The Terrible Cancelled Final Fantasy Anime

let's take a quick trip back to a time before the modern internet when jrpg is offered the best dollar per hour entertainment value you could find on a Home console and Final Fantasy was the Undisputed King of the genre in North America specifically kind of a time before Netflix or Crunchyroll or even watching shows and seven minute chunks on YouTube when the only way to enjoy anime or games was to go out to a physical store buy a physical copy from a physical human being with your precious physical allowance money a time when if you got home from the store and found out the thing you just bought sucked you were gonna watch that shitty anime and try to like it anyway Mister back in those days many of us believe that big brand names like Final Fantasy could save us from such tragic Fates so the logic went a name like that on a package promised that what was inside would offer similar fun to other things with that big name on them that you'd enjoyed previously it wasn't very good logic but I was 11. it was thanks to that mode of thinking that one of my friends ended up screening Final Fantasy the spirits within at a disastrous birthday slumber party and some time later having failed to learn from his mistake that was also how I ended up bringing this piece of crap home from Indigo Books a piece of crap so crappy that even under those watch it and like it conditions I could never make it to the end of this thing until now before I even knew what an isakai was Final Fantasy Unlimited was without question the worst isakai I'd ever tried to sit through honestly I think I'd rather have rewatched master of Ragnarok last week but with Final Fantasy XV finally arriving this week I knew the time was finally ripe for my revenge which is why I've gathered you all here today now please do bear in mind that this box set is a relic of a simpler time so it's more of a god-awful digimon knockoff sort of isakai than the mediocre Harem with extra steps you might been expecting luckily for those of you who came here hoping for a side of anime cheesecake with your roast our sponsor goddess of Victory Nikkei still has you covered hey baby could you crank the AC down this heat wave is killing me again it's like 15 degrees in here only thing wrong is it's boiling it's that darn game you're always playing I don't see how a highly immersive third-person Boomer like me cake could have anything to do with how hot it is um you mean shooter that's what I said Nikkei is an Innovative free-to-play mobile title that combines the strategic planning of a card game with the excitement of real-time cover shooting it's also set in this gorgeously painted post-apocalyptic anime world and each collectible character has her own sumptuously smooth live 2D animated ass hats sorry I got distracted looking at the very nice graphics what I think you're supposed to take your finger off the screen to go back into cover oh yeah good idea if she dies I can't see her shoot stuff more all right I see why you're having fun but maybe you should lay off a little bit till it cools down are you crazy right now it's the Big Summer Event until July 5th they've got a new volt Road mini game where I can earn gems and development materials plus there's recruit vouchers up for grabs through the new story event and more just for logging in and I'm gonna need all of those if I want to get my hands on the new swimsuit skins for frema pepper Marion neon did you say swimsuit skins yeah all right maybe the game is slightly related to the whole temperature issue what are you waiting for download the game at the link below use summer to get 200 joules and start enjoying your hot summer with Nikkei today in our modern world and indeed the world of two decades ago the words Final Fantasy anime most immediately bring to mind Moody Broody stories punctuated by intense battles and quiet moments of very pretty men staring wistfully into the distance and now it days there is actually quite a lot of content that fills that niche in both hyper uncanny CGI and standard anime formats born from Square enix's mid-2000s milk ff7 till the polygonal tits fall off initiative and later their mid-2010s efforts to fill in all the gaps that were left around Final Fantasy XV story when it stopped being Final Fantasy vs 13. but back before the merger at the turn of the Millennium the only anime Final Fantasy had to its name was a mediocre OVA from 1994 in which all the chocobos are inexplicably naked and the chosen one of the wind Crystal manifests its power through her glowing ass cheeks so the bar FF you had to clear was pretty low but all the new PS1 era fans who were clamoring for edgy sword boy content had yet to really be sated in any meaningful way and thus they were primed to reject this cutesy cartoon about a pair of precocious kids and their pet Chocobo looking for their lost parents out of hand even if it's too supporting pretty boys do get some very solid brooding in before it's over I will not be coming at this anime from that edgy Millennial FF Fanboy angle because in my eyes Final Fantasy represents such a wide range of Concepts Aesthetics and above all creative risks that the only really wrong way to adapt it would be to follow an extremely safe and boring episodic formula that said while you could theoretically turn a final fantasy anime into pretty much anything you can imagine if you were a Japanese game exec at the turn of the Millennium look into internationally multimedia franchiseify your brand there was only one thing you realistically would imagine and that thing was Pokemon back in 1997 ff7 ran neck and neck with Nintendo's new monster battle in Behemoth as Japan and indeed the world's best-selling game but by 1999 Square was being outsold by you know a little bit and the market saturating Synergy that Pokemon's Saturday morning cartoon had with the games and toys and cards was clearly a huge part of why so clearly to save the lagging sales of each now annual sequel Final Fantasy had to have its own weekly series about relatable kids going on adventures with an adorable yellow mascot where each episode would also serve to highlight one of the be many cool monster buddies that final fantasy players could summon to help them with their own quests at home and ffu would go one step further than Pokemon by showing you monsters that looked exactly kind of sort of like the ones you'd find in the games thanks to the bleeding edge power of computer Graphics Gonzo digimation was one of the earliest pioneers of CGI and TV anime using the tech to do things that simply weren't possible before the turn of the Millennium in shows that as early as 2003's Last Exile have held up surprisingly well and they made Final Fantasy Unlimited in 2000s one so [Music] yeah but okay well obviously that looks real bad today it is important to consider this anime in the context of its time when it was still really [ __ ] ugly I mean remember this thing was made for Final Fantasy fans and inevitably they were gonna compare all that to all this stuff that square did in a game that same year not that you even need such bleeding edge Graphics comparisons when the anime also got dunked on a whole generation Ago by Final Fantasy 9 and arguably eight hindsight is 20 20 though and at the start of 2001 Square was so confident in this thing that they ordered a full Year's worth of 52 episodes right off the bat which the eagle-eyed among you might have noticed this box contains uh less than that of that's because Square lost that confidence pretty quick when Spirits within bombed at the box office and bailed on the anime halfway through with what little money they had left the show's ratings did start off on a promising enough note that ADV snatched up the license immediately and was reportedly considering it for a run on American TV but by the time they finally got around to actually dropping these DVDs in May of 2003. you could hear them cutting their losses in the dubbing booth in real time this you changed you got new clothes you like yeah aren't they great that's not fair why do you get a change and I don't Chocobo says that clean hair tastes good still when you start watching the series you can see why people thought it had potential even through all the terrible CGI the first scene in particular is genuinely thrilling and intriguing a mysterious pillar of Darkness appears out of nowhere in the Sea of Japan so large it's visible from the streets of Busan and Vladivostok and even the mountains of rural China this catches the attention of a science guy and his pregnant science wife Mary shouldn't be out here in your condition but Joe this is the first phenomenon like this in all of history I'm well aware of that but the pair then bear witness as a hideous CGI Dragon emerges from the rift to battle another equally hideous CGI dragon as well as some hideous CGI warplanes and boats and a couple nicely drawn ones all of which are quickly smushed by the mysterious monsters right before they destroy each other credits roll then we're introduced to our guide fabula a mysterious lady in a mysterious clamshell who will mysteriously fill about 45 seconds of each episode's Air Time by recapping stuff and setting up the title card then the actual story picks up some 10 years in the future in a world clearly shaken but not ended by that inciting Kaiju fight a pair of fraternal twins I and you hayakawa make their way down to a derelict subway station to catch a magical midnight train ride to Wonderland the world that they're missing parents the science couple from the intro discovered beyond that black pillar and where the kids believe they've disappeared to once more once aboard they made this not at all suspicious lady named Lisa who's definitely not a spy sent to find the professor's hayakawa just a totally normal girl looking for her totally normal lost boyfriend hence why she totally doesn't start making doe eyes at Vincent Valentine's hotter edgier cousin Kaze the second they find him brooding in a tangle of vines in the middle of a city made of plants and bugs at the other end of that subway line but even if she was lying and did catch feelings just then there's hardly any time to flirt before a Sinister flying juicer descends from the sky to attack does somebody know is this covid related and if it is what do we do about it that Crystal then turns into a big wobbly mushroom monster that strikes out with an extremely suggestive protrusion which Lisa deflects with her canned attack animation that only makes it matter though so it engorges itself into an even bigger and wobblier earthworm gym type thing that chases them for a couple seconds until Kaze pops back up to take care of it with his canned attack animation the Magan soil is my power which involves substantially more bad CGI than any other canned animation and is also substantially longer taking up a full minute of every episode in which he uses it which is every episode there is some variation in the color of the bullets he loads into the gun which then in turn produce a variety of iconic Final Fantasy summons and some of those even do interesting things like compressing the space around an infinitely regenerating enemy to make him disappear but like ninety percent of them do the same thing which is throw a particle effect that the monster of the week until it dies which will happen to every monster every week because minus those first 10 minutes of plot setup the story I just summarized is the story of every single episode of this show well episode 2 adds one more ingredient to the formula a cutaway to the evil baby-faced Earl Tyrant eating some fancy anime food as he recites a first take evil monologue at his evil henchman oh my God can create order you understand that means me am I right here they don't know anything and mumbles his way through the week's evil plot back to business about this Underground it's those annoying ingrates right which usually fills at least a couple minutes between the kids walking around the weird place the weird Subway brought them to this week talking about how weird it is and them being chased around that weird place by a weird monster until kaze's special move comes off its cooldown sometimes they'll also fill Time by flashing back to the one time a lady held kaze's hand and then his whole world got exploded for a couple seconds of Lisa being homesick or maybe the kids bickering about something inconsequential but yeah believe it or not in the last five minutes I have already described like 75 percent of this anime and then another 10 is just Exposition about Wonderland which as it turns out is made up of bits of other worlds that were eaten by this malignant entity called chaos which is the true form of the Earl also a long time ago there was this other big monster called Omega that destroyed a bunch of stuff but then got broken into pieces and the Earl wants to collect those pieces so he can eat them and become more powerful because you see um Mega pieces are one of several extremely potent energy sources that exist in Wonderland alongside soil they crystallize Souls of dead things and elenium which permeates the water and makes all the magitek ships go there's also a concentrated form of Millennium called Flying water that's needed to make airships go and then Cloud Stripes even more emo cousin McKenzie breathes out this magic substance called Mist that he can use to summon a mistragon in a slightly different way from how his rival Kaze summons stuff with soil also Lisa uses a martial art called Keegan which draws on the Life Energy of the world around her notice how it took me like a minute to explain all that the show stretches that exposition to over an hour and trust me I didn't leave much out if you're lucky there will maybe also be like one small scene per episode that advances the plot in some nominal way for instance in episode 2 chubby the cute Chocobo that showed up for 10 seconds last episode to chew on Ice pigtails formally joins the party so he can repeat that deeply unfunny gag in every subsequent episode often multiple times per episode laughs in episode 3 fabula makes her one in-story appearance to give I this magic mustache bag that basically makes anything the writers needed to have than in episode 4 they meet comadine a group of underground Rebels opposing the Earl Tyrant who will go on to fill most of the Supporting Cast roles in future episodes whenever the show needs them most of them are literally faceless grunts but four have exactly one personality trait and one recurring gag mustache Commander man is a big dork but then plays it off like he's cool to impress the ladies Sid the inventor constantly brags about what a genius he is and names all his inventions after girls between Exposition dumps the hot lady commander of the faceless grunts likes to eat frogs and bugs but also has a secret girly side and the one grunt who actually has a face likes to eat inanimate objects and always gets a bad feeling right before the bad guys show up a little later on they also meet Lou lupus a mysterious girl who spends like a whole episode teasing out this dark secret she has that would make everyone hate her which is that she can turn into a guru Man by looking in a mirror which she thinks is just super embarrassing but the kids think it's super cool so they just became best friends and then her whole thing becomes making goo goo eyes at Kaze and busting out her canned attack animation to stop the villains from using their canned attack animations on him in the middle of his can't attack animation and that's probably the most complex character Arc in the whole anime another episode is just straight up a Shameless rip-off of Pikachu's goodbye with the Chocobo interrupted by a couple minutes of shamelessly recycled mushroom monster animations from episode 1 which then ends with of course the Chocobo coming back but now he's got a power up that lets him fly and more importantly fill another 30 seconds or so of air time whenever needed with his new canned transformation animation but no matter how many canned animations they give the other characters the show always falls back on Kaze doing the thing soil is his power in the rain soil is his power on a train soil is his power underground soil is his power in a town soil is his power on a cliff soil is his power on another Cliff soil is his power on another other Cliff soil is his power in a skiff well actually he destroys the skiff with his power which is soil by the way but that didn't fit the rhyme scheme there is this one early-ish episode that does seem like it might break the formula where the gang is stuck exploring this weird Mansion chubby even gets a new gag where instead of chewing on eyes hair he hamster bananas a dead pepper and then runs around real fast because it's so hot which they do kind of wear out before the episode's even over and also he still chews on her hair but still the whole time Kaze is nowhere in sight so when the horny bisexual monster Flower Lady ambushes them in the basement and threatens to quote hug hug them to death you start thinking that maybe finally they'll come up with a different solution to a problem for once but then at the last second she's like oh wait a sec before I murder you I gotta check on what just popped through my magic portal that summons random things from random places and do you want to guess which of the literally infinite possible things is behind that door I'll give you a hint he's got a power and it's soil The Fury that levels everything to the ground storm blue the essence then races all color Ash Gray the spirit that drops into Infinite Darkness silence lack I'm not on you that's almost it takes 15 episodes for the formula to change in any way when the kids are taken aboard the rebel underground submarine and that submarine is subsequently trapped traveling through a Magic Cube maze made of weird and unique pocket Dimensions called the ocean puzzle which is different from traveling between weird and unique parts of Wonderland on a train because it's a submarine now also The Supporting Cast is more consistently around to fill more time with each of their one character gags and because each cube of the ocean puzzle is a magical riddle sometimes they have to do things other than fight to win like stand around flapping their lips for 15 minutes while a mermaid puts them through a quiz game where she's obviously cheating and the answer is to actually not answer her questions and just say hey you're obviously cheating which makes her try to kill them anyway so she has to be stopped with a summon but hey this time Lisa does the summoning with her canned animation progress address there's also the one where SIDS turned into a frog and has to run around the submarine looking for a way to turn back before it sinks getting into hijinks like accidentally catching the commander naked in the shower or the one where I accidentally summons a Cactuar from her magic mustache bag and the kids have to chase it around the submarine getting into hijinks like accidentally catching the commander naked in the shower also even after all that recycling the cactuar episode still caps off with a the soil charge Triad to use on you has been decided as do like at least half of all the other ocean puzzle episodes but there is a little more variety here and also some recognizable Final Fantasy mascots like cactuar and then in the very next episode a Moogle cosplaying is Kaze almost as if the animators were shouting hey Final Fantasy fans look things you recognize please start watching the show again before it's canceled but a alas they did not and after what you could call a three-part finale if you want to be generous alas it was in part one the gang finally reaches the source of the flying water taros where they're reunited with Lou Who went off on her own to find Kaze because she lacks the pattern recognition skills to understand he was inevitably gonna show up in the next episode then they'd walk around for a bit commenting on how weird that place is until one of the big bads shows up prompting Kaze to do the thing but then the big bad corrupts the thing to make it destroy all the flying water instead so they can't make an Airship anymore but then Cloud strife's emo cousin immediately shows up to do his thing and stop that because the Earl also needs the flying water for reasons that are never actually explained this causes Kaze to pick a fight with McKenzie in part two because he always fights McKenzie whenever he sees him and then in the middle of that fight you gets kidnapped and brought to the Earl's Fortress where their parents have been mind control to think they're pastry chefs and also forget that they have kids which makes you very sad well not you you will be staring blankly at the screen the whole time this is happening I mean you the character yeah you get it meanwhile McKenzie finally reveals that he was a good guy who was spying on the Earl all along and the only reason he fought Kaze all those times was to stop him from unknowingly feeding chaos with his energy by uh fighting maybe that plan needed some work then he goes off to fight his old allies and even beats one of them but he can't beat the all-powerful Earl who floats out of the ship in a Frieza chair to laugh maniacally and then turn into whatever the [ __ ] this is in preparation for an epic battle against all the heroes but the show was like really running out of time by then so the next episode just skips over that battle entirely and cuts to everyone tied up in his lair where he dumps all their Mist bottles and soil bullets into the void and also the evil Takashi murakami flower eats the magic mustache bag so now they have no way left to stop him from monologuing for 10 straight minutes about how he's gonna eat the pieces of Omega and also the kids who are actually magical beings from Wonderland that the hayakawas adopted after Mom had a miscarriage so he can get even more powerful and then eat Earth but then at the last second the twins parents remember they love them and get unmind controlled so they unthrow the lever on the big evil science machine and everyone starts throwing canned animations at the Earl again but of course there's only one canned animation that'll actually work and they're still out of soil bullets but soil rhymes with Soylent which is people so the Moogle Lou and Kaze all sacrifice themselves to load the magon one last time which Lisa then fires off destroying chaos at long last and then it's just kind of over and what do you suppose happened to our Intrepid Travelers perhaps someday I will tell you when we meet once again which to the creative team's credit they did find a way to make happen eventually in the form of some drama CDs a couple web novels a half manga Half Light novel thing a mobile game and a hybrid visual novel card game activity center for personal computers but all that stuff was exclusive to Japan and I don't really see much point in summarizing the English fan summaries that are already out there so if you're curious as to what happens next you can just Google it I don't see why you would be though unless you're the sort of imaginary guy who always wished Pokemon was just the bits where Team Rocket gets sent blasting off again by Thunderbolts specifically but with all that said I do still think this is an anime that every Final Fantasy fan should watch so they can stop complaining so much about every other Final Fantasy thing that's not like their personal favorite Final Fantasy thing on Jeff THU soil is my power and the soil Triad to use on you has been decided

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 424,816

Keywords: Mother's Basement, Anime, Anime Analysis, final fantasy, final fantasy anime, final fantasy 16, final fantasy VII, final fantasy 7, final fantasy XVI, Final Fantasy Unlimited, final fantasy spirits within, pokemon, digimon, isekai, isekai anime, cursed anime, anime roast, cursed, squaresoft, square enix, gonzo, gonzo anime, gonzo digimation, pokemon clones, master of ragnarok, maburaho

Id: Xoa75JrWUdc

Length: 25min 29sec (1529 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023