mass Effect, which pulled the Earth's military & omni-tool aesthetic from The Spirits Within.
>Its like you never saw the World of Ruin
It's like you're colorblind. Character sprites don't change, for example. None of the interiors do either. and also stupid, as if you're unable to tell the difference between half the game using a dreary color palette and the whole thing.
The game perfectly illustrates what that movie was going for. The world gets fricked and turns drab and dreary. The movie does the same thing. A post apocalyptic world destroyed by spirit sucking alien ghosts
Its not suppose to look colorful and bright. Its suppose to be depressing as frick
6 months ago
Anonymous
Without contrast it just looks like they did a bad job.
6 months ago
Anonymous
it's literally Earth, they don't need to show the contrast. just use any image in your memory of present-day nature and you'll see the contrast.
6 months ago
Anonymous
It’s literally a movie, a CGI one at that. The drab gray/brown thing had been done to death in video games already and the movie just looked like more of that.
>The movie is all drab grays and browns.
I think that's a deliberate choice to distance themselves from the Pixar movies. also it visually tells the message that the situation is so dire that finding a single surviving green plant outside the dome is extraordinary. few post-apo movies go this far.
>I think that's a deliberate choice to distance themselves from the Pixar movies
Deliberate or not, it gives the wrong impression to brand fans. Instead of Star Wars at the very least, which always had some influence on Final Fantasy, the movie vibe is 'Alien.'
that's precisely the point. Sakaguchi did a hard SF film on purpose, so that it would be complementary to the games. another vision of the same themes on a completely different medium, instead of just more of the same. "MUH brand icons" like chocobos are only required by midwits who are too dumb to recognise these themes in a fricking anthology series. the Japs are much less attached to details in general, this is why they love spin-offs.
late 1990s science-fantasy FF was already very far away from original pure-high-fantasy early FF (but how could Americans know?). making a pure sci-fi FF installment was the logical conclusion.
6 months ago
Anonymous
The US audience were mostly familiar with FF7 so making a movie that had ZERO to do with it was the wrong move.
6 months ago
Anonymous
yeah but ff7 was a scifi ff so it makes sense that spirits within followed suit
As a fan that's pretty much it. Went in expecting something akin to my favourite game. Got a weird sci fi film with Joe Pantoliano or Steve Buscemi. One of them, can't remrmber fully.
Stupid & asiaticified main char. Same as everyhing else chinese, rip off superior stuff and shit it with ascociation with moronation in a bid to claim it.
The planet is haunted by alien ghosts, and a scientist lady and her soldier ex boyfriend have to save the world by holding a planetary exorcism before the planet is nuked by a General gone mad from the sheer horror of their intangible enemy.
They have to find ghosts that have codes that will stop an imminent disaster or something. I can't quite remember, I haven't seen this since it was in theaters.
Asteroid crashes against Earth decades early. It brought with it a plague of alien ghosts. The survivors retreated behind domed cities powered by biobatteries. Biobatteries are used for all their technology and allows them to temporarilly kill ghost. All ghost killed spawn again at the asteroid, if I remember correctly. Science protagonist is searching for specific biosignatures that when combined would allow them to nullified ghost ones, deleting them. She also had an accident at a lab that almost killed her and contaminated her soul, so not only is one of the biosignatures, but she has recurring dreams of what happened at the alien world (it blew up). Meanwhile there's a debate about using space megalazer Zeus that could in theory destroy the asteroid but main scientist and mentor of the protag fears it could damage Gaia, Earth's spirit, which is controversial (he's correct).
Rest of the movie is about finding biosignatures, while big bad crazy general keeps pushing for firing the megalazer. He remembers when his home city wall failed and that's why he wants to use the megalazer now. Eventually, he decides to temporarily sabotage a small portion of the local city's wall and send in a containment team. This would make him appears like a hero while pushing for his megalazer solution. Inevitably, he fricks up and gets the entire city killed by ghost, and a good portion of the main cast.
Protagonist find out where the last ghost is, near the asteroid. Big Bad general is about to kill himself before deciding to continue with the megalazer thing, and finally gets the approval. Big Bad general fires the megalazer again and again while the protagonist and boyfriend desperately try to find the ghost. Big Bad general fires the megalazer so many times it blows up on his face. Boyfriend sacrifices himself while protagonist finnishes the biosignature eliminating the alien threat and liberating them of their pain while saving Gaia.
It was long, boring, and very forgettable. The only two things from the movie I can remember was the scene where the GDI Ion Cannon knock-off gets fired multiple times in a row, and that the monsters were angry ghosts of another planet that exploded.
Early "realistic" CGI didn't impress the audience. That and with such technology old school Hollywood couldn't make heads or tails of it. So much so that Tom Hanks spoke out against the movie, in fear of replacing real actors (which was hilarious since he did Polar Express a few years later). But since the movie bombed so hard, and Squaresoft going bankrupt, they sold the CGI tech to James Cameron and used it to make Avatar, while Square merged with Enix only to see every FF game past FFX suck horribly.
Other reasons:
It was a Non-FF in the FF franchise. No 'high fantasy', big swords, insane magic spells.
Trademark FF icons were not that prominent either. Like maybe see a Chocobo (a'la Lacoste) logo on shirt, but no Chocobos in actual form. As if FF was nothing more than an Easter Egg to it's own film, weird.
No deep villain arch, just one sided "grr gotta kill the ghost-aliens even if it means killing the Earth".... Instead of "Golbez is your brother!" arch.
>written and directed by FF's creator and main writer and director >produced in-house by FF's studio >the great majority of Americans only had ever played Final Fantasy VII (seven (7)) >NOOOOOOO THIS IS NOT FINAL FANTASY!!! >LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT YOUR FRANCHISE!!!
Are you fricking moronic on purpose? There was no FF property like the movie even in Japan. Second, what fricking idiot markets to an audience without considering their expectations.
How about it the Creator of FF came out with a new game called FF the Squeaquel, and it just turned out to be a 240p snuff film of Black folk fricking your mom. Would you be such a smart ass then? You stupid b***h. You dumb mother fricker
>I'm too dumb to see the connections so that means there is none >sudden unrelated rant mentioning interracial sex for no reason
typical off-the-book Amerimutt reply.
their only mistake was their own technical autism that pushed them to spend way too much on it without relinquishing anything on their artistic vision.
in other words, it failed because it wasn't slop.
For the same reason as this. Barely has anything to do with the source material and the story/characters are very weak.
see
>written and directed by FF's creator and main writer and director >produced in-house by FF's studio >the great majority of Americans only had ever played Final Fantasy VII (seven (7)) >NOOOOOOO THIS IS NOT FINAL FANTASY!!! >LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT YOUR FRANCHISE!!!
This is a prove why videogames are shit and a overrated hobby. Kojimdrones can't accept his favorite hack never made a good game and the story is shit, if he could make a movie in the 90', he would be well-known like a bad director. Nintendo knows that and this is the reason why every game they sold is about gameplay and not a rip off a McCarthy book.
>Barely has anything to do with the source material a
Final fantasy has its own universe for most games. Spirits within has all the underlying references to final fantasy things
linkin park ripped off gundam. also spirits within started production in 97, a year after the band formed and two years before they even used the name linkin park.
branding trap and a lost bet.
the movie was released in the middle of the Lord of the Rings frenzy. they absolutely feared to be compared to LOTR in the "fantasy" sector. since FF was as much sci-fi as fantasy at the time they preferred to go full SF and avoid the competition. but they still required to put the name "Final Fantasy" on the movie to attract the fans.
it was a quandary. they made the bet that people liked the SF part of FF enough to overlook the ambiguity of the name and they lost.
>the movie was released in the middle of the Lord of the Rings frenzy
actually the matrix, and iirc it did get some unfair comparisons to that at the time of its release.
because it was a movie that literally catered to no one. it didn't look anything like the games and used next to zero game material, and normies had never heard of Final Fantasy before and had zero interest in a cgi movie NOT aimed at kids, and not made by pixar/dreamworks. Shit plot with clunky writing and boring action scenes was the icing on the diarrhea cake.
>Why did it fail?
Square knew frick-all about making a movie. Idiots opened a studio in Hawaii and didn't qualify for the state's generous tax breaks for film productions. Why didn't they qualify? Because they didn't hire enough locals. Just had to get some Hawaiians to be janitors at the office and they would've met the low, low threshold for the tax break. What'd they do instead? Import Japanese janitors.
if anyone in this thread is interested I got the premium edition dvd that has tons of "making of" and bonus and deleted scenes, I promise you guys I’ll dump the iso and upload it here, just search on Cinemaphile archive for "final fantasy" this month.
I want to take Sakaguchi's consciousness as he exists today and trasport it back to the day he started production on spirits within and then trap him in a groundhogday-esque timeloop running to the day it ends its theatrical run and continue to loop him until it becomes the highest grossing movie of all time (I guess in 2001 that would mean beating titanic). I wonder how many centuries he'd be stuck in that loop, how many runs would end in suicide or freak death, or the movie just never getting released. Maybe give him a scoreboard at the end of each run tracking how close he was to beating titanic.
>it had nothing to do with final fantasy >the cgi was still too awkward at the time >the story was pretty wonky
personally i appreciated the innovation and what this film was trying to do and i enjoyed it alot at the time
but it's failure is generally why we have no serious animation movies still, just pixar and disney crap
Maybe you should ask the director who knows far more about Final Fantasy than you since he created the damn franchise. And none of the final fantasies have anything to do with each other.
don't be moronic. of course direct sequels and spinoffs connect to each other. but FFX and FFXI are not related.
correct. 8 is the best in the series
9>8
Every movie with CGI was being compared to the matrix in 2001.
well no, moron, that wasn't the point i was making. and you're wrong btw, stop pretending you were there. any film at the time with martial arts or sci-fi shit like mechs/power armor or floating ships was given an unfair matrix comparison. in fact i remember a review for crouching tiger hidden dragon reading "it's like star wars meets the matrix".
i'm actually not the anon who initially said that, but you're the moron who felt the need to nitpick silly shit like a redditor would. the fact still remains that each new marked entry is its own canon.
i remember all the FF fandom hyping it up, then it came out and heard it was garbage from tv critics. might get around to watching it now but it doesnt look at all like Final fantasy from the trailer
>i remember all the FF fandom hyping it up
Because they were expecting Final Fantasy the film but got bootleg Starship Troopers with a haunted planet subplot
By that point, I had already gotten tired of the sci-fi direction FF was going in. IX was a great call back to the series' roots, but FFX looked almost like VIII and I remember not liking it as much as IX. Just not a fan of the sci-fi FF games and the movie was more of that. That's just me, though.
can you fricking read? I said "ALL" characters should carry guns.
6 months ago
Anonymous
yeah and it was a moronic question
6 months ago
Anonymous
>no argument
your concession is accepted.
6 months ago
Anonymous
The series had always been steeped in the mythical, medieval sword and sorcery aesthetic. With FF7 they went for a more-or-less contemporay scenario (with caveats, it's all over the place really) while still preserving many of the fantasy tropes of former titles. Having a swordsman fight against gun-wielding soldiers is not realistic, just as moogles and dragons and magic crystals are not realistic. Which, you know, who cares.
6 months ago
Anonymous
Why would all the characters in a Final Fantasy game use the same class of weapon?
Zoomers don't realize just how ground breaking this was. This level of 3d graphics was pretty mind blowing at the time. Disappointing it wasn't an ff7 movie, but I still really liked it.
That's the greatest crime that they poured all that money into new SFX and CGI and flopped because instead of using it on a new idea that could have reached a wider audience it was hamstring by being part of a big bait and switch niche movie.
Square’s strength was delivering climatic and technologically impressive cgi scenes. The parts between them being walls of text (that progressed as fast as you could read) and jrpg grinding meant there was no pressure on artists to make those scenes interesting. When they tried to make an entire movie they expected the “impressiveness” of the CGI to carry otherwise boring scenes, it didn’t.
The same reason spirits within failed are all over FFX as well, as being unable to skip the atrocious voice acting made the story scenes the consistent low point of that game.
Absolutely nothing to do with any FF setting before and since.
Token mention of series staples like Espers/Summons/GF, moogles.
Shitty voice acting.
Barrett but a slim white guy with Alec Baldwin's unintimidating voice.
Plain jane girl hyped up as the next sex symbol.
And so on.
The point is Spirits Within was the culmination of Square's attempt to reclassify FF as a modern sci-fi series. FF7 was a big success, FF8 flopped but it was too late to put the brakes on the movie by then.
At the very least, you had recurring races throughout the series. Spirit Within was just a bunch of bland humans. Maybe the series didn't have a variety of playable char races, but it certainly spent time build their worlds.
FF7 won the console wars single-handedly. Yet, Spirits Within didn't borrow anything from it. Who was that movie even for if not for American audiences wanting more FF7?
Came out after FFVII and it wasn't Advent Children. Which is what people actually wanted. Would have been a success if they made a sequel to FFVIII instead.
... yeah most people were pissed off about FF8 and its utter fricking disaster of a final act. >oh shit we actually all have amnesia of the exact same memores >oh frick we all went to the same orphanage >oh shit this means... uh >OH NO SOMEONE IS ATTACKING FROM THE FUTURE WHO'S NEVER BEEN MENTIONED BEFORE
"time loops" are fine until they come out of nowhere for no reason other than to rush the conclusion.
the theory that sorceresses inherited memories of previous sorceresses, that rinoa was one, and utlimecia's goal was to "make the moment last forever" would've worked, but that didn't make it into the final product.
I just remember it being very boring
You can't introduce a whole new universe in a film of weird alien ghosts and have most of it done through cgi people talking to each other to explain it
That's all it really is just talking
>so… just like Final Fantasy then?
Final fantasy is talking with loads of action and fighting thoughbeit
If we compare what people had with with FF7 to spirits within you can't really disagree. I think it was ahead of its time with the cgi and digital actors but watching them just speak exposition was boring
There wasn't enough fantasy in the final fantasy
Was hard sci-fi. If you stuck in some big swords and some monsters it unironically would've gone down fine
My theater had quite a few people in it. It just wasn’t a good story. The characters and animation had an effect though. The magazines were filled with that chick and FF games had no issues being marketed on tv
I think this movie created the hologram UIs that were then ripped off in Avatar, then in Marvel and now in every SF slop.
still the UI looks way better in the original than in any of the rip-offs.
with those and the UI in Avalon, the Japs had fantastic UI concepts and yet 20 years later we still have nothing that comes close IRL. we were robbed.
>had fantastic UI concepts and yet 20 years later we still have nothing
UI has gone backwards at an alarming rate.I blame the drooling phone gazing masses. Instead of words we now have nondescript pictures for fricking everything. Hate this gay planet
I still don't know why these fricking morons decided to make an all CGI animated Final Fantasy movie and not adapt FF7 which is the game that put the franchise on the international map in the first place and one of the most important games of all time?!?FACT!!!
It had nothing to do with any of the established tropes of Final Fantasy in the slightest. Even across all the unrelated games that existed at the time there were still certain things that tied them all together. It shared none of that. Also it was kinda gay.
>most important reason
The name. >other contributing factors
Story requires triple digit IQ to comprehend (identity of the final spirit is only implied).
Critics mindlessly repeating the "uncanny valley" myth.
FF:TSW is the second most underrated movie behind Freddy Got Fingered.
>haha hey anon, you're cute. So tell me about yourself >what are your thoughts on this Final Fantasy film? Please, answer correctly. You *will* be unmatched!
normies don't care for hard scifi.
>Cartoon, but not marketed to kids
Hmm, a mystery for the ages, to be sure.
I liked it at the time but I have never played a ff game and I think part of the problem was people expecting ff7 the movie or something. I think if it was just called something like Gaia it might have not pissed off those people.
this, people were expecting ff6/7/8 the movie. instead they got kino and rejected it.
>Trademark FF icons were not that prominent either
they had a Sid and that's more FF than a fricking chocobo could ever hope to be.
No the issue is the movie was bland and boring.
A boring movie might have been more successful if it had elements to appeal to the Final Fantasy fanbase. But since it didn't, you're left with a drab CG movie with nothing much going for it.
>they had a Sid and that's more FF than a fricking chocobo could ever hope to be.
Frick all that. Start with fundamentals: color palette. Every single Final Fantasy game is full of vibrant colors. The movie is all drab grays and browns.
I like the soldier's suits.
>I like the soldier's suits.
So did the concept artists for Mass Effect, which pulled the Earth's military & omni-tool aesthetic from The Spirits Within.
>The movie is all drab grays and browns
Its like you never saw the World of Ruin
>Its like you never saw the World of Ruin
It's like you're colorblind. Character sprites don't change, for example. None of the interiors do either.
and also stupid, as if you're unable to tell the difference between half the game using a dreary color palette and the whole thing.
The game perfectly illustrates what that movie was going for. The world gets fricked and turns drab and dreary. The movie does the same thing. A post apocalyptic world destroyed by spirit sucking alien ghosts
Its not suppose to look colorful and bright. Its suppose to be depressing as frick
Without contrast it just looks like they did a bad job.
it's literally Earth, they don't need to show the contrast. just use any image in your memory of present-day nature and you'll see the contrast.
It’s literally a movie, a CGI one at that. The drab gray/brown thing had been done to death in video games already and the movie just looked like more of that.
Terra’s supposed to have blonde hair. They made it green due to the limitations of the SNES. Same reason why Link had pink hair in ALTTP.
Then explain Celes having blonde hair you fricking double stuffed crust cheesey bread baboon.
>Then explain Celes having blonde hair
And Edgar, Sabin, Relm, Daryl...
In reality, the concept art wasn't the final product.
They didn’t want players to confuse the two. They’d look too similar so Terra’s hair was changed to green to differentiate the two.
>The movie is all drab grays and browns.
I think that's a deliberate choice to distance themselves from the Pixar movies. also it visually tells the message that the situation is so dire that finding a single surviving green plant outside the dome is extraordinary. few post-apo movies go this far.
>I think that's a deliberate choice to distance themselves from the Pixar movies
Deliberate or not, it gives the wrong impression to brand fans. Instead of Star Wars at the very least, which always had some influence on Final Fantasy, the movie vibe is 'Alien.'
that's precisely the point. Sakaguchi did a hard SF film on purpose, so that it would be complementary to the games. another vision of the same themes on a completely different medium, instead of just more of the same. "MUH brand icons" like chocobos are only required by midwits who are too dumb to recognise these themes in a fricking anthology series. the Japs are much less attached to details in general, this is why they love spin-offs.
late 1990s science-fantasy FF was already very far away from original pure-high-fantasy early FF (but how could Americans know?). making a pure sci-fi FF installment was the logical conclusion.
The US audience were mostly familiar with FF7 so making a movie that had ZERO to do with it was the wrong move.
yeah but ff7 was a scifi ff so it makes sense that spirits within followed suit
FF7 wasn’t hard sci fi though.
>Every single Final Fantasy game is full of vibrant colors
It's always looked washed out to me.
As a fan that's pretty much it. Went in expecting something akin to my favourite game. Got a weird sci fi film with Joe Pantoliano or Steve Buscemi. One of them, can't remrmber fully.
Stupid & asiaticified main char. Same as everyhing else chinese, rip off superior stuff and shit it with ascociation with moronation in a bid to claim it.
Bunch of whiny babies didn't like the name. It was a fun movie with cool designs and atmosphere. Very entertaining and looked great.
>fantasy
>bunch of cyberpunk robonazis with guns
hmmmmm
there's still materia and it has ghosts, that counts as fantasy.
It was unironically ahead of it's time. I wish Square or someone would revisit the whole concept of "Digital actors" now in the age of AI.
And VTubers too being so big. You see them doing ads for shit now, soon it will be movies
I dare you to explain the plot without looking it up.
That's why.
The planet is haunted by alien ghosts, and a scientist lady and her soldier ex boyfriend have to save the world by holding a planetary exorcism before the planet is nuked by a General gone mad from the sheer horror of their intangible enemy.
They have to find ghosts that have codes that will stop an imminent disaster or something. I can't quite remember, I haven't seen this since it was in theaters.
are you kidding? the plot is more coherent and much better explained than 95% of Hollywood sci-fi movies.
anyone who saw it in theaters fell asleep though.
Can confirm, it's one of the only two movies that made me fall asleep in the theatre, the other being Attack of the Clones.
Asteroid crashes against Earth decades early. It brought with it a plague of alien ghosts. The survivors retreated behind domed cities powered by biobatteries. Biobatteries are used for all their technology and allows them to temporarilly kill ghost. All ghost killed spawn again at the asteroid, if I remember correctly. Science protagonist is searching for specific biosignatures that when combined would allow them to nullified ghost ones, deleting them. She also had an accident at a lab that almost killed her and contaminated her soul, so not only is one of the biosignatures, but she has recurring dreams of what happened at the alien world (it blew up). Meanwhile there's a debate about using space megalazer Zeus that could in theory destroy the asteroid but main scientist and mentor of the protag fears it could damage Gaia, Earth's spirit, which is controversial (he's correct).
Rest of the movie is about finding biosignatures, while big bad crazy general keeps pushing for firing the megalazer. He remembers when his home city wall failed and that's why he wants to use the megalazer now. Eventually, he decides to temporarily sabotage a small portion of the local city's wall and send in a containment team. This would make him appears like a hero while pushing for his megalazer solution. Inevitably, he fricks up and gets the entire city killed by ghost, and a good portion of the main cast.
Protagonist find out where the last ghost is, near the asteroid. Big Bad general is about to kill himself before deciding to continue with the megalazer thing, and finally gets the approval. Big Bad general fires the megalazer again and again while the protagonist and boyfriend desperately try to find the ghost. Big Bad general fires the megalazer so many times it blows up on his face. Boyfriend sacrifices himself while protagonist finnishes the biosignature eliminating the alien threat and liberating them of their pain while saving Gaia.
The end.
t. looked up the plot
Nope. I'm just quite good about remembering scifi films and I watched two or three times.
That's very Death Stranding.
A post apocalyptic earth is being assaulted by alien ghosts and a scientist and her military escorts are looking for a way to stop it
See, not that hard
eco nonsense instead of cool magic and giant monsters with swords and hot girls was an odd choice.
Make a generic space movie
Slap Final Fantasy on the front
Add a few allusion to basic FF tropes in post
Call it a done deal
This movie was better than Advent Children. I hate all the FF7 circle jerking.
This. The Final Fantasy movies that were like the dumbass games sucked dick.
It was long, boring, and very forgettable. The only two things from the movie I can remember was the scene where the GDI Ion Cannon knock-off gets fired multiple times in a row, and that the monsters were angry ghosts of another planet that exploded.
>tanks your company
>Why did it fail?
Early "realistic" CGI didn't impress the audience. That and with such technology old school Hollywood couldn't make heads or tails of it. So much so that Tom Hanks spoke out against the movie, in fear of replacing real actors (which was hilarious since he did Polar Express a few years later). But since the movie bombed so hard, and Squaresoft going bankrupt, they sold the CGI tech to James Cameron and used it to make Avatar, while Square merged with Enix only to see every FF game past FFX suck horribly.
Other reasons:
It was a Non-FF in the FF franchise. No 'high fantasy', big swords, insane magic spells.
Trademark FF icons were not that prominent either. Like maybe see a Chocobo (a'la Lacoste) logo on shirt, but no Chocobos in actual form. As if FF was nothing more than an Easter Egg to it's own film, weird.
No deep villain arch, just one sided "grr gotta kill the ghost-aliens even if it means killing the Earth".... Instead of "Golbez is your brother!" arch.
>that bikini pic
I came BUCKETS to her when I was a teenager. BUCKETS
>high-def render release never ever
Funny thing is that there's an official 4k release of the movie.
didn't have anything to do with the games. to this day I have no idea who the target audience was.
Name wasn't related to games, bland acting and actors plus added uncanny valley effect from cgi
It was meh overall
That said kid me fricking loved it.
>written and directed by FF's creator and main writer and director
>produced in-house by FF's studio
>the great majority of Americans only had ever played Final Fantasy VII (seven (7))
>NOOOOOOO THIS IS NOT FINAL FANTASY!!!
>LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT YOUR FRANCHISE!!!
I had only played FF6 and I liked the movie.
THAT'S NOT ALLOWED! YOU HAVE TO HATE IT AND SAY IT'S BORING!
Are you fricking moronic on purpose? There was no FF property like the movie even in Japan. Second, what fricking idiot markets to an audience without considering their expectations.
How about it the Creator of FF came out with a new game called FF the Squeaquel, and it just turned out to be a 240p snuff film of Black folk fricking your mom. Would you be such a smart ass then? You stupid b***h. You dumb mother fricker
>I'm too dumb to see the connections so that means there is none
>sudden unrelated rant mentioning interracial sex for no reason
typical off-the-book Amerimutt reply.
he's clearly an esl, look at how he types his insults.
I like 8 more than 7.
7 is overrated.
correct. 8 is the best in the series
>8 is the best in the series
you sir are a gaygit
>t.
>smooth brain who could understand junction
You're not alone, moron.
entire series is good but it peaks with 6, 7, 8 & 9
Final Fantasy II (IV) and III (VI) were very popular in early 90s USA
their only mistake was their own technical autism that pushed them to spend way too much on it without relinquishing anything on their artistic vision.
in other words, it failed because it wasn't slop.
Sakaguchi made a flop on purpose so he could finally leave Square Enix
Mega65
I recall it was kinda dull and bleak.
>Why did it fail?
had nothing to do with the games
and normies werent ready for AI yet
if this shit was released today it would be bigger than avatar
see
generic plot, shit characters, boring af
Seeing it as a kid, the soul stealing monster ghosts that can phase through walls and are immune to weapons scared the living shit out of me
>Toy Story
>Antz
>A Bug's Life
>Toy Story 2
>Dinosaur
>Shrek
>Final Fantasy : The Spirits Within
Easily the worst CGI film at the time
Dinosaur was absolutely awful and deserves the last place in the ranking.
Kino poster tho, and the score by James Newton Howard is also good.
This is a prove why videogames are shit and a overrated hobby. Kojimdrones can't accept his favorite hack never made a good game and the story is shit, if he could make a movie in the 90', he would be well-known like a bad director. Nintendo knows that and this is the reason why every game they sold is about gameplay and not a rip off a McCarthy book.
For the same reason as this. Barely has anything to do with the source material and the story/characters are very weak.
Coincidentally, Donald Sutherland is in both films. He sounds exactly the same.
i wouldn't watch that just because it kinda looks like shit. i'd rather stick to pluto and the 80s or 00s anime
>Barely has anything to do with the source material a
Final fantasy has its own universe for most games. Spirits within has all the underlying references to final fantasy things
Linking Park rip off.
linkin park ripped off gundam. also spirits within started production in 97, a year after the band formed and two years before they even used the name linkin park.
it was like ang lee's hulk.
branding trap and a lost bet.
the movie was released in the middle of the Lord of the Rings frenzy. they absolutely feared to be compared to LOTR in the "fantasy" sector. since FF was as much sci-fi as fantasy at the time they preferred to go full SF and avoid the competition. but they still required to put the name "Final Fantasy" on the movie to attract the fans.
it was a quandary. they made the bet that people liked the SF part of FF enough to overlook the ambiguity of the name and they lost.
Didn’t stop other studios from making their own LotR clones. That shit’s a common practice. They could’ve marketed it as LotR but CG.
>the movie was released in the middle of the Lord of the Rings frenzy
It came out the same year as Fellowship.
>FF movie released in July 2001
>Fellowship released in December 2001
OK moron.
>the movie was released in the middle of the Lord of the Rings frenzy
actually the matrix, and iirc it did get some unfair comparisons to that at the time of its release.
Every movie with CGI was being compared to the matrix in 2001.
because it was a movie that literally catered to no one. it didn't look anything like the games and used next to zero game material, and normies had never heard of Final Fantasy before and had zero interest in a cgi movie NOT aimed at kids, and not made by pixar/dreamworks. Shit plot with clunky writing and boring action scenes was the icing on the diarrhea cake.
>Why did it fail?
Square knew frick-all about making a movie. Idiots opened a studio in Hawaii and didn't qualify for the state's generous tax breaks for film productions. Why didn't they qualify? Because they didn't hire enough locals. Just had to get some Hawaiians to be janitors at the office and they would've met the low, low threshold for the tax break. What'd they do instead? Import Japanese janitors.
The CGI was impressive for the time but that's really all it had going for it. It's both shallow and charmless.
I haven't seen this since it was in theatres, might have to give it a rewatch. Thanks op
>released in 2001
>looks better than cgi from 2023
Explain that, atheists.
>every single hair is hand-animated
pure literally handcrafted SOVL
if anyone in this thread is interested I got the premium edition dvd that has tons of "making of" and bonus and deleted scenes, I promise you guys I’ll dump the iso and upload it here, just search on Cinemaphile archive for "final fantasy" this month.
You should stream it on cytube. I'd join in.
DO IT.
I'm interested too.
I want to take Sakaguchi's consciousness as he exists today and trasport it back to the day he started production on spirits within and then trap him in a groundhogday-esque timeloop running to the day it ends its theatrical run and continue to loop him until it becomes the highest grossing movie of all time (I guess in 2001 that would mean beating titanic). I wonder how many centuries he'd be stuck in that loop, how many runs would end in suicide or freak death, or the movie just never getting released. Maybe give him a scoreboard at the end of each run tracking how close he was to beating titanic.
>it had nothing to do with final fantasy
>the cgi was still too awkward at the time
>the story was pretty wonky
personally i appreciated the innovation and what this film was trying to do and i enjoyed it alot at the time
but it's failure is generally why we have no serious animation movies still, just pixar and disney crap
>Final Fantasy movie
>it has literally fricking nothing to do with Final Fantasy
what was even the point
Maybe you should ask the director who knows far more about Final Fantasy than you since he created the damn franchise. And none of the final fantasies have anything to do with each other.
>And none of the final fantasies have anything to do with each other.
X
X-2
?
don't be moronic. of course direct sequels and spinoffs connect to each other. but FFX and FFXI are not related.
9>8
well no, moron, that wasn't the point i was making. and you're wrong btw, stop pretending you were there. any film at the time with martial arts or sci-fi shit like mechs/power armor or floating ships was given an unfair matrix comparison. in fact i remember a review for crouching tiger hidden dragon reading "it's like star wars meets the matrix".
I was agreeing with you, dipshit. I saw both matrix and FFSW on opening night.
Im not the one who said NONE of them have anything to do with each other, that would be you.
i'm actually not the anon who initially said that, but you're the moron who felt the need to nitpick silly shit like a redditor would. the fact still remains that each new marked entry is its own canon.
>Im not moronic I just pretend to be one
k
>the true FFX
saw it at The Theatre back in the day, thought it was really mid even then and i was a huge FF fan
Saw this in the theater. Went in HYPE and left disappoint.
>GO ON WITHOUT ME .S..SAVE YOURSELVES!
>dude you can get totally out right over there..
>NOO...GO ON WITHOUT WITHOUT ME SAVE YOURSELVES!
>...dude LOOK..you can literally get out RIGHT THERE..just walk over there and around..there's all kinds of room...we'll wait.
>NOOO SAVE YOURSELVES
>...dude w.t.f??
>SAVE YOURSE....ack!
i remember all the FF fandom hyping it up, then it came out and heard it was garbage from tv critics. might get around to watching it now but it doesnt look at all like Final fantasy from the trailer
>i remember all the FF fandom hyping it up
Because they were expecting Final Fantasy the film but got bootleg Starship Troopers with a haunted planet subplot
>bootleg Starship Troopers with a haunted planet subplot
kek that's very well-put
Spirits Within is the worst of the three. They are all flawed but the first one is just a solid miss all around.
Advent Children blew it with that lame electric guitar score in the final battle in the final act.
Kingsglaive made the princess ugly...like w.t.f.
2>3>>>1
It wasn't the last one.
underrated.
By that point, I had already gotten tired of the sci-fi direction FF was going in. IX was a great call back to the series' roots, but FFX looked almost like VIII and I remember not liking it as much as IX. Just not a fan of the sci-fi FF games and the movie was more of that. That's just me, though.
always found it weird that they have literal 1990s technology in FFVII and VIII, like computers and cellphones. why aren't they all using guns?
these games are all about blending myth with modernity. it makes no practical sense but that's ok
>ff7
>one of the first characters has a gun for an arm
>ff8
>main character uses a gun with a blade attached
I know, I said "why aren't they ALL using guns". at least as a secondary weapon.
fricksakes if the game was just cloud and sephiroth shooting it out it would be lame as frick, might as well make cloud look like vin diesel
Barrett and Vincent both use guns as their primary weapons.
can you fricking read? I said "ALL" characters should carry guns.
yeah and it was a moronic question
>no argument
your concession is accepted.
The series had always been steeped in the mythical, medieval sword and sorcery aesthetic. With FF7 they went for a more-or-less contemporay scenario (with caveats, it's all over the place really) while still preserving many of the fantasy tropes of former titles. Having a swordsman fight against gun-wielding soldiers is not realistic, just as moogles and dragons and magic crystals are not realistic. Which, you know, who cares.
Why would all the characters in a Final Fantasy game use the same class of weapon?
Stop acting moronic.
Because they're not American?
Zoomers don't realize just how ground breaking this was. This level of 3d graphics was pretty mind blowing at the time. Disappointing it wasn't an ff7 movie, but I still really liked it.
That's the greatest crime that they poured all that money into new SFX and CGI and flopped because instead of using it on a new idea that could have reached a wider audience it was hamstring by being part of a big bait and switch niche movie.
I jerked off a lot to Aki.
Square’s strength was delivering climatic and technologically impressive cgi scenes. The parts between them being walls of text (that progressed as fast as you could read) and jrpg grinding meant there was no pressure on artists to make those scenes interesting. When they tried to make an entire movie they expected the “impressiveness” of the CGI to carry otherwise boring scenes, it didn’t.
The same reason spirits within failed are all over FFX as well, as being unable to skip the atrocious voice acting made the story scenes the consistent low point of that game.
Absolutely nothing to do with any FF setting before and since.
Token mention of series staples like Espers/Summons/GF, moogles.
Shitty voice acting.
Barrett but a slim white guy with Alec Baldwin's unintimidating voice.
Plain jane girl hyped up as the next sex symbol.
And so on.
The point is Spirits Within was the culmination of Square's attempt to reclassify FF as a modern sci-fi series. FF7 was a big success, FF8 flopped but it was too late to put the brakes on the movie by then.
>Absolutely nothing to do with any FF setting before and since.
That was every FF before enix took over
At the very least, you had recurring races throughout the series. Spirit Within was just a bunch of bland humans. Maybe the series didn't have a variety of playable char races, but it certainly spent time build their worlds.
... breh the main characters of every FF before enix were "human."
>Spirit Within was just a bunch of bland humans.
nobody cares about the other races anyway. in every FF game up to then the heroes were always human.
you're thinking of Jobs anon
>trust me dude I had already played to all the Jap-only FF games back in 2001
Not too implausible, unofficial ROM translations were already a thing back then.
FF7 won the console wars single-handedly. Yet, Spirits Within didn't borrow anything from it. Who was that movie even for if not for American audiences wanting more FF7?
>American finally remembers the rest of the world exist
I always find that part of the conversation very amusing.
Came out after FFVII and it wasn't Advent Children. Which is what people actually wanted. Would have been a success if they made a sequel to FFVIII instead.
In b4 "... Whatever."
... yeah most people were pissed off about FF8 and its utter fricking disaster of a final act.
>oh shit we actually all have amnesia of the exact same memores
>oh frick we all went to the same orphanage
>oh shit this means... uh
>OH NO SOMEONE IS ATTACKING FROM THE FUTURE WHO'S NEVER BEEN MENTIONED BEFORE
imagine being filtered so hard by an entry level time loop narrative lmao
"time loops" are fine until they come out of nowhere for no reason other than to rush the conclusion.
the theory that sorceresses inherited memories of previous sorceresses, that rinoa was one, and utlimecia's goal was to "make the moment last forever" would've worked, but that didn't make it into the final product.
I just remember it being very boring
You can't introduce a whole new universe in a film of weird alien ghosts and have most of it done through cgi people talking to each other to explain it
That's all it really is just talking
>That's all it really is just talking
so… just like Final Fantasy then?
>so… just like Final Fantasy then?
Final fantasy is talking with loads of action and fighting thoughbeit
If we compare what people had with with FF7 to spirits within you can't really disagree. I think it was ahead of its time with the cgi and digital actors but watching them just speak exposition was boring
There wasn't enough fantasy in the final fantasy
Was hard sci-fi. If you stuck in some big swords and some monsters it unironically would've gone down fine
what about it
>Soundtrack not composed by Nobuo Uematsu
Missed opportunity there
My theater had quite a few people in it. It just wasn’t a good story. The characters and animation had an effect though. The magazines were filled with that chick and FF games had no issues being marketed on tv
I think this movie created the hologram UIs that were then ripped off in Avatar, then in Marvel and now in every SF slop.
still the UI looks way better in the original than in any of the rip-offs.
with those and the UI in Avalon, the Japs had fantastic UI concepts and yet 20 years later we still have nothing that comes close IRL. we were robbed.
>had fantastic UI concepts and yet 20 years later we still have nothing
UI has gone backwards at an alarming rate.I blame the drooling phone gazing masses. Instead of words we now have nondescript pictures for fricking everything. Hate this gay planet
gotta be able to sell the phones to illiterate indians
Oh yes when I think "Final FANTASY" I definitely think holograms and pulse rifles. Shocking that the average moviegoer was not prepared for this
I still don't know why these fricking morons decided to make an all CGI animated Final Fantasy movie and not adapt FF7 which is the game that put the franchise on the international map in the first place and one of the most important games of all time?!?FACT!!!
I also remember seeing the original Spider-Man Twin Towers teaser playing before it on July 11th 2001......
?si=aLlD1rmTvydOPkVK
!!!FACT!!!
It had nothing to do with any of the established tropes of Final Fantasy in the slightest. Even across all the unrelated games that existed at the time there were still certain things that tied them all together. It shared none of that. Also it was kinda gay.
It was pretty gay tbqhwy
Why is Square so obsessed with time ghosts
Even for people who'd want a final fantasy movie, it was nothing like any of the games even slightly.
it didn't need to be like the games, it just needed to be good.
>most important reason
The name.
>other contributing factors
Story requires triple digit IQ to comprehend (identity of the final spirit is only implied).
Critics mindlessly repeating the "uncanny valley" myth.
FF:TSW is the second most underrated movie behind Freddy Got Fingered.
>uncanny valley" myth
OK bot
>believing psychology research
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley#Criticism
>linking the Wikipedia criticisms subsection to prove a point
it didnt, it is great
only plebs with no taste hate it, its a good relationship filter
>haha hey anon, you're cute. So tell me about yourself
>what are your thoughts on this Final Fantasy film? Please, answer correctly. You *will* be unmatched!
>unmatched
who uses dating apps Black person, do not tell me you waste money on those
They took the Final Fantasy name, and made an Aliens ripoff. Remember Aliens from 1986, my fellow teens and early 20-somethings?
ahead of its time
story WAY too complex for normies to understand