Advent Children in Venice becomes a success
Warning: Use of undefined constant Date - assumed 'Date' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /mnt/web203/e0/91/54654191/htdocs/news/news.php on line 76
Sep 05, 2004Warning: Use of undefined constant Story - assumed 'Story' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /mnt/web203/e0/91/54654191/htdocs/news/news.php on line 78 Warning: Use of undefined constant Story - assumed 'Story' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /mnt/web203/e0/91/54654191/htdocs/news/news.php on line 79 Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children was shown yesterday in the 61st Venice Film Festival, and was greeted with splendid reviews. It is rare for incomplete movies to be shown in the festivals, but Venice made an exception by inviting Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children to be a part of the new digital movie category. The International Venice Film Festival is one of the three biggest movie festivals, the others being Cannes Film Festival (France) and Berlin International Film Festival (Germany).
Many people who wished to attend the screening waited outside before the show began. Yesterday about 25 minutes of the movie was shown to an audience of fans, Square Enix staff members and other authorised personnel. A lot of effort has been put into this project, and when Tetsuya Nomura’s and Nobuo Uematsu’s names appeared in the ending credits they were greeted with thundering applause.
The people who attended the screening were overwhelmed and the movie was highly praised afterwards. The special edition shown yesterday was incomplete and didn’t show everything, so only time will tell how different it will be on the actual DVD.
 |
Tetsuya Nomura: Director of the movie and character designer for such Final Fantasy titles as FFVII, FFVIII and FFX. He worked as a director in Square’s collaboration with Disney – Kingdom Hearts, and is the man behind Advent Children along with FFVII’s producer Yoshinori Kitase. Nomura was busy all weekend in Venice, giving numerous autographs to fans and letting fans take his picture,
Masashi Hasimoto: Producer of Advent Children, Square Enix’s executive staff member, who has often given official statements of Square Enix’s games. "We have finished enormous amounts of images even as difficult as battle scenes. Furthermore, we also received an invitation to the Montreal Worldwide Movie Festival." –Hasimoto
Takeshi Nozue: Co-director of Advent Children and has worked previously as CG designer for Final Fantasy IX, animation director for Final Fantasy X and as movie director for Kingdom Hearts.
Kazushige Nojima: Scenario writer for the movie and has previously worked in the same position for Final Fantasy X and for Kingdom Hearts, and also wrote lyrics for the songs in various Final Fantasy games.
The team, which develops Advent Children, consists of only 40 members, while in contrast Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within employed over 200. The dramatic cut in staff still hasn’t affected the quality, because Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is at least as high quality CG animation as Spirits Within was back in 2001. The character models are highly detailed and animate smoothly, while the environments are made as realistic as possible, and use heavily the contrasts of light and shadow.
Read AdventChildren.net’s summary of the Advent Children special edition shown in Venice.
Notice it is SPOILER HEAVY.
Read Gamespot’s in-depth report of the event.
IT CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS.
FFWA'S OWN PLOT SUMMARY COMING SOON
So now Advent Children has made its first debut, what people want to know next is, when will it come out so we can buy it? 1up.com gives us a release date of 14th February 2005, but where that date comes from is unknown. Because Square Enix has been insisting that Advent Children will be released in ‘late 2004’, the February release date may indicate a stateside release.
Before Crisis turns out to be more popular than expected
Final Fantasy VII: Before Crisis started its beta testing period only five days ago, and already it is causing problems for Square Enix. The game has turned out to be massively popular, which caused the game being accessed in levels approaching 100 times the expected amount! 1.6 million people tried to download the game on the first day, with a peak of 160,000 people per hour in the worst hours of the day.
Because of the traffic, many people were unable to download the game and they had to wait until the traffic would tone down. And the people who were able to download the application now experience long pauses for downloads and access to the network. Square Enix is trying to fix the problem and answer the growing demand, by building more servers, which should be up and operating on 24th September when the game is officially released.
Written by alhana
Proofread by Berrik
Picture from Famitsu.com
Sources:
AdventChildren.net
Creativenut
GameFAQs
Gamespot
IMDB
IGN Wireless
Komo TV
Labiennale
Manga and Anime Forum
Square Insider
Related links:
Venice debut information
Discussion forum