StoryI’m a Final Fantasy VII fan, that's for sure. Having recently watched Advent Children and coming out of it fairly disappointed, I was eager to pick up Last Order and see if it managed to be any better. To my dismay, I walked away even more disappointed than my prior AC viewing. *Le sigh*. As a warning, you might not want to read this if you haven't played the game, since I'll be discussing plot points from it.
Unlike Advent Children, Last Order takes place before and during the game. In fact, the entire twenty or so minutes of Last Order is nothing more than an animated version of many scenes in the game. Literally, that's all there is to it. The verbatim, even, is identical to certain scenes in the game. We are shown the scene in Nibelheim where Sephiroth has set the city on fire, striking down anyone who opposes him. We watch him battle Zack (a huge plot twist in the game), and we watch scenes with the eerie tubed-up Jenova. Unfortunately, that’s all there is to the plot.
AnimationWhile some might argue that the pure fanboy element of showing nothing but scenes from the game is worth a high rating, I'd heavily disagree. On the contrary, I found this to be a complete waste of time on basically every level. It’s one thing to watch a very pretty remake of something. Even though, for example, I thought the ending of the FF7 game was complete ass, I still enjoyed seeing the beautiful CG remake of the scene in Advent Children. On the other hand, the very normal looking animation of Last Order didn’t make me super impressed when seeing the same game scenes over again. Speaking of the animation, Sephiroth's character looked very un-scary and unintimidating, unlike his very badass persona in other forms of media. All of the other characters looked almost disappointing without the beefed up CG graphics, and in general looked very... average. The color scheme was almost a little too dark at times, but this might have been a bad encode. I will admit that some of the backgrounds were quite beautiful, such as a shot of the industrial city of Midgar and Jenova's tank with her inside. SoundAs far as the music goes, it's a testament to how fantastic it was, considering I don’t remember it at all. CharactersThe characters are, well, pulled straight out of the games. Due to the fact that a lot of the sequences are flashbacks (often with no dialogue), newcomers would be totally confused and not have any idea what the characters are about. There's probably a chance to get some sort of sense of their personalities, but with a short length even that is difficult. OverallI don’t know. In general, I see Last Order in terms of two audiences: first, if you’ve never played the games, I’d rate this maybe a 1. Yes folks, it's that bad. There is literally nothing that explains what’s going on for folks who haven't played the games. Even for those that HAVE played the games, Last Order doesn't try in the slightest to get you up to speed. You are shown bits and pieces of the game, and that's it. Nothing to tie them together in an interesting way or make them flow together well. The graphics aren’t fantastic so I can't even say newcomers would enjoy watching it for visual purposes. Now, the second audience I can rate this based off of is the core fans of the game. For these people (and for the purpose of this review) I'd still rate this very low, ultimately around a 2. Now, I know I'll get a lot of flak for this, especially from the fanboys out there. But I ask you, why would you rate it any higher? The visuals aren't amazing. The music is forgettable. The story shown to us is nothing more than bits and pieces from the game, strewn together in a haphazard fashion, for twenty minutes. Call me crazy, but I can’t get all excited about something just because it was animated for me. Hell, I like the Star Ocean game series but I wouldn't automatically orgasm out of being able to watch twenty minutes of it, animated, on my computer.
I guess I'm just not seeing the appeal, so I can't in good conscience recommend this to pretty much anyone. Watch this if you are a hardcore fanboy, and that’s basically it. Even then, I think people out there who actually claim this is amazing, are just fooling themselves or are rating it highly because you had already decided anything FF7 related = teh kickass lol!!1!! Seriously folks, just stay away from this one. It’s twenty minutes of your life you could be using to do something else like playing the game, if you like it that much.
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