Last Order: Final Fantasy VII

• 1. A Flashback Animated

  ›

  Last Order: Final Fantasy VII arrived in Japan on the 14th of September 2005, bundled inside a special release called Advent Pieces: Limited. Only 77,777 copies were produced, and they sold out months before they even reached shelves, retailing for 29,500 yen, roughly US$300 each. This was not a film you stumbled upon at a video store. It was a carefully rationed artifact for the most devoted fans of Final Fantasy VII.

  The OVA, produced by the animation studio Madhouse and released by Square Enix, runs just under half an hour. It revisits two of the most emotionally charged flashbacks from the 1997 game Final Fantasy VII: the destruction of the village of Nibelheim by the warrior Sephiroth, and the desperate flight of Zack Fair and Cloud Strife as they attempt to escape the megacorporation Shinra. Director Morio Asaka shaped the material, while Tetsuya Nomura, the character designer behind the entire Final Fantasy VII series, served as supervising director with authority to reject or accept concept drawings.

• 2. Why Madhouse Got the Job

  ›

  Madhouse was not chosen by accident. The studio had previously produced a promotional clip for the mobile game Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, and that clip generated strong positive reactions. Square Enix took notice. The president of Madhouse was personally enthusiastic about the project, which counted in the studio's favor. But the decisive reason, according to those involved, was that Madhouse "understood the significance" of animating Final Fantasy VII, described internally as "the most popular game" in the Final Fantasy series. That weight of responsibility shaped every decision that followed.

  Nomura exercised his supervisory role with unusual intensity. He had the right to reject concept drawings outright, and he used it. The volume of images he sent back for redrawing was so large that, by the production crew's own account, "the entire production was in jeopardy." Production lasted six months in total. The crew identified its hardest challenge as making "Nomura's drawings move on screen." Because Last Order was hand-drawn, achieving consistent line weight across scenes proved technically difficult. Original artwork came from multiple artists, meaning individual scenes carried noticeably different visual styles, and the team worked to smooth those differences before the deadline.

• 3. Tseng at the Center

  ›

  Junichi Suwabe voiced Tseng, the leader of the Turks unit, who serves as narrator for the OVA. That choice was not part of the original plan. Last Order was initially conceived to focus on Zack Fair, the young first-class SOLDIER at the heart of the story. As production developed, however, Tseng shifted from narrator to something more central. He became, by the production team's own description, the "real highlight" of the film.

  Producer Akio Ofuji explained that Last Order was designed to fill gaps. Nomura and Ofuji had agreed that the original Final Fantasy VII game had left many scenes depicting important events and feelings feeling fragmented. Last Order was their opportunity to give viewers of Advent Children, the film it shipped alongside, a "more enjoyable understanding" of those moments. Tseng's arc reflects that purpose directly. The OVA traces his changing relationship with his job, the tension between his moral values and his obligations to Shinra, and the moment he abandons those values to carry out what Ofuji called "a cruel mission." Ofuji noted that "those are the kind of scenes we wanted people to be more aware of."

• 4. Zack, Cloud, and Nibelheim

  ›

  Kenichi Suzumura voiced Zack Fair, and the production crew treated the role as a corrective. Zack had appeared in Advent Children, but the team felt his character had not come through fully. Last Order offered a chance to "portray Zack properly" as what the crew called a "handsome, light-hearted man who was in everyone's memory." Suzumura himself noted that Zack felt more "alive" in Last Order than he had in Advent Children.

  Takahiro Sakurai played Cloud Strife, here not yet the protagonist of the original game but a Shinra infantryman, barely conscious through much of the story. Toshiyuki Morikawa voiced Sephiroth, whose unraveling at Nibelheim drives the first half of the OVA. Sephiroth's breakdown is rooted in Hojo's laboratory records, which reveal that Sephiroth was injected with cells from Jenova, an extraterrestrial organism that crashed onto the Planet 2,000 years before the events of the story. The second half follows Zack and the unconscious Cloud as they break free from Shinra captivity and attempt to reach Midgar, pursued by Shinra's military.

• 5. Music and Release

  ›

  Takeharu Ishimoto composed, arranged, and produced the score for Last Order, including its ending theme, also titled "Last Order." The music was packaged alongside the soundtrack from Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII on a single disc, released in Japan on the 19th of December 2007 and later made available in North America by Square Enix. Tracks 13 through 27 on that disc contain the Last Order score; tracks 1 through 12 belong to Before Crisis. Select tracks from the Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII soundtrack also include music and remixes drawn from the OVA.

  The fan community around the game extended the music's reach further. OverClocked ReMix produced a four-disc tribute album called Voices of the Lifestream. One disc on that album is titled Order, a name chosen explicitly to coincide with Last Order, with its music themed around the OVA.

• 6. Fan Backlash and Legacy

  ›

  Western critics who reviewed the North American "Limited Edition Collector's Set" of Advent Children, which included Last Order and retailed for $49.95, responded positively. Chris Carle of IGN described Last Order as "the true meat of the new extras" and said it "adds even more dimension to the story." Todd Douglass Jr. from DVD Talk called it "the real reason to check out the Limited Edition release."

  Fan response in Japan was sharply different. Hideki Imaizumi, producer of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, stated publicly that the team had received "considerable negative feedback" from fans who objected to how Last Order depicted the Nibelheim event. The changes the OVA made to that story, one of the most significant flashbacks in the original game, did not sit well with the audience that knew it best. The Crisis Core production team responded directly: they redrew the scene for their game and were deliberately careful not to repeat the choices made in Last Order. Last Order is not an official installment of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, the sanctioned series of prequels and sequels, though it appears in official guidebooks. That unusual status, neither canon nor dismissed, kept it a point of debate. The North American release arrived without an English dub, subtitled only, and Last Order was not included when Advent Children was re-released in 2009 as the expanded director's cut Advent Children Complete.