I rediscovered Red Letter Media recently. In one of their recent episodes, Jay defines “style over substance,” something that I assumed I knew what people meant when they said it and never thought to formally define. “Style over substance,” according to Jay, means the way the story is told makes a simple story interesting, or more simply, “style over substance” is filmmaking.
I’ve always thought of “style over substance” meaning purposeless action scenes that mean nothing to the characters, films with artistic styles that detract from or don’t compliment the story, or films that look cool but don’t have a thoughtful take-away message. It’s a phrase I’ve fought against a lot recently in my defense of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which is accused of being all these things. Jay’s definition just gave me a different way to look at the phrase.
Essentially, when people use “style over substance” with Jay’s definition, they’re saying a story is so simple that the way it’s told is the only reason it’s interesting. Probably any story out there, however, could be condensed into a single sentence and claimed to be simple. “A boy becomes a man,” “a man rediscovers his identity,” “a girl embraces her destiny”: these are all stories that could be horribly boring or enthralling, depending on the world and characters it’s told with and the skill of the author(s). The way any story is told is exactly what makes it interesting in any storytelling medium. “Style over substance” is storytelling.
What I’m saying is, if you’ve ever used this phrase in this context with Advent Children… you’re an idiot. 😛
Programming – I finished fixing the code that controls the camera and control scheme in Team KAIZEN’s 3D fighter game Shattered Soul! Perhaps Josh will post a new video soon to show off the latest version, but until then, rest assured the camera no longer snaps and spins around, and the control inversion matches the side of the screen the player is on. While I’m waiting for more work to do, I decided to resurrect my artificial intelligence simulation/RTS game RPS Wars to get more practice with the Unity game engine. Soon you won’t have to have a Linux Red Hat Server to play it!
Writing – I made it 2/3 of the way through Chapter 3 of The Twelfth Hour this week. I have a fairly large section to rewrite though, so no guarantee I’ll get to the end of the chapter by the end of next week yet. I’ve also begun writing scripts for new episodes of Speech Therapy where I’ll compare one of my favorite terrible CGI movies Elysium to Foodfight!. Which film is worse? You’ll soon find out.
Other – I reorganized the website’s menu slightly. The link to the page with all my CGI movie analyses, one of the main things I do these days, seemed buried in one too many menus. So now it has its own tab for all to see!
My Eliza – I spent most of this week editing my short story, My Eliza. This included generating what’s going on in the background of the protagonist’s story and the setting. It officially takes place in an alternate United States where the U.S. government collapsed and has been replaced with small experimental governments and anarchy. Apparently, it was necessary to sprinkle some Stefan Molyneux philosophy into the somewhat mundane topic of a job interview gone wrong. I actually really like the extra layer of strange it adds. People said they wanted to know the setting, so I gave them a hell of a setting. I just hope it doesn’t overpower the story.
The Twelfth Hour – I made it to chapter three of twelve in the rewrite process of my novel. I’m hoping to finish this next chapter within two weeks, but it has some rough sections and I have a family reunion next weekend, so we’ll see. I’m thinking about sending chapter one through Critters as well. I have a feeling that this is the type of book that some people will love but most will absolutely hate because I do so many unconventional things in it (switching between first- and third-person, switching between past- and present-tense, redacting character names, mixing alien, ghost, and monster tropes, featuring an angsty protagonist, making heavy use of unreliable narrators, etc.), but if the feedback is anything like what I received for My Eliza, it will still be interesting to see.
Shattered Soul – I got the control scheme mostly working on Team KAIZEN’s 3D fighter. Vector math is a pain though, so it’s not perfect yet. It is, however, much more awesome than it was.
Kingsglaive vs Advent Children – I spent the majority of the week video editing the latest episode of Speech Therapy. This video officially marks the end of my Kingsglaive and Advent Children craze. I’ll probably continue my futile harassment people on YouTube and Final Fantasy forums, but that’s all I have planned for reviews at the moment. If one thing has become clear, I don’t think it’s possible to convince Final Fantasy VII fans determined to hate Advent Children that it is good. Square Enix is composed of malicious capitalists that give people what they want and/or destroy their own worlds in exchange for money regardless of the apparent quality or effort they put into what they produce. I suppose you can’t make anyone change their mind about anything though. That’s true of everything from politics to Star Wars sequels. O.o Anyway, if something else doesn’t distract me first, Foodfight!, Elysium, and Resident Evil: Degeneration are next!
Writing – When I wasn’t video editing like mad, I was writing something. I’m reviewing a novel for someone through Critters, which involves writing my many opinionated thoughts, and working on The Twelfth Hour. I’m thinking about giving My Eliza and The Twelfth Hour a little more attention next week and next month.
Shattered Soul – I’ve taken somewhat of a hiatus from programming since moving due to craziness, distraction, and stuff everywhere, but I’m hoping to get back into it. This week, I worked on the control and camera movement scheme for Team KAIZEN’s 3D fighter Shattered Soul demo. Next week, if I’m some combination of lucky, determined, or talented, I’ll come up with something that works a bit better.
Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children feature epic battles with giant monsters, magic, high-flying sword fights, high-speed vehicle chases, and overall ridiculous levels of action. Are they really comparable films though? I’ve pointed out in previous videos that these movies have big differences from one another in terms of how they communicate information visually. As action movies, Kingsglaive and Advent Children make their action scenes a spectacle, but what separates a bad action movie from a good one is how well they communicate why each battle matters in addition to making them look awesome. How well do Kingsglaive and Advent Children show the characters’ locations, goals, and thoughts during a fight? Let’s compare the final third of Kingsglaive to three scenes it resembles from Advent Children.
The final third of Kingsglaive features the protagonist Nyx fighting the antagonist General Glauca, the enemy empire Niflheim’s daemons fighting other monsters, Nyx’s friends Libertus and Princess Luna escaping the city of Insomnia, and a parallel scene featuring Niflheim’s chancellor and emperor. The monsters the daemons fight are referred to as the Old Wall, brought to life as a last resort to defend the kingdom of Lucis from its enemies. In the process, they destroy Lucis’ capital Insomnia. Don’t worry. Lucis’ future doesn’t depend on its citizens’ survival. What kind of kingdom needs people?
Libertus and Luna escaping from the city has similarities to the final motorcycle chase in Advent Children. In Kingsglaive, Libertus must escort Luna out of the city so she can deliver a magical ring to Prince Noctis to save Lucis’ future. Their escape is actually pretty uneventful compared to everything else going on in this section of the movie, which is odd considering that Luna and the ring are the only things that matter in it. General Glauca breaks off from his fight with Nyx once to try to stop them, but when a section of missing highway dislodges him, he returns to killing Nyx rather than continuing his pursuit of the most important items in the movie.
In Advent Children’s motorcycle chase, the protagonist Cloud must stop the antagonist Kadaj from using Jenova’s cells to reincarnate Cloud’s greatest enemy Sephiroth. Kadaj also has a mostly carefree escape, but that’s because his brothers forcefully separate Cloud from him. This whole scene is about Cloud fighting through Loz and Yazoo to get to Kadaj rather than two guys just killing each other because they forgot their purpose for fighting.
Actually, Nyx and Glauca do have a reason to fight, but it’s not what you think. Glauca says that he wants the ring, but he and Nyx move ever farther away from it, which suggests he has another goal. This final battle actually symbolizes an ethical debate. Is it better to surrender to your enemy to save the people who haven’t died yet, or should you continue fighting for what you believe no matter the consequences? Glauca wants Lucis to surrender to Niflheim to end the war while Nyx believes that Niflheim could never rule a just future. Neither of them are wrong. Both choices are awful, and either choice could lead to a terrible future.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Nyx and Glauca are equally terrible people, considering how little they care about the wanton destruction and death surrounding them, and Lucis is just as bad as Niflheim. Lucis’ King Regis hoards his son and magical objects behind a wall while forcing his people to fight a losing war to protect them. The final scenes show this blatantly; his own magic kills his own people. Meanwhile, Niflheim murders thousands of civilians whenever it has the chance.
In essence, Nyx and Glauca kill each other simply because they have different beliefs. That’s right! If someone doesn’t believe what you do, just kill them.
This battle mirrors the battle between Cloud and Sephiroth in Advent Children. (Kingsglaive, you can’t just use Advent Children physics without setting them up first!) Among their differences though, the characters have clear motivations, and we can even sympathize with one of them. [“What I want Cloud is to sail the darkness of the cosmos with this planet as my vessel.”] Cloud must save the planet. Simple! Done! Now we can watch the fight without wondering why we should care about two people murdering one another while a city and its inhabitance falls into ruin around them.
Actually, no one in this scene dies. If Cloud fails, everyone on the planet will likely die, but the battle takes place in an abandoned city. Cloud doesn’t even kill Sephiroth in the end. [“I will never be a memory.”] And when Kadaj reappears, Cloud shows him sympathy. He isn’t some psychopath who can murder his colleagues while ignoring the deaths of thousands around him. He can barely handle his memories of two friends who died years ago. Advent Children doesn’t present morally gray questions to mull over, but personally, I prefer its message, “choose life,” to Kingsglaive’s morally reprehensible message, “Kill everyone who disagrees with you and also your allies.”
Finally, most of Nyx and Glauca’s battle takes place on top of a giant monster battle similar to a scene in Advent Children where Cloud and his friends fight the monster Bahamut. The problem with Kingsglaive is that the monsters only add to the visual chaos on screen. Some of the monsters of the Old Wall look and sound like General Glauca. [“Rawr!”] [“Argh! Ugh!”] The monsters on both sides destroy so much with little to no reaction from any of the characters that it all seems pointless.
Additionally, Nyx and Glauca’s battle takes place on constantly moving settings: fighting monsters, collapsing buildings, flying airships, falling debris, and racing cars. They can also teleport anywhere within throwing distance at any time. Kingsglaive seems to think that because of this, it doesn’t have to show how the characters move from one area to the next. Nyx and Glauca can just appear on top of giant monsters or airships whenever it looks cool.
The movie, however, often has to cut to other useless scenes just so that moving Nyx and Glauca from one place to the next makes some kind of sense. The characters can’t jump from a collapsing parking garage and reappear falling from an office building roof, so let’s see what’s going on with Libertus and Luna. [“That’s not something you see every day.”] Nothing. Great. Why are these guys still here? Didn’t they say half an hour ago that they were leaving? Why do we need to hear this information again?
The battle with Bahamut also contains many fighters, some of which fight on top of the monster. The difference from Kingsglaive is that Advent Children constantly shows the location of the fighters, including the monster, in the scene and in relation to one another. The battle takes place in one area that all looks very similar but has landmarks that even serve as an element of combat. In the middle of the battle, we briefly cut away to a scene where Kadaj discovers the location of Jenova’s cells. This scene, however, exists to break up the action and reveal new information rather than to move all the characters to new locations. When we return, the fight picks up right where it left off.
Attacks from the monster also mean something to the characters, especially considering that they’re fighting to save themselves and the city. Not only do we know the characters’ locations, but also, we know their feelings through reaction shots.
Overall, Advent Children’s fight scenes show everything we need to know in an awesome way while Kingsglaive occasionally displays awesome moments in otherwise visually chaotic settings. Both films may appear to be incoherent action fests, but their similarities are only superficial. Beneath the surface, Advent Children uses visual language so masterfully that I find it shocking Square Enix went on to make Kingsglaive, a film so inept that it can barely get across that someone is stealing a crystal without multiple characters verbally pointing it out. Comparing Advent Children to Kingsglaive is like comparing Toy Story to Foodfight!, but if you still don’t believe me, go watch them. Watch them back to back. Then, come back and tell me what you think. Talk at you next time.
[“Shall we take our leave then? The sun will soon set. We need not be here to witness the terrors of the night.”] [“I will return to Niflheim.” “So soon?”]
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children – This week, I posted a thread “What does Advent Children mean to you?” on a couple Final Fantasy forums. I received quite a few responses on the Eyes on Final Fantasy forum so far. You can find the thread here. It’s amazing how many reasons people come up with to hate this movie for nothing that’s in the movie itself. I thought I knew them all by the time I released What’s Beneath the Fan Service, but no. People hate this movie because Sephiroth coming back to life didn’t make sense based on things that happened in the game (others argue, however, that Sephiroth coming back to life makes perfect sense based on things that happened in the game), every Final Fantasy-related game/thing after Final Fantasy X-2 is garbage, the movie doesn’t have a complete story because On the Way to a Smile exists, and it’s impossible to understand this film in any sense unless you read the novella. Yes, this week I learned that Case of Denzel and Case of Tifa released in 2005 alongside the original film. That doesn’t make Denzel’s backstory anymore relevant to Advent Children’s story, much as Advent Children Complete would like us to believe otherwise, but it changes things slightly… It shows that the Final Fantasy VII franchise did a hell of a lot better creating standalone, FFVII-related stories in multiple media than those in Final Fantasy XV franchise. I don’t know what happens in half of FFVII’s media, don’t need to know, and, indeed, didn’t even know that some of them existed!
My Eliza – The other major thing I spent this week doing was reviewing feedback on my short story from Critters.org. Opinions continued being wildly disparate and contradictory, but eventually, it reached a consensus. Most critters agree that there’s a problem with the ending, which I can totally see. I made it slightly too silly, but I can fix that. The rest of the feedback looks like I can take what I like and leave the rest. I wonder if people were so split about it because they couldn’t see that most of its problems stemmed from the ending?
Other – I didn’t do much else besides write on The Twelfth Hour because I made a trip to Montana to visit friends on the weekend and stayed a day longer than expected. I wanted to get started on editing Speech Therapy this week, but that’ll have to be next week now. What can I say? The Final Fantasy forums are really entertaining!
Improvised Incoherence – This week, I released two episodes of Improvised Incoherence. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if I was going to get them out this week because I got addicted to Final Fantasy XV on Friday. Fortunately, on Saturday, I said to myself, “Nah, I got this.” Then, I video edited for a day and a half. Now I can be addicted to FFXV… Well, not really. Next week, I need to video edit Speech Therapy.
Final Fantasy – Yes, Final Fantasy XV arrived this week! I’m still getting used to the setting. Part of me wants to say, “Get all these white people out of my JRPG!” but then, I wonder how many characters in any Final Fantasy are overtly Japanese. Why does the apparent mix of races suddenly bother me so much in FFXV? Is it the English voice acting with all the stereotypical accents? Is it the art style? Is it the attention to photorealism? Is it that Noctis looks so Japanese compared to everyone else, including his own father? Maybe. Why didn’t I have this problem with Final Fantasy XIII? I’m still trying to figure out who Noctis is as well, but I’m not very far into the game. Perhaps I’ll figure out what’s going on with more time. I will admit that it is fun, especially considering that it’s messing with my productivity. I also continued harassing YouTubers about Advent Children and found some Final Fantasy forums I want to poke around in next week.
My Eliza – This week, my short story My Eliza went through Critters.org. The response so far has been… interesting. Reviewers are about split half and half as to whether they related to the protagonist. They are also split half and half as to whether they liked the characters’ Russian accents written out. Most had some comment about wanting more details about the setting. Half of that I can understand and fix, but the other half is due to me classifying this story as science fiction, which it isn’t. I don’t know what it is really. A comedy for introverts? Besides that, reviewers tended to criticize different things from one another, which could mean that nothing is wrong with the story, something’s wrong but no one can identify what, or everything’s wrong. I’ll definitely be changing some things, but perhaps I’ve written an enigma that readers will either love or hate. O.o
I made two episodes of Improvised Incoherence this month since, between all the chaos of moving to Spokane, I didn’t make an episode last month. The theme is my new living space.
I was looking at a list of movies “like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children” on IMDB when I found this:
IMDB says it’s rated R, but I don’t quite believe it. NR is more likely with these video game spinoffs. For now, I put it under “R” in the Atypical CGI movie list, but I might move it when I find out for sure. Appleseed was rated R just because someone murdered a child in it I think, so R could still be correct.
