11 June 2005 | ureshinamida
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Mediocre and a shame on the FF series
I couldn't wait to take a look at Final Fantasy Unlimited after reading the article in Newtype magazine. Silly me, I assumed that the games' great characters, interesting plots and beautiful art would be present in the anime. The number of positive reviews for Final Fantasy Unlimited on IMDb.com is mind-blowing. Granted I've only watched the first episode, but it was repulsive and filled with clichés. Normally I'm the type of person to stay with an anime long after it goes bad, but lately I've completely lost my patience. I guess my main disappointment is that I expected it to live up to the games.
In all fairness, it was brash of me to drop this series after the first episode. But you have to be one hell of an anime to make a person go through these stages in twenty minutes:
1. "Well, this is alright."
2. "What?"
3. "Ugh! Wait, maybe it's a comedy!" (And it worked alright as an unintentional comedy)
4. "Life is too short." *Fast-forward, peek at next episode, turn off TV*
*Shrug* And I'm no FF expert... But I notice that in the beginning of the FF games I've played, you usually see the main character doing *something* really *cool* or nice. Here, we just have a bunch of random people freaking out over a huge light in the sky. So what? Who cares? Then we meet our protagonists.
The characters are nothing new. The bad-ass of the series, whose name I didn't learn because he's *so* MYSTERIOUS, seemed like he was crammed with every trait a dark loner could ever want: He has a dark cloak, long matted hair, unusual tattoos, broken glasses that obscure one eye AND amnesia! The twins, who appear to be the protagonists, are annoying even for anime kids. Some of their lines seemed to be ripped out of a bad fan fiction: "You're the ghost here lady!" "Ai! Remember your manners! Sorry, my name is..." And last but not least is a large-busted female we meet in the first episode, who the girl twin hates for some reason. When we first meet her, she speaks a few cryptic lines into a cellphone. In retrospect, this could have made for an interesting character. But somehow I completely forgot about that. I never attached to the characters because nothing about them sticks out to me.
The animation was as mediocre as the characters. I mean, sure it's colorful and digital, but the designs just lack that spark. I know that every additional line adds up real quickly in animation and that a TV show could never have the detail of even the FF sketches, but this is *really* minimalist. I've heard comparisons to Digimon's animation; all I can say is that even that had more detail than this. And besides, the Digimon designs always struck me as full of energy; these just look... typical. Maybe the lion's share of the animation budget went to the crappy 3-D special effects?
I dunno. Maybe I have really bad taste and no patience. But I would only recommend watching it so you're familiar with what people might bring up in conversation.
