Advent Children (4 comments)
I'd forgotten about Final Fantasy: Advent Children until Penny Arcade did a strip on it. Tycho was also good enough to provide a short fanboy warning:
This film contains scenes that may be totally fucking awesome. Your favorite characters may be rendered in extreme detail as they take part in mind-blowing battles set in familiar locales. Futuristic scabbard/motorcycles might be depicted in a way that makes them appear sweet.
Advent Children is a full-length animated feature film that tells the story of the events that followed Sephiroth's defeat at the end of Final Fantasy VII (which I re-played recently). I got a copy and watched it. The story's so-so, but everything is beautiful (as I'd expected). That got me thinking about the evolution of Cloud.
Cloud Strife, the game's protagonist, started out as a swanky bit of concept art:
Limitations in the Playstation's processing power limited his in-game model to look a bit simplistic and pointy:
But in more restricted settings, namely battles, Cloud was given a higher-polygon model:
The game's full-motion video sequences were pre-rendered, so he looked smoother, but intentionally angular to resemble his realtime-rendered game model:
But once the game was over, Cloud could move on to modern technology. He made an impressive appearance in a Playstation 3 tech demo:
Now, Advent Children has outdone even that:
