Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete SCENE CHANGES COMPILATION. *SPOILERS*

[Theozilla]

Resurrecting this thread because I just noticed for the first time that in the update to Advent Children Complete, the 500 years later scene with Red XIII and his cubs, the smoke plumes (which are even mentioned in the original Advent Children script) have ended up removed in the Complete version of the scene (presumably by accident?). There's also a few other differences in where bodies of water/rivers are placed in parts of the overgrown Midgar landscape.

Screen-caps for comparison

 

[Rydeen]

Oh wow, I originally thought the author intent was that humanity was probably extinct by then.

 

[null]

Oh wow, I originally thought the author intent was that humanity was probably extinct by then.

Kitase once said “In a way, I consider that epilogue to be the true happy ending of FFVII. Well, it’s a happy ending even though all the humans were destroyed (laughs).” The punchline: he said it in the October 2005 issue of EGM, just after AC had been released.

Personally I always thought it was up to the viewer to decide.

 

[Ite]

The ambiguity is nice. I think it’s one of the more enduring things about FFVII in general.

As a former “Extincter” I have softened in my old age and believe that, if there were a Holy spell, it would change humanity, not erase them. That we could, by some magical turn of the wheel, become a healthy part of the ecosystem again.

But then again, the more I look at life, the more I think about survival… consumption… sometimes it feels like all life would be a cancer, if not kept in check by predators.

 

[Theozilla]

Oh wow, I originally thought the author intent was that humanity was probably extinct by then.

Kitase once said “In a way, I consider that epilogue to be the true happy ending of FFVII. Well, it’s a happy ending even though all the humans were destroyed (laughs).” The punchline: he said it in the October 2005 issue of EGM, just after AC had been released.

Personally I always thought it was up to the viewer to decide.

According to Nojima at least, the ambiguity of humanity’s survival was basically an accident due to the Art Director Yūsuke Naora forgetting to add the smoke in the OG.

Full translated interview from 2003 here: https://www.shinraarchaeology.com/resources/article_pdfs/dreamaga_oct03.pdf

The ambiguity is nice. I think it’s one of the more enduring things about FFVII in general.

As a former “Extincter” I have softened in my old age and believe that, if there were a Holy spell, it would change humanity, not erase them. That we could, by some magical turn of the wheel, become a healthy part of the ecosystem again.

But then again, the more I look at life, the more I think about survival… consumption… sometimes it feels like all life would be a cancer, if not kept in check by predators.

Well think of it this way, the threat of cancer is predicated on there being life in the first place (cancer is essentially life when it’s unregulated and out of control growth, when our immune system isn’t properly recognizing and destroying the thousands of glitchy cells we produce daily). The interdependencies and interactions of life, both conflict and cooperation, is what allows the diversity of life to exist in the first place. For living things, harmony can only arise from the cacophony of conflict and cooperation, the beauty and brutality of life are inseparable from each other.