Hello again, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children fans! Have you ever wondered what makes Advent Children’s high-speed motorcycle battles, giant swords, and physics-defying action awesome? What does this movie do that other action movies don’t? Would you believe that Loz throwing a motorcycle with his feet, friendship defeating Bahamut, and a gunshot wound threatening to kill Cloud all follow a consistent set of rules?
Advent Children: What’s Beneath the Fan Service is a three-part series in which I debunk common misconceptions about what is arguably one of the most important CGI movies ever made. Part 2, now up on the Extra Life Community website, discusses how Advent Children tells its story and defines its world through action, visual language, and efficient dialog. You can find it here. If you missed part 1, which analyzes the story Advent Children tells, you can read that here.
Feel free to spread this around! If you want more movies like Advent Children, don’t be afraid to tell people why you love it and why they should love it, too. Everyone needs to know what’s beneath the fan service.
For those of you who don’t know, Extra Life is like a marathon for charity, but instead of running or walking, you play video games to raise money for a Children’s Miracle Network Hospital of your choice. The official Extra Life event happens November 4 this year, but you can raise money whenever you want year round. Check out the Extra Life website to learn more, donate, and sign up!
I’m trying something new. We’ll see where it goes. Since I don’t finish things very often and have some large projects in the works, I thought I’d write updates to track and report my progress. Here’s what I did last week:
Advent Children: What’s Beneath the Fan Service – Part 1 of a three-part article series on Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is up on the Extra Life Community website. You can find it here. Part 2 and Part 3 should be up in the next few weeks, depending on when the editor can get to them. In the meantime, I will probably start harassing reviewers on YouTube about how WRONG they are. 😛
That’s not an Argument – I’m working on a website prototype that lets you highlight and comment on text sections on any website and share your thoughts with friends. Originally, I envisioned it for supporting or discrediting news articles. I found another use for it this week, however, when I was trying to figure out how to provide comments to an author in a writer’s group I’m testing out. Anyway, this week I finished roughly coding the backend logic for saving and exporting json files and local data. Now it’s time to actually make the tools for navigating to websites and displaying them for editing!
MisCon – I spent the weekend at MisCon, a science fiction and fantasy convention in Missoula, MT. It’s a good place to listen to people talk about writing. Also, for the first time ever, I participated in the writers’ workshop. I submitted a query letter, synopsis, and novel sample for a paranormal thriller I’m working on called The Twelfth Hour. My synopsis was absolute crap, but the actual novel sample was at least halfway decent. I can’t write a simple overview of a story, but I can write dialog! I guess all the years of writing scripts for silly amateur films and watching plays six to fifteen times each as a theater technician actually paid off. O.o After spending more than a decade writing novels in a closet, it’s nice to hear that I haven’t wasted my time writing terrible, uninteresting garbage. I just get lost in the details. Now I can fix it!
Hey, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children fans! Have you ever wondered if Advent Children is more than fan service? Do you question why you like a film known for its poor story, weak characters, and unrealistic action scenes? Would it surprise you to know that criticisms of Advent Children have little to no basis in reality?
Advent Children: What’s Beneath the Fan Service is a three-part series in which I debunk common misconceptions about what is arguably one of the most important CGI movies ever made. Part 1, now up on the Extra Life Community website, analyzes Advent Children’s story, characters, and themes under a lens that has little to do with the game it’s based on. You can find it here.
Feel free to spread this around! Fans and haters alike need to know what’s beneath the fan service.
For those of you who don’t know, Extra Life is like a marathon for charity, but instead of running or walking, you play video games to raise money for a children’s hospital of your choice. The official Extra Life event is on November 4 this year, but you can raise money whenever you want year round. Check out the Extra Life website to learn more, donate, and sign up!
My first experiment in improvisational speaking went well, so here’s a new episode. I tried fewer jump cuts this time. The video reflects more the actual speed that I speak at… so sorry if I put you to sleep. 😛
What do my amateur short films, CGI movie reviews, and unpublished science fiction novels have in common? Their sources of inspiration.
The second season of Speech Therapy has lasted for more than two years, so I’m arbitrarily ending it. I hope to make new episodes more regularly. Hey! This is the third episode I’ve released in the past five months! Regular releases could become a thing… maybe.
I got yet another shout out from Extra Life Community Website editor Jack Gardner on The Best Games Period podcast. With this much hype for my upcoming Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children article, it’d better be good, right?
You can listen to the podcast here. The teaser occurs at about 1:04:00, but listen to the full podcast for a discussion of Devil May Cry. Is it one of the best games ever, questionable voice acting and all? Listen in to find out!
For those of you who don’t know, Extra Life is like a marathon for charity, but instead of running or walking, you play video games to raise money for a children’s hospital of your choice. The official Extra Life event occurs on November 4, but you can raise money whenever you want year round. Check out the Extra Life website to learn more, donate, and sign up!
I finally got around to cleaning up and collecting together some of the projects I made in an Introduction to Computer Graphics course, something I’ve wanted to do for a couple years. Topics I explored include procedural generation, ik-rigging, and animation. The projects even include a Frozen-inspired snowman with a head that perpetually falls off and a flying table. You can find the demos and source code on the GitHub page here.
I got another shoutout on The Best Games Period podcast. This time, the Extra Life Community Website editor Jack Gardner gives a quick teaser of my upcoming article on Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Hopefully, we can get it out in the next month or two for all to see. This is the same article I was talking about in Improvised Incoherence #1.5. Keep an eye out for it. It should be pretty awesome.
You can listen to the podcast here. The teaser occurs about 37 minutes in, but listen to the full podcast to learn about Oíche Mhaith, a strange flash game about a child’s experience of her abusive parents. It’s dark but interesting.
For those of you who don’t know, Extra Life is like a marathon for charity, but instead of running or walking, you play video games to raise money for a children’s hospital of your choice. The official Extra Life event occurs on November 4, but you can raise money whenever you want year round. Check out the Extra Life website to learn more, donate, and sign up!
Appleseed Alpha entertained me, and I don’t say that often about the subset of CGI movies that I review. It looks beautiful and contains great action, characters who interact with one another like people, characters with fun personalities, interesting designs, awesome music, and of course, unintentionally ridiculous moments. [“The death… They could’ve taken her anywhere! It’s pointless!”] By the end of the movie, when it obviously set up potential for a sequel, I found myself thinking, “You know… I wouldn’t mind that.”
This movie’s great… as long as you don’t think about anything that happens in it. So just for fun, let’s think about what happens in it.
The story follows former soldiers and couple Deunan and Briareos. After World War III’s end, the protagonists find themselves in the service of crime boss and overlord of New York Two Horns. The war left Briareos, a cyborg, weak and in need of frequent recharges, which Two Horns provides in exchange for Deunan’s and Briareos’ services. Despite their wish to leave the ruined city, Two Horns and Briareos’ weakness won’t allow it.
This changes when the protagonists meet Olson and Iris, who have a mission to destroy a powerful weapon left over from the war. Deunan and Briareos save Olson and Iris from automated war-time robots. As payment, Olson finds a defective chip in Briareos that causes his weakness and removes it. Apparently, Briareos’ mechanic implanted it in him on Two Horn’s orders. With his strength restored, Briareos and Deunan decide to accompany Olson and Iris on their mission.
The antagonist, a cyborg named Talos has different plans for the weapon though. Originally given a mission to dispose of left over weapons from the war, Talos decides it would be more effective to control a weapon capable of enforcing the peace and controlling the world, the same weapon that Iris must destroy. Talos kidnaps Iris and kills Olson in order to learn the location of the weapon and control it. Iris is a bioroid, an artificial human, created specifically to destroy the weapon. As such, she has the ability to activate the weapon through its iris scanner.
Talos forces Iris to bring the weapon to life, but not everything goes as planned. Shortly after powering on, the weapon begins an automated sequence to self-destruct in the middle of the New York. Deunan and Briareos catch up to them after discovering Olson’s body and information on where to find the weapon. Deunan and Iris kill Talos and come up with a plan to destroy the weapon with Briareos. Seconds from success though, Iris reveals that she must sacrifice herself in order to keep the weapon’s shields down and give Briareos a shot at destroying its power generator with a sniper rifle.
First of all, why does this weapon have an automated sequence to destroy New York? Iris explains that it’s a weapon programmed for retribution in the event that the country fell to its enemies. Who is this weapon punishing though? The country? “You lost! Loser! That’s what you get!” New Yorkers? Clearly, if we lose World War III, it’s New York’s fault. “Damn liberals ruined the country!”
Okay, maybe this weapon is punishing America’s enemies by destroying its crown city… New York. Yeah, how’s that feel Los Angeles? Who cares about you, Washington, DC? “You’ll never take our country’s greatest source of pizza alive!” It’s an ingenious idea, placing a booby-trapped weapon on your own soil. When the enemy discovers it in their new country after the war ends, they’ll unwittingly destroy New York. “Fools! Now we have the last laugh!” I’m sure everyone who lives there currently would willingly die for this trickery.
Second, what causes the weapon’s automated self-destruct sequence to begin in the movie? When Talos discovers that he doesn’t have control of the weapon, we hear the computer stating [“Hull breach verified. Self-defense system protocol initiated.” “No!”]. So when this weapon’s hull is breached, it automatically begins an uninterruptable process to destroy New York. [“What?”] I guess if this weapon’s primary function is retribution, it’d better make sure that it carries it out. You had one job, weapon!
Exactly how much damage classifies a hull breach? Before this automated sequence begins, Deunan shoots at a cargo door, so apparently, not very much. A bird could probably fly into a window and begin the automated self-destruct sequence. The weapon was never completed though, which could have caused the computer to identify missing pieces of the hull as a hull breach. This suggests, however, that the people building this robot would destroy New York if they so much as turned it on. The designers must have just really hated New York.
Third, why does Iris have to die? Iris explains to Deunan that she must stay on the weapon to keep its shields down presumably by holding a button or something. So an operator can’t disable the weapon’s self-destruct sequence, but they can disable its shields. It’s a safety feature. In the event that you accidentally sentence New York to destruction, you can disable the weapon’s shields by holding down a button and hope that other people can destroy it in time.
Fourth, why does it have to be a spider robot? This weapon’s primary function appears to be to blow up New York. Why not just bury a bomb in the middle of New York and blow it up when the country loses the war? Why build a giant war machine for the sole purpose of walking a few miles to New York? You could probably put bombs beneath every major city in America for a fraction of the cost of building a massive spider robot that only blows up one. Sure, the robot in the film was incomplete, and if it weren’t, maybe Talos could rampage around the country with it for a while. But the end point is still, for no apparent reason, New York.
Finally… why is Deunan so upset about this? When Deunan and Briareos discover Olson’s dead body, Deunan briefly throws a fit. [“We finish what he started.” “I don’t think I can.” “What?” “It’s too much… The death… They could’ve taken her anywhere! It’s pointless!”] Um… Is death new? Deunan is a former soldier. She murders a number of people in the movie and watches Briareos do the same. She doesn’t have nearly this reaction when Iris dies. She’s angry and hurt, but she doesn’t lay down her weapon and call everything pointless. She didn’t give any indication of giving up when she and Briareos were trapped in the city or fighting enemies in the weapon bunker or chasing after the spider robot. Briareos doesn’t care this much, and he’s been through as much as she has. This level of despair seems out of character for a kind but otherwise tough and stubborn soldier.
So overall, Appleseed Alpha is a fun movie about a girl who has to kill herself to stop a giant spider fortress built only to blow up from destroying an already ruined city. Also, Deunan is a woman. She has feelings. I wonder what the sequel will be like.
Talk at you next time.
[“You’re too late. She’s already dead.” “No, but you are.”]
I know it’s April Fool’s Day, but I thought you could all use a heavy dose of reality. 😛
Also, one of the questions I answered for this video spawned a lengthy answer, involving how reading reviews of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children changed my perception of reality.
