Advent Children / Dear Friends

Last things first.

The US orchestral performance of Nobuo Uematsu's compositions for the Final Fantasy series took place last night, as a sort-of E3 warmup. It was covered, before the fact, in the New York Times:

Video Fantasy Replaces Mozart (But Who's Keeping Score?)

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, which typically plays scores by composers like Beethoven and Brahms, will perform music tonight more often heard while keeping score.

The Philharmonic's program will consist entirely of excerpts from the Japanese composer Nobuo Uematsu's soundtrack music for "Final Fantasy," a popular series of action-adventure video games.

[. . .] A decade ago it would have been difficult to imagine that the beeping and whirring that accompanied most video games would have been worthy of the concert hall. But with the introduction of high-powered video-game consoles like Sony's PlayStation2 and Microsoft's Xbox, games could finally play on cue large audio files containing recordings of acoustic instruments instead of cheesy synthesized sounds. And as the game industry grew into an annual business of more than $7 billion, having high-quality music provided a competitive edge.

In the standard, "wacky" tone the press reserves for that sort of thing. Why yes, those were sneer quotes. What can I say? Not impressed with the article.

Some,like the gent linked way up at the beginning and the person who wrote Square Enix rocks Los Angeles, were impressed with the actual music:

The packed concert hall was greeted by a superb performance of Liberi Fatali, the well-known opening theme from Final Fantasy VIII. The evening's emcee (and voice of Final Fantasy X's Tidus), James Arnold Taylor, then appeared to introduce the man who made tonight's event possible: Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu. An apparently stunned Uematsu immediately received a standing ovation (the first of many for the evening) right in his seat. The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Los Angeles Master Chorale went on to play many old and new favorites from the series' long history, to the constant delight and rabid applause of the assembled fans.

But, y'know, game programmer and someone writing for a games web site. There is the slight possibility of bias.

As for Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, well, you probably know as much as I do.

This is the first you've heard of it?

Well, yeah. There ya go.

There's a trailer at 1UP.com, and a description that should make you more confused:

The sequel to Square's immensely successful RPG Final Fantasy VII, entitled Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, is not, in fact, a game. That part of it is not so hard to parse. The hard part is getting Square Enix and the sequel's creators -- character designer Tetsuya Nomura and director Yoshinori Kitase -- to precisely explain what it is instead. The phrase they use is "visual contents," at least when it's translated into English. What's a "visual content"? Therein lies the rub. It's made of pre-rendered computer graphics, 60 minutes of fine animation from the talents at Square Visual Works, and it's not interactive, at least not in the way we've come to think of it as regards videogames. Square doesn't like to use the word "movie" in this context, though. That would apparently imply a release in theaters, which obviously brings back unpleasant memories of Hironobu Sakaguchi's misadventures in Hollywood. So is it direct-to-video instead? Well, maybe, and maybe not. Though Advent Children is scheduled for release in the summer of 2004, according to the producers' comments at its press conference debut, Square has yet to officially decide on a delivery medium.

But DVD has been mentioned. You can play those in your Playstation 2. And if you don't have a Playstation 2, they're down to $149 these days. Including the network adapter, possibly Sony's way of going for more of that phat monthly-fee cash. Possibly.

Want to know more about Advent Children? You could do worse than AdventChildren.net, for more trailers (including one from E3) and logos and suchlike. I mean, Final Fantasy Finland doesn't seem to have much about it at all, and what they do have?

Advent Childrenin traileri on nyt saatu ripattua. Traileri on hyvälaatuinen ja siinä on monia uusia kohtauksia, mitä emme aikasemmassa trailerissa nähnyt. Elokuvasta tulee noin 70-80 minuuttia pitkä, ja se julkaistaan Japanissa kesällä.

It's, um, in Finish.

Go figure.

Update: Oh. Duh.