The Sequel That Finally Looked Like the Promise

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children arrived eight years after the original game, long enough for the technology to finally catch up to what the box art and concept sketches had been promising since 1997.

Directed by Tetsuya Nomura with Takeshi Nozue co-directing, built by Square Enix's in-house CG studio Visual Works, the film picks up two years after the game ends. Cloud has pulled away from the people he saved, running a delivery business out of the city of Edge while a strange illness called Geostigma spreads across what's left of the planet. 

The 1997 game could only gesture at how cool this cast was supposed to be. Field models were chibi-proportioned, big heads, stubby bodies and even the sharper battle and FMV models stayed blocky by necessity. The artwork on the case, the magazine spreads, Nomura's own promotional sketches… that was always the real version of Cloud and Sephiroth, and the PlayStation just couldn't render it. 

Advent Children finally did: real proportions, individually simulated hair, cloth that moved like cloth. Nomura, who'd designed the originals, came back to direct that rebuild himself. Yusuke Naora, the franchise's longtime art director on VII, VIII, and X, built everything around them, Midgar's wreckage, Edge's makeshift skyline, the lighting that gave every frame its mood.

A film built entirely to answer one question: what happens to the people who survive saving the world.