I'm gonna double post this in the movie thread and here. So I saw Kingsglaive FFXV tonight. I don't know anything about FFXV. Haven't played any demos, watched any trailers since like it was revealed as Versus and then the revealed as FFXV trailers and that's it. These days I'm generally in media blackout on every videogame, just because I don't care and nothing worse than getting hyped up for a game that ends up sucking. But anyhow, so knowing nothing about FFXV here's my thoughts:
While FFVII Advent Children was a bombastic stupid videogame movie that embraced itself and FF and was all about SUPER MELODRAMATIC slow moments and CRAZY ACTION at ultra-high speed with dramatic orchestra music pounding, Kingsglaive is a very mild low-key videogame cutscene movie. It's a bit odd because the low-key more western cinematic style to it (aka, general lack of melodrama) would make it seem like it'd fit more as a movie, but it just doesn't feel like a movie at all. It feels really close to like the Type-0 opening movie if it was 2 hours long and without the cool "We have arrived" music. Just a bunch of action with no impact, bad editing, and the worst videogame sound effects I've ever heard. Like they get in the car and it sounds like Gran Turismo 3 car sound effects. It doesn't sound like a movie because the sound effects are like gameplay sound effects. It's weird. Also the music not being Shimomura but low-key background movie music really keeps it generic feeling. At least if it had FF style music it'd have its own unique character to it.
The few little bits of character stuff are generally solid. My favorite scene is the ONE melodramatic slow scene in the entire movie where Somnus is playing and the old Versus painting is in the background and it feels nice and character-y and it feels like the stuff I like FF and jrpgs for. But then it quickly gets back into 90 mins of action action action that's for the most part terribly directed/edited with non-stop quick cuts and only the final fight really has decent fight choreography in a Cloud/Sephiroth way.
Story was alright. Honestly, now that I know what FFXV is about, I'm sorta interested because I assume it's an old but workable story of an exiled prince taking back a kingdom. But at the same time the quality of Kingsglaive makes me feel like the execution of the concept is gonna be pretty terrible like Type-0, which also had an interesting story but awful execution of it all. If FFXV is anything like Kingsglaive the general feeling I'm getting is that it's FFXII x Type-0; lots of parts of Kingsglaive felt very Type-0.
Voice acting was a mixed bag. Most of the non-big name actors were total shit anime dub. The most elitist thing I'm ever gonna say about my Japanese is that I'm really glad I became fluent in Japanese before jrpgs started having voice acting because I have no idea how people put up with anime dub acting. Aaron Paul is actually really good! And Lena Headey's quality as well. Sean Bean kinda sucks and his character doesn't emote visually which is weird, so that's disappointing, but on the antagonists the cowboy hat dude actually has a decent dub voice. But then you have the 2ndary characters like white trash Barrett and no-name NPCs who really suck and take you out of the movie when they talk.
Visuals are weird too. Like, you can tell these are video game cutscenes as they're decently above real-time PC/PS4 graphics, but nowhere near the quality of modern CG films. You can see that most of the assets, especially in the environment are seriously in-game PS4 assets. Some of the outdoor locations look really rough and some of the character animations are pretty bad too. Even the lip-synch is off a lot, which gives it more of a dub anime feeling, but I'm under the impression the lip-synch was done to the English voice track. Just feels budget. And then the one seen that is seriously in-game PS4 graphics running on a giant theater screen wow, that looks terrible.
In the end it's not a bad movie, story is ok as a prologue, there's a couple cool scenes and most of the time it's passively enjoyable, but it's not good either and it's never really great like the highs of Advent Children. Kingsglaive abandons its Japanese melodramatic epic FF roots and is the poorer for it. It's the movie equivalent of those last gen Japanese games that tried so hard to westernize for a wider audience. I don't know if this reflects on the game as well, but hopefully not. Also, I never want to see a realistic Ultros again.
