Final Fantasy: Unlimited Phase 1

Reviewed By: Carla Land

ADV Films DVD

Review based on first disc (episodes 1-4)

Rating 12+

What it’s (basically) all about: Ai and Yu are twelve year old twins, and their scientist parents have disappeared into Wonderland through a dark vortex that magically appeared near Tokyo before the twins were born. Now on a mission to find their mom and dad, the twins bravely (or foolishly) venture into Wonderland on their own. Along the way they meet up with people who help them (some willingly, some by chance) and have adventures that would make Lewis Carroll proud.

Nitty Gritty: This show is based on the ever popular Final Fantasy video games. (For those of you not familiar with these, they are a role playing game in which you battle your way across a make believe world in order to save it from ultimate destruction. They are also very heavily story based, and while the game play remains the same, the stories have little to do with each other except for some characters that come back again and again.) Several elements of the game are apparent at the beginning of the series, including the music and the chocobos (big bird like animals that people can ride on.) Viewers familiar with the game are going to feel “in” on the joke.

There’s no gory violence, but the Japanese army gets annihilated by monsters that come out of the dark vortex at the very beginning of episode one. All the violence after that is almost a carbon copy of the game- it takes four minutes for the good guys to pull off their “special moves” using the same animated sequence every episode and the bad guys are clearly bad guys who are usually using a monster of some kind to do their bidding. In fact, most of the bad guys don’t even get killed. They end up back with The Earl (their leader) with little more than egg on their face.

The language is very mild. There have been no four letter words, no innuendo, and no offensive language.

The characters don’t get a lot of time to get developed. Ai and Yu are close, since they are twins, and they have definite character details. One is a little worry wart boy dressed in shades of blue, the other an act-before-you-think girl dressed in shades of pink. Lisa and “that guy,” the two people they meet up with first, are still a mystery, though Lisa is from Tokyo and “that guy” has a bionic Magun attached to his arm.

The animation itself is a hybrid of 2D hand-drawn and 3D computer animation.

Special features include clean opening/ closing animation, production sketches and backgrounds, preliminary drawings, DVD credits and commentary on episode one by two of the voice actors. Previews included on the disc are for Steam Detectives, Southern Cross (some of you may recognize this as one of the series used to create Robotech), Fullmetal Panic, Rune Soldier (big ears for elves and long flowing hair for all), Raxephon (mecha with creepy porcelain doll faces), and Noir.

Survey says: This series can be comfortably housed in your teen collections, though younger children may like it more. The violence is enough that small children may be frightened, and as of episode four there are still some characters that we know so little about that they may end up being bad guys after all.

Personal Ad: The animation didn’t work for me. The 2D was poorly done and the 3D looks way out of place. Also, I’ve watched my husband play most of the 11 versions of Final Fantasy that have been released, and I got sick of the four-minute special move about five years ago. It’s a long sequence, and I think the time would be better used to develop the characters.