Starting this week, Elaine and I will, as promised, be watching video game movies and discussing them as part of the podcast.  Even before we began this venture, however, I’d decided to watch an anime series through Netflix (and God bless Netflix, by the way) that was sparked by Final Fantasy, perhaps the most influential video game series in my own personal gaming career.  Now, I don’t have a whole lot of experience with anime in general; I’ve watched a few of the bigger titles here and there, but overall, I just find the breadth of material a little too intimidating to really get into (although I’m trying to broaden my horizons through the recommendations of a former roommate of mine who happens to be quite the anime aficionado).  I was warned, though, that Final Fantasy Unlimited is what they like to call “bad” anime.  I had no idea how right this would turn out to be.

Final Fantasy Unlimited is a series of twenty-five episodes that tell a new story which is, admittedly, right along the lines of something you might find in a Final Fantasy game.  Let me take a deep breath and see if I can sum this up.  Two geologists encounter a strange black pillar of energy that spits out two angry dragon-like monsters whose fighting causes a whole lot of bad shit to go down.  Years later, the children of these geologists (did I mention that the woman was pregnant at the time?) set off to find their parents, who have gone missing into Wonderland, the alternate dimension connected to their own world by the very “Pillar of Darkness” that spawned the monsters.  They do this by riding a special subway, which is presumably the same way their parents traveled between the worlds in the first place.

From there, the main thread of the story is that the kids, Ai and Yu, travel through Wonderland in an attempt to find their parents, meeting, of course, all sorts of good and bad guys along the way.  On the “good” side, we have Lisa, the first ally they encounter, who takes a sort of big-sisterly role in watching over them (and who hides her own agenda through most of the series), Kaze, the mysterious hero-type who serves as the muscle to defend the travelers (when it suits him), Chobi, the obligatory Chocobo who eventually gets a mech suit, Lou, the werewolf-girl, and the Comodeen, a collective of fighters who also helps the crew throughout a large portion of the story.  On the “bad” side, we find, for the most part, a classic setup composed of the big boss and a bunch of minibosses: the main bad guy is known as “the Earl,” and for most of the story, takes the form of a little kid (although of course, things are more than they seem…).  He’s supported by his henchmen, who go by the collective name of the Four Lords of Gaudium (briefly the Five Lords, but things even out pretty quickly there), and individually are known as Oscha, Fungus, Herba, Pizt, and Makenshi. 

Okay.  That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but if you think about a typical Final Fantasy game, you’ll realize that NOT oversimplifying would take approximately as long as watching the series itself, so if you really want to know more, then do that.  Or check out this Wikipedia page, which will probably be less painful.  What you really want to know, I’m sure, is what I thought about the series as a whole.  To answer that, I’m going to try to break down my impressions into a few categories so that they come out a little less random…

Characters

I guess this is the logical place to start, but even this is kind of a broad category.  The series throws a LOT of characters at you through the course of the story; some are really important, and a few just fade into the background.  And a few fade into the background and then turn out to be important later on…. okay, I’m starting to confuse myself.  At any rate, a lot of the individual characters’ stories feel a little unfinished to me, probably because the series was, I believe, supposed to go on for quite a bit longer than it actually did.  You are given quite a bit of back story, but it generally seems to be the same thing over and over again, with little to no explanation.  Okay, I get that Kaze had to let go of this chick Aura.  But he doesn’t give a flying fuck about anyone else… I’m assuming she was his special lady friend, but really, how many times are you going to show me the clip of the two of them drifting apart while she sparkles?  I GET IT.

Plot

I already gave about as concise a summary of the plot as I could, so I suppose the best I can do here is to simply say that it is… convoluted.  The early episodes are little more than monster-of-the-week adventures (complete with the exact same summon sequence each time to cap the whole thing off), and when the later ones start to actually adhere together to form a true storyline, it’s very easy to get lost in all the weirdness that goes on due to the prevalence of side-stories and tangentially connected adventures that are often a regrettable necessity when dealing with an ongoing set of episodes.  Maybe the DVD box set should have come with a strategy guide.

Visual Style

I think I would have been happier with this particular facet if it had been more consistent.  Most of the series is drawn in what I (and probably most people without a greater degree of experience in the medium) think of as standard anime style.  Nothing to write home about, for good or for bad, it’s just… what you would expect.  There are a few points, however, where I kind of had to scratch my head and wonder why they bothered to deviate from that style, or if they really felt they had to, why they didn’t do it…. well, better.  The first of these is Kaze’s summons.  I suppose the creators thought that they had to distinguish them somehow from the rest of the art style, and that’s fine, I guess, but to someone who’s played a great deal of Final Fantasy, they just sort of end up looking blocky, undetailed, and generally unimpressive (like Odin, pictured, who should look like a raging badass but instead comes out sort of generic and blah).  I’m not saying that they had to look the same as in the games, but it would have been nice if the art would have conveyed the idea of their badassitude a little more effectively.  The other art decision I had a problem with was the places in which they chose to use some positively horrid CG animation.  This usually showed up in the repeated sequences (like Kaze’s summoning, again), the Subway, and some of the really powerful monsters, like Kaze’s and Makenshi’s dragon forms and most of the appearances of Omega.  This series isn’t THAT old; it was created in 2001.  Really?  I know you guys have money.  You could have done better.  And if you couldn’t, then again…. just stick to the normal animation.  It would have gone better, I think.

Sound/Voice Acting

Music is an important part of any Final Fantasy game, but even though Nobuo Uematsu did compose for it, it just didn’t have the same kick to me as the games tend to do.  It was forgettable.  The opening and closing themes are pretty much your standard J-pop (which in itself is, I suppose, something that shows up with frightening frequency in Final Fantasy games, and thus is faithful to the series), but the background music didn’t make an impact on me.  I think my favorite part of the sound design, actually, was that when anyone wins some sort of pivotal battle, they play the Final Fantasy victory music afterwards.  I chuckled.

I lumped voice acting in with this category, but to tell the truth, I don’t have a whole lot to say about it.  I wasn’t quite brave enough to tackle the English dubbing, so I kept the original Japanese tracks on, and they were pretty much standard fare.  There were a few voices that were annoying as hell, but I think overall they were supposed to be.  If anyone has actually watched this with the English voice tracks on, I’d be curious to know how horrible they are (although not curious enough to rewatch it myself, of course).

Faithfulness To Games

Here, actually, is the only point at which I have to concede that Final Fantasy Unlimited does a good job.  If this story had been constructed in game form instead of in animation, I think it actually might have been pretty decent.  It certainly would have fit right in with the rest of the series, as it bears most of its hallmarks.  To start off with, there’s a storyline that starts out as one thing but gradually reveals its true purpose through the adventures of the characters.  The characters themselves are practically straight out of one of the canon games; we’ve got our strong, silent-type hero (Kaze), boasting not only an oversized special weapon and beautiful girl-hair, but also an atmospheric moniker (”Black Wind”), as well as minor recurring characters such as the chocobo, Chobi (who actually does speak in “Kweh”s), a swarm of Cactuar, and even a version of Cid.  Also, I could just see the final confrontation involving working your party’s way through the sub-bosses in order to get to the Earl, who would of course change forms before allowing you to triumph… yeah, this whole thing could definitely have made a better game than series.  This is, actually, a shining example of why this particular cross-over doesn’t work too often (and thus, why this segment is going to prove to be hilariously terrible).

Overall, I don’t think I can assign a rating to this series.  I will say, though, that I don’t recommend it, particularly if you, like me, hold the Final Fantasy name near and dear to your heart.  Is this the worst thing I’ve ever experienced?  God, no.  I watched Street Fighter yesterday, for heaven’s sake.  Even though I was cautioned against Final Fantasy Unlimited, though, I just had to know.  Maybe you do too… but don’t say I didn’t warn you.