[Movies] Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV

Final Fantasy movies have a mixed history. Animation quality has certainly been high but never exactly 100% human. Some stories are okay and some are just terrible. Or at least they end up being quite confusing since Final Fantasy stories are often a strange mix of love stories, environmentalism, politics and other story prompts.

I didn't know how to feel about Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV. Actually the news of the movie was not something that had blipped on my radar. And really, the idea of a movie as a sort of parallel companion for a video game felt odd. I can see the value but this sort of cross-platform tie-up venture rarely pans out all that well.

But here we are with a movie that's related to a video game but not quite the main story of that video game. It's another weird mash-up of magic and science fiction with a lot of CGI characters. We get a story with a lot of confusing bits but in the end it becomes something more maybe? Or not.

[Games] Dungeon Siege III (PS3)

It's rather difficult for some PC game franchises to make the transition over to the console market. You just don't have the same level of functionality the moment you take the keyboard out of the equation. And thus game designers are constantly challenged to figure out how to somewhat simplify the game to work with the console setup without taking too much away from the core gaming experience. It's a lot more difficult than it sounds, believe me.

One of the rare good examples of this is probably Civilization Revolution. It still managed to capture a lot of the rich depth of the various incarnations of the desktop version of the game while still keeping things manageable for the console gamer. Thus managing multiple cities, research projects and armies moving across the land still remained efficient and not too annoying an experience.

Now this was a clear attempt to translate a generally successful hack-and-slash PG game into a decent console version of the experience. On its own it's a pretty decent game but it tends to loose luster once you compare it back to the original games. And the fact that this same version of the game was not only distributed to consoles but was also ported back to the PC game market seemed like a bad idea. What we're left with is a game that could have done a whole lot more but instead barely managed to get past the finish line.

[Movies] Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (2005)

My Friday posts are dedicated to "older" movies, which means anything released prior to 2009 (for now). That gives me a very wide range of possibilities in terms of things to write about and at times I find myself dumbfounded as to what to select from all the stuff I've watched. Sometimes I come up with themes. Sometimes it's a movie I only recently watched despite its older release date.

And sometimes I pick favorites.

So this was definitely something that I dug up from the archives - a great movie that I enjoyed a lot. It was one of the rare examples of a decent movie based around a video game franchise, although I know a large part of its success was that it wasn't live-action. Instead, it was made by the same animators who continue to work on the game franchise and thus look and feel was consistent with the overall line, but still worlds ahead of what the original game was.

I know, I know - there's a big possibility that a lot of my love for the movie is more based on the fact that I was such a fan of the original game. There is some merit to that - love for a game can influence love for a movie. But in my defense, I didn't fall in love with horrendous movies like Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter.

Was this movie that much better? Was I won over by the spiky hair and the giant sword? Let's figure that out together.

[Games] Final Fantasy XIII Trailer

I love the Final Fantasy series, even if the stories don't necessarily make sense, the characters seem like rehashes of previous ones and they tend to repeat concepts and themes.

It still sooo works for many geeks like me.


Final Fantasy XIII Trailer - NEW!