I Wish FF7 Remake Part 3 Wouldn’t Worry About Advent Children

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part 3 has a lot of weight on its shoulders, and if anything could be removed to help lighten the load, I’d vote for any and all obligations to FF7: Advent Children. As FF7‘s foray into the world of film, Advent Children has plenty of ardent fans, and I have nothing in particular against the movie. As ludicrous as its biggest moments of fan service can be, they’re characterized by the bleeding heart sincerity that defined much of the 2000s work by director Tetsuya Nomura and writer Kazushige Nojima.

At the same time, I’m not particularly concerned with Advent Children‘s status as franchise canon, an issue where my opinion and the perspective of the architects behind various Compilation of FF7 works differ. While there’s no particular reason to believe that FF7 Remake Part 3 will be particularly focused on anything relating to Advent Children, it’s also clear that the game and film will be designed to be compatible on some level. That might only mean that Part 3 will follow in the footsteps of the original game, but I’d be a bit disappointed if it means anything more.

FF7 Remake Part 3 Will Link Up With Advent Children

The Remixed Story Is Looping Back Around

At the moment, the big phrase connecting FF7 Remake Part 3 and Advent Children is “link up,” a choice of words repeated (at least in translation) by both Tetsuya Nomura and FF7 Rebirth producer Yoshinori Kitase. While Nomura’s original statement came without much elaboration, at least as reported by The Guardian, Kitase softened the implications a bit when speaking to GamesRadar.

“We are finally going to link up with Advent Children, that is going to be part of canon. The overall storyline, the developments, will not go wildly out in a way that will not add up to Advent Children in the end. I don’t think anyone wanted that, that’s not what we’re looking to create here. [But] to make sure it doesn’t become stale and people know exactly where it’s going, [that it] doesn’t just follow the original word for word, we add in extra elements which add that little bit of doubt. Getting the right balance of that is so key. Ultimately, we’re not trying to change the Final Fantasy 7 story into something really different. The overall balance wouldn’t really allow for that anyway.” —Yoshinori Kitase

I have no issues with Kitase’s way of explaining things here — whatever the team might have planned for the ending, I see no real reason that it would need to directly conflict with the events of Advent Children. As Kitase mentions, most fans probably aren’t looking for an overhaul that radical. The assertions that the stories will link up still give me some pause, however, as I’d argue that should be just about the last of FF7 Remake Part 3‘s concerns.

FF7: Advent Children Isn’t Beloved For Its Narrative

A Rough Story With A Striking Style

I don’t have the connection to Advent Children that FF7 fans who saw it in 2005 do, but I also didn’t come into it with any pre-determined cynicism. I undertook my primary FF7 odyssey in the early months of 2024, playing through the original game in January and FF7 Remake in February to prepare for the launch of Rebirth at launch. Conveniently, Advent Children squeezed in a theatrical re-release right ahead of Rebirth‘s launch, so I rolled out with some friends and a t-shirt of Cloud standing outside McDonald’s to see how the story ended.

Advent Children‘s theatrical re-release featured the extended cut of the film, which is 26 minutes longer and, to my understanding, smooths over some of the most disconnected elements in the original cut.

I wouldn’t say watching Advent Children was a bad time, and parts of the film stick out as memorable. Setting aside any qualms about the further cutesification of war criminals, the Turks are a lot of fun, and the very literal depiction of the party members raising Cloud to greater heights is as charming as it is ridiculous.

As a complete experience, however, Advent Children didn’t entirely come together for me. Having already played FF7 Remake, the thrill of seeing all of FF7‘s beloved characters in smudgily upscaled HD didn’t have the same effect that I imagine hit people in 2005. It’s still got a lot of visual style, but there’s no shortage of Hong Kong action films that make their flights of stylistic fancy feel more consistently impactful.

Even if I didn’t love it, I’m fine with the idea that Advent Children‘s sensory experience more than makes up for any narrative defects. The story, however, really does share Kingsglaive: FF15‘s sense of being an overblown video game cutscene. Despite an attempt at balancing heavy themes with fun moments, many individual scenes ring hollow, especially as the film struggles through contrived dialogue and overly simplified takes on the characters. As a post-script to a game with an ambiguous, weighty ending focused on the planet at large, it’s a relatively trivial take that misses the most compelling ideas.

FF7 Remake Part 3 Should Focus On The Main Story

Advent Children Shouldn’t Matter That Much

FF7 Remake and Rebirth have already borrowed and refined Advent Children‘s main strength, taking a dynamic visual approach that blends detailed realism with stylized character models. While this influence has some downsides, particularly in the heightened presentation of Sephiroth that can sometimes feel more silly than intimidating, I’m happy to give Advent Children its flowers for laying that groundwork.

Discussions of the games and film linking up, however, move things squarely to the narrative realm, where I’d rather avoid any particular overtures at connection. By nature, FF7 Remake Part 3‘s ending has two massive obligations — honoring the original game and finding a satisfying conclusion for the changes introduced in Remake and Rebirth. I couldn’t care less whether it leads into Advent Children, and any material ultimately included for that purpose would probably be better allocated to the aforementioned obligations.

At this point in the Compilation of FF7, the idea of a canon is starting to feel like a weight hanging over the franchise. I’m all for respecting the original game as the ultimate canon, but I think it’s perfectly fine for things like Advent Children or Dirge of Cerberus to exist without being treated as inalienable in-universe fact. The FF7 Remake project has remixed things while continually gesturing at a sense of canon through meta-commentary elements, and while this can be interesting at times, it also hampers some of its strongest emotional moments by burying them within these layers.

I might be worried about nothing, as the connection between FF7 Remake Part 3 and Advent Children might only be that they don’t contradict in an entirely natural way. Like Kitase said, it’s all about the balance. If the bittersweet ending of FF7 gets saddled with a post-credits scene about Advent Children‘s Geostigma, however, I’ll probably be disappointed. Advent Children is fine, but a movie best described as entertaining doesn’t need to dictate anything about the ending to a massive saga in Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part 3.

Sources: The Guardian, GamesRadar