Final Fantasy: Advent Children & Character Camera

Final Fantasy: Advent Children is a sequel to the 1990s role-playing video game Final Fantasy VII, though it is less a sequel in the sense that it continues the story VII (which it does), and more that it is a return to a previous work, a film akin to the nostalgia of meeting up with an old friend. Final Fantasy VII was an enormously influential game. It showed off the power of the then-cutting-edge PlayStation video game console with its elaborate 3-D graphics, and through those visuals it was one of the first (if not the first) Role Playing Game to expand to a much wider audience. For many people, Final Fantasy VII was their first great game, the first to move them to tears, to engross them in its story, to make them fall in love with its characters. Having never played Final Fantasy VII for any extended period of time, I was not one of those people, but I knew quite a few who practically grew up on Final Fantasy VII. In many cases, they saw and still do see Final Fantasy VII as the epitome of not only the Final Fantasy franchise itself, but of storytelling in video games in general.

Still, despite my lack of personal experience with the original game, I had decided to watch Final Fantasy: Advent Children because just by being around so many people who played and loved Final Fantasy VII, I knew a lot about it. This viewing for the Vistas blog is not my first time seeing it either. But upon the second viewing of the film, I noticed a detail that had escaped me the last time around. As the film opened and the credits began to roll, I saw “Director: Tetsuya Nomura,” and upon being conscious of his enormous influence on this movie, I could not ignore it.


Tetsuya Nomura had worked on Final Fantasy VII, but it wasn’t in the capacity of director or producer. Nomura was the character designer, and Advent Children feels like a movie directed by a character designer. Not only are each of the characters themselves re-designed with greater attention to detail and updated fashions—compare the heroes of the story with the plain designs of the children around them—but the shots are framed in a way that glorifies some aspect of the characters in them. The movie often lingers on the characters for extended periods, most noticeably in the slow-motion sequences during action scenes, as if the overall shot itself is less important than the character in it, or perhaps, in terms of Advent Children, that the character is the shot.

I do not believe that Nomura could not have possibly done otherwise, or that all character designers-turned-directors will create the same type of movie. However, I do believe that Nomura’s past with Final Fantasy VII as a character designer influenced Advent Children’s visuals profoundly, and that he would have had to make a much more conscious effort to go against his artistic instincts. I think that Nomura had his own nostalgia for the characters, or that he understood well the number of people who saw Advent Children as a fated reunion. As someone who was not part of that nostalgia but knew its effects, perhaps this is how such a movie comes across for me.

Though I never did play it myself, Final Fantasy VII actually still did influence my life in a certain sense. I remember when the game first came out back in the late 1990s, when discussions about it raged across the video game-loving section of the internet, back when people used the term “Information Super-Highway” seriously. Some fans who self-identified as “gamers,” including those who had enthusiastically followed the Final Fantasy since the beginning, saw Final Fantasy VII as the advent of the “new school” of gamers, the end of the golden age, where the doors of the RPG kingdom and video games in general had been flung open. For years, this was my image of how Final Fantasy VII was perceived. Then one day, I saw a post on a video game forum decrying the state of the Final Fantasy franchise and the role-playing genre. In it, the poster wishes a return to the great, “old-school” RPGs like Final Fantasy VII. I had actually seen a video game go from new-fangled tool of the whippersnapper to a symbol of the old days. In that respect, Final Fantasy: Advent Children says a lot about where video games have gone in the years since.