Like her profile snippet says, she has a rare gift for sorcery, so I'm assuming that means she can use magic without the King or the crystal. So it makes sense they'd want her out of the picture.
Is this the reason? That's part of the movie I was kind of confused about. Why did Crowe get send out exactly and why was she killed? Given that the entire organization was so compromised - not to mention the Captain himself gave her the orders - it seemed like there had to be some reason to send her just to kill her.
If that is the reason, the movie could have said that...at all.
Like her profile snippet says, she has a rare gift for sorcery, so I'm assuming that means she can use magic without the King or the crystal. So it makes sense they'd want her out of the picture.
Is this the reason? That's part of the movie I was kind of confused about. Why did Crowe get send out exactly and why was she killed? Given that the entire organization was so compromised - not to mention the Captain himself gave her the orders - it seemed like there had to be some reason to send her just to kill her.
If that is the reason, the movie could have said that...at all.
I don't know if that's the reason, but that's what I interpreted from the information I was given on screen. King Regis said he sent one of his Glaive get Luna from Tenebrae; maybe Drautos volunteered Crowe for the job because a) she's a woman and Luna may feel more comfortable traveling with her, and b) he wants to kill two birds with one stone and get a powerful Glaive member out of the way.
That's just how I interpreted that whole situation after watching it for the second time.
Like her profile snippet says, she has a rare gift for sorcery, so I'm assuming that means she can use magic without the King or the crystal. So it makes sense they'd want her out of the picture.
Is this the reason? That's part of the movie I was kind of confused about. Why did Crowe get send out exactly and why was she killed? Given that the entire organization was so compromised - not to mention the Captain himself gave her the orders - it seemed like there had to be some reason to send her just to kill her.
If that is the reason, the movie could have said that...at all.
I don't know if that's the reason, but that's what I interpreted from the information I was given on screen. King Regis said he sent one of his Glaive get Luna from Tenebrae; maybe Drautos volunteered Crowe for the job because a) she's a woman and Luna may feel more comfortable traveling with her, and b) he wants to kill two birds with one stone and get a powerful Glaive member out of the way.
That's just how I interpreted that whole situation after watching it for the second time.
Is this the reason? That's part of the movie I was kind of confused about. Why did Crowe get send out exactly and why was she killed? Given that the entire organization was so compromised - not to mention the Captain himself gave her the orders - it seemed like there had to be some reason to send her just to kill her.
If that is the reason, the movie could have said that...at all.
I don't know if that's the reason, but that's what I interpreted from the information I was given on screen. King Regis said he sent one of his Glaive get Luna from Tenebrae; maybe Drautos volunteered Crowe for the job because a) she's a woman and Luna may feel more comfortable traveling with her, and b) he wants to kill two birds with one stone and get a powerful Glaive member out of the way.
That's just how I interpreted that whole situation after watching it for the second time.
anyway i also have non-ass related thoughts sometimes and here they are
i wouldn't consider myself super up to date on ffxv's story (i played the type-0 demo which barely had any story, watched three episodes of the anime, and know the basic gist of the game's plot as 'prince who's kingdom is attack on a road-trip-quest for reasons idk'), but i didn't find it that hard to follow the film. maybe knowing more would enhance the experience but i think i got by fine with limited knowledge.
it does look amazing, though. i made me want an artbook for the film (the film collections box set has a booklet with art from this and brotherhood but idk about that 'booklet' bit).
i thought the 'celebrity' cast were good. regis did seem to age a lot in 12 years, idk i guess people draining magic from you takes its toll. i wasn't that off put by lena headey's voice for luna, but i wasn't thinking much of her age and don't know how old she is meant to be (is noct about 20? i thought luna looked older than him in the flashback anyway and lena's voice is nice and i don't know my point anymore. probably ideally she could have sounded younger, although i thought it already sounded like she was trying to age down her voice. aaron paul did fine but i have no strong opinions on it. but sean bean is from my hometown so i have to support him in all his endeavours. (j/k but i thought he was good)
the other voices though, they were servicable to 'meh'. libertus was all over the place but that's been covered already. it felt like he was putting on an accent at times but he wasn't sure what accent it was meant to be (i thought he might have been putting on that slightly muffled tone of voice as well but listening to the actor speak that's just he's actual voice, sorry). i assumed he would be a side character to the extent that luche? was in the final film, but he had a pretty major role and that voice was everywhere on the map and a few points beyond. he should have stuck to his regular speaking accent, because it doesn't seem like they have a voice director putting as much thought into the distribution of accents as ffxii's did.
i mean, libertus and nyx are from the same town i think? but libertus has what i guess was some kind of united-kingdom-based accent and nyx is an american. regis and lena's luna sound english but noct is american? (i think, i haven't heard much of his english voice). ignis? from the end being agonisingly british, though i've not seen his backstory anime episode yet so i don't know if he's meant to be from wherever-the-english-people-are-from-in-this-world. also, i haven't heard game luna's english voice but is she going to still have an english accent? not even starting on the bad guys, just. get your accents together, square. at least it's not dirge of cerberus levels of 'but what if they had THIS random accent!'
i felt like some of the actors were just trying too hard to put on voices where it didn't work for me. (i don't think i could play the english version of the game from what i heard of ignis so far, i find his voice too off-putting to go 40~80 hours with it.) i would like to give the japanese dub a go next, even if only because it seems to maintain the same actors as the game except for luna.
i had assumed that crowe, being the only other woman in the film, would have a larger role than a little battle and a bit of banter then getting killed off in a scene you don't even see. there were a bunch of characters that i expected not to have much of a role when i saw their pictures and one sentence of character bio on the official site, but not crowe. so i was surprised to see her die and actually stay dead, but she hadn't really done enough to make it a meaningful death? she got jihl'd. it kind of makes me wish for a novel or something to go into some pointless backstory
i didn't notice the product placement (forgot about the audis and tbh didn't even notice because i know shit about cars), until the beats logo appeared and i had to go back and ask myself is that what the beats logo looks like or is it just similar? then i thought i saw an uniqlo sign. but i missed the japan air/american express stuff until the credits. tbh i didn't think the product placement was that intrusive but i kind of wish they had avoided companies and brands with names based on real countries. is there a japan and america next to lucis and niflheim and all these other fantasy kingdoms? 'cause if not, find a different brand pls.
i enjoyed the action scenes but some were hard to follow with all the warping around, namely the final sequences in insomnia and the airship with ultros (though i was happy to see ultros since i watched a tv ad on square's youtube channel and here's a quick shot of an octopus and i was like, is that ultros? i kind of miss him not having a silly voice, though).
not sure how to compose my thoughts on the story. the script could be really cheesy at times and there were certain things i could guess would happen. you knew that jerky kingsglaive guy was going to turn traitor. but i wasn't expecting the captain to be a traitor, or regis to die (don't know if that's common game knowledge or not since i haven't kept up with it). i wasn't expecting a complete resolution to everything since i knew there was a game to go with this. i enjoyed it well enough, it wasn't a mind blowing story and there's things that feel someone lacking but it was entertaining.
i've been watching a bunch of cg movies lately to appreciate the technical aspect, and for that it is pretty amazing.
I keep meaning to put some thoughts down about this, but I feel like everything I'm thinking has been said by others.
It is not a good movie. Like, at all. XD It's beautiful to look at; the voice work is great (Aaron Paul and Sean Bean were obviously great, and I actually really liked Luna's voice for her; even Libertus didn't bother me); the music is great and does its job; the character and art designs are fantastic; and the fights are entertaining as fuck. But it is not a good movie.
And that's perfectly alright.
I didn't expect it to be. It was what I expected and what I hoped for. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I loved that it catered to established FF fans. It's honestly more enjoyable (in the sense of inviting repeat viewings) than either Advent Children or The Spirits Within.
I could really give a shit (but I don't) that
Ultros is just randomly on that airship. It's easy enough to form a reason like "He's extra cargo to wreak havoc on Insomnia" or "It's a reference to the Empire from FFVI sending Ultros to the Returner's airship" -- and it's easier still to just enjoy that it's fucking Ultros.
There are some things I wish were done a little differently, and I feel like there were some plot threads left dangling (e.g.
what happened to the gate guardsman who came to Nyx's aid? Should we just assume he died? And what's the full story behind the General Glauca identity? And is Drautos dead now? I guess we now have an explanation for Crowe being singled out for assassination, but it really should have been detailed in the movie proper
I dunno about that for myself. I mean, beating out the FF7 cast is a tall order for me. But I still definitely enjoyed it, it does get the nod over TSW. Which was easier to follow at the cost of being super predictable.
THere's a lot of ragging on the characters for blaming Regis, and I get it, it's stupid, but there's an element I really enjoyed about it. That Regis, or at least, people's interpretation of Regis, unintentionally sowed the seeds of his own county's demise.
The movie was beating us over the head with the fact that the Kingsglaive isn't satisfied with what is going on, even before the treaty. The first twelve minutes has the "Regis isn't paying us refugees enough" which is a pretty strong signal that they are outsiders, consider themselves outsiders, and kind of are beginning to resent going into these fights.
Regis ends up giving up their home countries. He didn't have a choice, but if you were fighting fucking Diamond weapon and then realized the place you grew up and love was being thrown to the dogs, misplaced anger is bound to happen.
Even Luna's brother, it was stupid to blame Regis, but he was a kid, and he was expecting Regis to save him and his mother, and he ran the fuck away, not even bothering to save him. From a child's eyes, yeah, it could look selfish and cowardly, even if it wasn't.
I like the concept that Regis decisions have a consequence, even if he couldn't help most of it. I like that he wasn't perfect, that he potentially made decisions more for his son at the cost of others, that as much as he is evidently loved, he his loathed for his decisions that had no right answer.
That's interesting, it makes him more compelling, and I would love to see more of him, or at least, exploration of his character through Noctis. A huge part of the story seems to be about their relationship, so hopefully he's satisfyingly complex.
Regis was the best character of the entire movie.
I think I left the movie having better feelings about Luna, who I didn't care either way for. Stella originally was said to be like Celes, and if we are going to continue on comparisons, Luna is a good mix of Garnet and Yuna.
The unfortunate thing is that I don't see much room for character development. It seems like she's already a finished character, with not much else to go. I mean, she's a good character, but unless we see some other side to her, I think she's meant to be flat and undynamic. A shame, because I found her really likeable.
Yeah, Advent Children was a very mopy movie, which makes sense and all. It was very Cloud centric movie, and more importantly, a Cloud cenctric, character study the way the Novellas were for all the other characters.
I liked it of course, because I love all (Most) nostalgia fueled stories, but as a mess as it was, Kingsglaive is a step towards the right direction. The characterization was definitely better in AC, but AC had the games to fall back on and are definitely meant to be for Cloud's character development, while KG was attempting to introduce all these characters AND the setting AND this background political intrigue story, that was full of holes but make more an interesting backdrop nonetheless.
I mean, I want to write an in-depth post on what I thought about everything that happened, but to do that I'd have to watch it again, and I'd much rather continue playing Mankind Divided in what little free time I have right now.
this isn't in response to anyone i just feel a bit excluded for putting zero effort into my previous posts
I quite liked Luna, but I agree with Splintered ("I think she's meant to be flat and undynamic. A shame"). She does seem quite one-dimensional, but I still like her. But I also feel like it's a very Serah/ Noel in XIII-2 "like". As in, you can't not like her? She has like zero depth of character, but what little she does have is foolproof-ly mildly positive. I have no better way of putting that and it's not just tiredness. Like I want to see more of her and I'm a tiny bit frustrated with how little depth she seems to have (at this point).
Confession:
I read an absolutely huge spoiler re: her by accident and I'm not even going to put it in tags because it's potentially game ruining (and people click tags even when they don't really want spoilers, case in point me), but it's definitely
colouring my opinion of how her character has so far appeared.
Listen I don't want to retread old ground with the "what might have been" (Stella vs. Luna/ Versus vs. XV) argument we had a million pages ago where people were like "omg Lex shut up there's no way to know" and like... OK there's no way to know you totes win, but let's be real for a second and now really examine how different a universe this is from what was originally planned in Versus. Because it is now completely different in tone, in design, in setting. And that's colouring my opinion of certain things, like Luna. Because I look at Luna and think "Stella with the edge sanded off" now that we've had an actual taste of her character. We know nothing about who Stella was supposed to be, I get that. But the tiny glimpses of what we did get in ancient trailers are now far more interesting to me than the Luna we have in Kingsglaive. Again not saying I dislike Luna, but there's a degree of blandness there I just can't shake.
Could be completely different in the game, who knows.
Please do not come for me again for bringing up the tonal shift, I'm not saying XV doesn't have the potential to beat that original whatever-the-fuck. If I have to read another twenty posts about how I'm a dumb shit for thinking the tone of the game has changed I will literally swallow all of the E.coli in work tomorrow just to save myself from having to read them after work tomorrow. Because I am now clairvoyant, or something.
Still 100% more FF7 cast than Kingsglaive
And, having listened to the Case of Shinra audiobook, hot damn if that doesn't add such a layer to that movie.
As for splintered RE: Regis. In TLS being its usual jaded self and shitting all over new stuff, i feel everyone's ignoring the super awesome part that I mentioned in my post. Regis and Not-Ian McClellan's conversation at the treaty signing. So intense. It's not treated like a twist because we all know what's going to happen. It just revels in the tension and it's great. With great vocal performances.
At this point I wouldn't argue against it anymore. It's obvious by now just how much has changed. I miss that darker tone as well tbh. Soldier-impaling and neck-breaking Noctis will be missed. Even the human enemies have been replaced by more family-friendly automatons.
(although Kingsglaive didn't shy away from showing people getting fucked up but eh )
For all we know even Versus under Nomura might have eventually changed a lot from the original trailers, but...
That's Versus XIII's advantage. It does not have to bear the burden of being a finished game and having to live up to anyone's expectations. It will always be a "what if" with countless possibilities and mysteries that inspire excitement and imagination, a forever mythological game made of dreams and fueled by hype.
XV on the other hand will actually have to come out and stand up to scrutiny.
As for splintered RE: Regis. In TLS being its usual jaded self and shitting all over new stuff, i feel everyone's ignoring the super awesome part that I mentioned in my post. Regis and Not-Ian McClellan's conversation at the treaty signing. So intense. It's not treated like a twist because we all know what's going to happen. It just revels in the tension and it's great. With great vocal performances.
To be fair, it's not TLS are full of jaded, bitter old people but the entire FF franchise. Being in a long running JRPG fandom is a journey of bitterness the likes no man should have to shoulder. I'm part of the problem many a time so, oh well.
But I have to agree with you, sometimes it could get a tad overbearing with all the speaking in riddles, but all in all, the scenes where Regis and Niflheim's emperor are interacting were pretty great. It's full of intimidation and hatred all smothered under a layer of feigning politeness. If they wanted to make talking about peace look like a war in of itself, they did a good job.
The weakest Niflheim versus Insomnia scene was probably the first one when they invited the Chancellor just because it was blatantly obvious, but it was still fun to watch. But even that scene where they replace Luna's driver with Nyx was a pretty classy and subtle power play, it just says volumes on how they view each other- more than all the mutterings of "We cannot trust them!"
If I have to read another twenty posts about how I'm a dumb shit for thinking the tone of the game has changed I will literally swallow all of the E.coli in work tomorrow just to save myself from having to read them after work tomorrow.
Still 100% more FF7 cast than Kingsglaive
And, having listened to the Case of Shinra audiobook, hot damn if that doesn't add such a layer to that movie.
It does. AC is flawed, but even if it doesn't itself depict the most interesting sequence of events, it is also an important component in the portrayal of several unassumingly rich characterizations spread across multiple works.
I'm talking about the joy of casual repeat viewings, though. Perhaps it's otherwise for you, but I'm confident I will find more of that joy in watching Kingsglaive again and again in years to come than I have with repeated viewings of AC.
Force said:
As for splintered RE: Regis. In TLS being its usual jaded self and shitting all over new stuff, i feel everyone's ignoring the super awesome part that I mentioned in my post. Regis and Not-Ian McClellan's conversation at the treaty signing. So intense. It's not treated like a twist because we all know what's going to happen. It just revels in the tension and it's great. With great vocal performances.
At this point I wouldn't argue against it anymore. It's obvious by now just how much has changed. I miss that darker tone as well tbh. Soldier-impaling and neck-breaking Noctis will be missed. Even the human enemies have been replaced by more family-friendly automatons.
I think they have a pretty good mix of humans and robots.
I think the plot comes off as predictable because we already had a good sense of how it was going to end. Kingsglaive is a smaller cog in an even larger story. And I guess I'm one of the few that didn't expect much by way of character development because of that. But I had a good sense of how it was going to end before I even came across spoilers by accident on FF Wikia
Though I have to give kudos to Mr. Lith, because when I got him to watch it on our huge flatscreen last night, he predicted
that Luna's rescue mission was a trick to lure them away from Insomnia. What he didn't expect was for most of the Kingsglaive to turn trick while they were there. I did because I had already watched it a few hours ago, and let's be honest--some of the looks the members exchange with each other weren't exactly subtle.
But tbh, I could give a shit. It's not a fucking suspense thriller or a mystery--I don't care that it was a predictable betrayal. It was still an enjoyable movie, at least for me.
Also, why is everyone questioning Ultros being on the fucking ship? Did they not see the fucking monsters at the beginning of the movie? They had to keep 'em somewhere! My guess is Ultros was set loose, either by accident or on purpose.
But I agree with the consensus; Regis was one of the best characters in the film. There were actually two moments in the film that parallel each other that both had my eyes get teary--I'm sure ya'll can guess what they are.
In other words, Regis's mocap/face actor Jon Campling is still a boss. Saw on Twitter today that he wants to get a PS4 so he can watch Kingsglaive at home in HD--and also to play FFXV.
I wanted to make a corny joke about wanting to play with himself, but held back. We as many jokes as I see the Kingsglaive actors make about their characters, I think he would have been a good sport about it.
)
)