Pretty Pile of Poo
This .swf was a lot like a really, really pleasent looking pile of doodoo. At a glance, the visuals look pretty, sure. But upon even the slightest further inspection, a totally undesirable product exposes itself.
I'll start with the good. The illustrations were good. End of good.
But the bad was tremendous. Now, I can't blame you guys too much for the terrible voice acting, but that doesn't make it any less of a negative point. Blargh, I'd rather have just read the text.
Which leads me to my next point. I really wouldn't have rather read the text. The scripting was pale and bland, cut and dry, boring stuff. It was beyond boring. It made me want to puke just sitting through it. Oh, look! Zell is acting like a n00b! Ha ha ha ha ha! Oh, Auron just called himself a pimp! Bwahahahahaha! Look, Wakka's a scaredy-cat! Really, my sides are just bursting with boring, staged, unenthusiastic laughter. The Krypton joke during the Super Nova attack was about the only fresh humor in this entire flash. The rest of it was just plain comedic suicide, and even though the "bad guy stopping to cough in the middle of his maniacal laugh" is a good joke in and of itself, it's far from an even modestly original idea. You don't get any points for that joke because it's so blatantly overdone.
And the animation. Boo on you for tweening body movement animations in a movie. In an interactive flash game, I could understand tweening limb motions (and even then it comes out looking like crap), but there's no excuse for that crap in a flash movie. There's a lot you can tween to make it look natural, and complex movements in a sword fight, walking animations, and other complex actions, are not among them. Frame-by-frame those animations because tweening will never make them look convincing in the least.
Your interpretation of the characters is really, REALLY bad. You turned Sephiroth into a clone of Vegeta's personality, gave Cloud, Vincent, and Squall the same boring "cool but cold guy" personality, you gave Zell and Wakka NO credit and they don't remind me of their characters AT ALL, and Quistis was the only female in the cast who even got any air time, and even she was only used for plot recap and explanation. All in all, the characters' personalities look like they were warped to suit the likings of some crazed fanboy. Very unprofessional reproduction of established, well-known characters.
Finally, it was just too fucking short. I know it's a minor point to make, but come on. That lasted about 3 minutes at the most, and too much of that time in itself was made up of akward pauses. There was about as much actual plot material in this as in a single episode of DBZ, though thankfully without taking up nearly as much time. Nobody was saying or doing anything important anyway, so you may as well have at least gotten the ball rolling a bit better.
Good illustrations, the rest is crap. Sorry for the harsh review. I know this stuff takes a long time to put together, but you really should have planned it out way better before getting to work.
