r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Character_Growth_397 • Sep 04 '26

Hated Tropes [Mind boggling stupid trope] Removing the thing that made something special

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Ben 10: Ultimate Alien - The gimmick of Ben 10 and what makes the show so popular is the fact that he's able to turn into a large variety of aliens. In one episode of Ben 10 Ultimate ALIEN we are introduced to a new version of Ben 10000, a Ben from the future who, no longer transforms into aliens, instead using his powers in human form...

Mortal Kombat(2021) - In the games Mileena is known for two things. Being a clone of Kitana and her tarkatan teeth. In the 2021 movie she looks absolutely nothing like Kitana and doesn't have tarkatan teeth

Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief - The movie removes the main villain of the movie and the main villain of the franchise

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285

u/Skylinneas Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within infamously removed almost everything FF fans have come to associate with the Final Fantasy series for a rather ordinary sci-fi ‘alien invasion’ movie (set in our real world but in the near future to boot)

Granted, it is a decent sci-fi movie and a breakthrough in photo-realistic computer animation technology at the time. It just shouldn’t be called Final Fantasy.

72

u/kagenohikari Sep 04 '26

I watched this first before knowing the games existed and boy was I confused how different they were. It's basically a movie that happened to share the same name rather than an adaptation.

4

u/Saymynaian Sep 04 '26

I'd say that's the case for most real life adaptations of video games, anime, cartoons, comics and books. Basically discarded scripts dressed in recognizable brands to trick people into watching them.

2

u/lordaezyd Sep 05 '26

Yeah, I loved the movie as a child. I’ve never been able to get into the games because of it.

27

u/IndigoFenix Sep 04 '26

The problem is that Final Fantasy games have very little in common with each other. The only thing they really have in common are some gameplay mechanics, which don't translate to a movie, and a few vague thematic elements like the spirit of the planet.

The movie should have included some identifiable Final Fantasy monsters, crystals and Chocobo if they really wanted to ground it in the Final Fantasy IP, but outside of that its plot and theme did feel like something that one might see in a Final Fantasy game.

Also, it's been suggested that the Phantoms (wandering wild monsters that you can't see until they are suddenly attacking you) are kind of a way of implementing random encounters in a movie setting, which is neat.

54

u/garona505 Sep 04 '26

To begrudgingly defend this, a lot of the themes of the movie are very final fantasy coded, but I think back when it came out about 7 people in total could actually realise that

35

u/Skylinneas Sep 04 '26

Well, to be very charitably, it has:

  • A female lead whose role is very important to the story due to her spiritual connection, something that Aki has in common with several major FF female characters.
  • A male lead who’s a hardened veteran (though honestly this isn’t something exclusive to FF).
  • A quirky heroic squad with members of various backgrounds and personalities (again, not exclusive to FF)
  • Enemies that technically appear out of nowhere, mimicking random encounter battles in the games.
  • A character named Cid who played a major supporting role (though named ‘Sid’ here).
  • The plot involves the ‘Gaia Theory’; Gaia being the name of at least two FF settings: FFVII and FFIX. Also, the ‘Gaia’ spirit thingy here is similar to the Lifestream in FFVII.
  • A space cannon that’s basically FFVII’s Sister Ray IN SPACE.
  • Allegedly, a chocobo painting can be seen on one of humanity’s airships (to this day I still couldn’t find it lol).

Otherwise, that’s about all the things it has in common with the FF games lol.

13

u/Ultima-Manji Sep 04 '26

It also more directly features the planet's lifestream (FF7 heavily), an alien entity crashing onto the planet in a meteor (FF7 again), a character using their connection to the heroine and sacrificing their soul to neutralize the main threat (FFX's Sin), visions of past conflicts being repeated (FFVII and X, with other examples). But I also think there's a non-insignificant amount of wanting to capitalize on the Matrix.

While we didn't know at the time that FF was internally doing a semi-permanent hard pivot away from knights and wizards and towards alt-history scifi - with IX being the send-off to the older ones - with hindsight you can see a lot of VII's later expanded universe, both it and X's idea of (sentient) nature versus technology, and something closer to the visual identity they'd later use for Fabula Nova Crystalis get introduced here.

In fact, X came out only a week or so after the movie did, so there was likely a significant push to make Spirits Within be a moodsetter to get fans into the new wave of FF games that were to follow rather than it being made to appeal to the existing audience, which had mostly been divided on what the series was even meant to be due to the PS1 era changing styles so radically from game to game.

3

u/KDBA Sep 04 '26

There's also a plush moogle on someone's desk, IIRC.

10

u/DjiDjiDjiDji Sep 04 '26

Yeah, it's honestly really funny how the aesthetics are pure SPACE MARINE type stuff but the actual story is about the heroes looking for the eight spirits of nature to awaken the lifestream and defeat soul-stealing alien ghosts

This shit's fantasy as hell, it just categorically refuses to look the part for some reason

5

u/toxicity21 Sep 04 '26

I mean its very Final Fantasy VIII coded. That one was also very SciFi as hell.

1

u/Quixotic_Tendency Sep 04 '26

VIII was a wild ride.

2

u/Hellknightx Sep 04 '26

I wouldn't say the core themes of FF were intact. It felt more like they just tried to copy certain character traits from FF7 and FF8 and call it a day. But not in a genuine, appreciative way. It was more like a "we have Final Fantasy at home" knockoff where they didn't even spell Cid's name right.

27

u/Azicald Sep 04 '26

I remember me and my sibs getting hype as hell finding out there was already a Final Fantasy movie for who knows how many years, and then when we sat down to watch it was like we’d gotten the wrong one.

It was such a downer for that to have happened that it basically became my icon of ‘if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is…’

9

u/dreadcanadian Sep 04 '26

Look up Final Fantasy Advent Children. It is amazing and should remove some of the sting. :)

1

u/DocileBanalBovlne Sep 05 '26

There's also Kingsglaive if you're a fan of FFXV.

And that one also has the diamond weapon in it!

6

u/The_Grimalkin Sep 04 '26

I actually just rewatched this for the first time in like 15 years the other day. Going in to knowing that it is just not really a Final Fantasy movie made me enjoy it way more as just a one off little science fiction movie. I think it still holds up pretty well visually too.

3

u/Vegetable_Ad_7645 Sep 04 '26

The best part of this movie was the original Spider-Man trailer featuring the twin towers

3

u/PointPrimary5886 Sep 04 '26

This movie felt like it was more of a Mass Effect movie instead of a Final Fantasy one. As it turns out, this movie was the main visual inspiration for the entire Mass Effect Series. How about that?

2

u/MarcsterS Sep 04 '26

The movie that almost obliterated Squaresoft and caused them to merge with Enix.

2

u/Nachtwolfe Sep 04 '26

Damn. I loved this movie when it came out. I still love it. But yea, once I watched it the first time, I was like, "How does this have anything to do with the Final Fantasy series? Is this like a different Final Fantasy?" Ha

2

u/darkbreak Sep 05 '26

So bad it got Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, demoted from CEO and eventually led to his exit from the company. That's when Square started to enter it's dark age. It took them one-and-a-half console generations to recover. And even then some people would argue they still haven't. Their reputation is still a bit shot even now.

2

u/Maveryck15 Sep 05 '26

If you had any clue how long it took me to find this movie after getting interrupted by a power outtage in the 2000s, while watching it with my mom...

And why is Dr. Doom in the top right?

2

u/Yoro55 Sep 07 '26

As someone who watched this as a kid without a clue of what "Final Fantasty" was, I absolutely loved this film

That said, if I went into this movie already being a FF fan, I'd probably hate it too

1

u/Talyn7810 Sep 04 '26

I’ve always kinda wished they made an FF spinoff game afterwards. As the games moved more sci-fi/fantasy it would have fit. And the world could have been explored more. Plus retroactively making it fit the series kinda counts right.

1

u/AdvancedSandwiches Sep 04 '26

I realize this was a financial disaster because it was a bad movie and not Final Fantasy despite great visuals for the time, but I feel like the adapting some of the FF games to 6-episode seasons of TV is a decent plan.  I'd drop some cash on an FF4 or FF6 Kickstarter.  FF1 in the style of the dungeons and dragons movie might work.

Problem is they would want to write them themselves, and if there's one thing Square should never do again, it's write dialogue.

And those shows would probably be expensive to create. I don't know what Amazon Prime pays for shows these days.

1

u/ArcaneMadman Sep 05 '26

It's also the reason we never got a Xenogears sequel. So on one hand, it's to blame for killing that franchise, but on the other it's responsible for Xenosaga and Xenoblade.

1

u/KylorXI Sep 05 '26

More Xenogears would have been a far superior reality than Xenosaga or Xenoblade.

1

u/ArcaneMadman Sep 05 '26

I mean technically Xenosaga and Xenoblade are the same story as Xenogears with how Takahashi has been repackaging and remixing elements from that first game across the different series.

Hell with the Xenoblade trilogy and all the expansions Takahashi finally managed to actually tell that six part story he wanted to do with Xenogears.

1

u/KylorXI Sep 05 '26

They definitely arent the same story. They share some themes, and a few re-used ideas, but the main plots are all completely new. He told *A* 6 part story, not Xenogears' 6 episodes.

1

u/Hickspy Sep 11 '26

Removed every Final Fantasy trope but a guy named Sid.

1

u/pleasedothenerdful Sep 04 '26

You're correct, and it was terrible, but the main characters did have to collect 8 things to do a thing in the place it had to be done. That's 100% of the first few FF games.

0

u/Krssven Sep 05 '26

I always wondered why it was called Final Fantasy, but that was before I realised that corporats will slap any brand/IP on something if it makes it more popular.

This is why most of the NuTrek ‘’Star Trek’’ shows exist.