Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this column are those of the participants and the moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive material afoot. I wear my sunglasses at night in a mistaken belief that they make me look cool. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Just to be up front about it, I'm gonna withhold any real discussion of the FF Movie until at least next Monday. Even some hard core fanatics (like myself) won't be able to see it until the weekend, and it'll probably make for a more interesting discussion if people allow it to simmer in their heads for a bit, rather than blurting out their immediate impressions.

And now, just because I'm so gosh darn proud of it, here's some Prolog code.

inorder(empty, []).
inorder(node(A, X, Y), L) :- inorder(X, L1), 
				inorder(Y, L2),
				append(L1, [A|L2], L). 

Ain't it purty?

Onward.

Always good to have some pessimists hanging around, just so they can make me feel upbeat by comparison. While I don't know how the film'll do, I do have some firsthand evidence that the graphics are truly amazing... and the plot suggests a run of the mill SNES RPG plot. (And not even a Final Fantasy SNES plot, at that.) I'd love to be proved wrong, but I'm not nearly as hyped about the film now as I was when I first saw the screenshots on the Unofficial Squaresoft Home Page, all those many years ago.

On the other hand, if the film is great, it'll validate your gaming habit in the eyes of your peers, and if it isn't, you can always make the excuse that "the games are way better".

These are just two of the many letters I got talking about how the film will play with the "mainstream"... whatever the hell that is. Think about it for a second: JD4 says it'll be too complicated for the same "mainstream" that blew more than $200 million of their own money on the fairly intricate Sixth Sense. Cactus says most people are looking for some eye candy, which is true, but there are lots of pictures with great effects that die a lonely death each year because of competition and the lack of a decent plot.

I think it's time we stop back for a second and realize that there's no such thing as the "mainstream", just what the rest of the world looks like from your own particular tribe's view. The lovesick girls who made Titanic the biggest grossing film ever are a completely different audience than the legions of geeks who saw Episode 1 over and over, and they're both different from the dating audience of My Best Friend's wedding or the mooks who swarm Dumb and Dumber. There's some overlap, sure, but each of those films made big bucks because it made a solid connection with a specific, core demographic, and had enough broad appeal not to immediately drop off the radar.

I honestly don't know what kind of connection Final Fantasy'll make; you can estimate the hard core RPG audience in the States at around 200,000, but if everybody who bought FF7 goes to see it and brings a friend, that's a fair amount of cash. Hell, for all we know, every PSX owner in the country may feel compelled to see it on opening weekend - that's not the "mainstream", but even half that number would mean $50 million. Meantime, let's hold off on the mainstream predictions until we have some idea of what we think about it ourselves.

I haven't checked my email since about 7, but this is easily the lowest figure I've seen on it so far. The thing to remember tho, is that even if these are the kind of numbers we see out of the States, Square could still make their money back fairly easily in the Japanese market. I dislike making gross generalizations about a culture, but Japanese anime and RPGs do seem to lean towards mumbo jumbo, and whatever hardcore audience the film finds over here will be several times larger over there. Ironically, even as I'm worried about about the quality of the film, Square's financial status on it looks pretty good... and I think I can honestly say I'd rather see them make a mediocre film that does ok than a great film that bombs, considering how precarious their situation is at the moment.

I remember that contest; I was thinking about it yesterday when reading Ian P.'s letter. More specifically, I remember that the first place winner drew up a design that had a pair of bicycle-like hand grips coming out near the bottom of the unit... not entirely unlike the handles of an N64 or PSX controller. I've always wondered if that guy saw any kind of royalties from his idea, and why it's up to people like Mad Catz to produce add-on handles, rather than having them standard on every Game Boy.

Meantime, I'll just regret that this isn't back in the dot com boom days of yore, when some industrious gaming website might have had the spare cash to put together such a contest of their own.

This might be some sort of parody on my sometimes overly verbose writing style - I honestly can't tell. Regardless, I think you've got it backwards: the graphics and action sequences that I've seen are good enough so that whatever nagging doubts the audience has about plot holes in the back of their minds, they'll be too distracted to think about them until after the movie's over.

The threat of Planet of the Apes and Jurassic Park are far more serious - as long as FF's the only big name game in town, it'll continue to do ok financially no matter how good it is artistically. But unless it's really good, it'll get buried by those other summer blockbusters... and it may be anyway, just because it's animated. Bummer.

The thing is, you've got to differentiate between good philosophy and bad philosophy in movies. Americans in general can relate pretty well to fairly coherent philosophical ramblings, whether it's critiquing nihilism in Fight Club or questioning suburban values in American Beauty. The difference between that and, say, Xenogears, is that the characters act out the theses of their stories. In Crouching Tiger, Lu Mu Bai doesn't just spout a lot of Zen jargon, he lives it, and makes his decisions because (or in spite of) his philosophical beliefs. Ashitaka embraces San even as she stabs him; we rarely saw the same thing from the supposedly pacifistic Fei.

So in a way, how the US reacts to the philosophy in the FF movie'll depend on to what extent the characters are actually moved by "the spirits within"... in other words, to what extent Sakaguchi's mastered the art of showing, not telling.

No idea what the vocal themes are going to be - I've stayed away from even the soundtrack thus far because I wanted to see everything in context. (The teaser at E3 aside, of course.) Still, it's worth reminding people that you might want to consider picking up the film soundtrack; aside from the FFX promo, you're helping Square turn a profit on this thing, and increasing the chances that they'll bring more of their OSTs over.

Man, I feel like a PBS telethon all of the sudden...

Closing Comments:

On a tangential topic from this whole movie bit, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a friend of mine a few months back, when we were talking about gaming setups. I was talking about various large scale systems I'd experienced and the best way to get a more cinematic experience on a limited budget, when he pointed out that he wasn't really looking to be overwhelmed by his games, just to enjoy them.

I think there's an interesting debate here: you're likely to enjoy a lot of Square's stuff more if you've got a big screen and surround sound to enjoy the FMVs, but classics like, say, Bionic Commando really don't demand anything more than an old 13-inch color with a clear screen. So what do you think of gaming setups: what do you have, what do you want, and what baselines do you think companies should design around? See you Wednesday.

-Chris Jones, carefully researching theater sound systems