Last Order: Final Fantasy VII

This should be a short one.

Last Order: Final Fantasy VII is an OVA that attempts to flesh out some sequences described in the original game. I had considered attaching this to my Advent Children blog post because it's a fairly short thing, but since I'll be going through as much FF7 as I can I think every piece of media deserves its own time in the spotlight. Before I start, this is something that deals heavily with plot points from Final Fantasy VII so I'd recommend leaving if you haven't played all of that game. It's, uh, kind of hard to discuss this without being direct about what it's covering so I wanted to give you all that warning.

With that out of the way, I suppose I'll start by saying what this is. It's a 20-or-so minute short that details both the encounter in Nibelheim 5 years before FF7's events and Zack and Cloud's journey to Midgar following that incident. Almost nothing in this video is new information, at least, nothing that couldn't be inferred by what you witness in the game itself, though it's the first time some of these specific conversations or scenes have been depicted.

One scene from the game...

... and as its depicted in Last Order.

It was cool! Getting to see more of Zack was nice as I think I'm going to really like Zack, and revisiting these confrontations has its appeal. My biggest issue is that it changes a few things. There are relatively minor things, like Tifa's father being outside the reactor when she finds him, or Tifa not wearing her cowboy hat when she goes to find her father, but they also change Sephiroth's "death". 

In the original game I saw his demise as being one caused largely by shock and his underestimation of Cloud (it's honestly pretty "Sidious at the end of Return of the Jedi") and that's still an element here, but this gives him some agency and seems to imply he has some sort of plan. I really like that this seemingly omnipotent alien demi-god gets surprised by some normal guy who wasn't even good enough for the SOLDIER program. I think that's a pretty significant element to that moment and changing it, even slightly, so that Sephiroth can still appear "cool" feels like a misstep. I'm hoping the Remake(s) and Crisis Core go with the original portrayal, personally.

I suppose I should mention that I actually watched this twice. The first time was with some friends who, for some reason, decided to watch a fandub. It was a pretty serviceable dub but I wanted to make sure I watched the original just to cover my bases, so I sought that out after the fact. I don't know that I gained much by doing so (the fandub was fine; the original was, similarly, fine) but I enjoyed watching it twice, anyhow.

Overall, Last Order was cool. It slightly fleshes out the existing story but mainly serves to just be an anime adaptation of events people were already familiar with. It's slightly less necessary now that Crisis Core exists (and presumably once again detail many of these same events) but it was a good watch regardless.