It is truly more than a side-story than a sequel... Its as if only the characters were taken from FFVII and placed in the same world with a different time and a TOTALLY different story... P.O.V. ko lang ung....

On the ring tone.... The timing of the call was so strange at the first time you would hear it.... most people i watched it with ( i watched it several times) thought tifa had already won but with the ring tone repeating itself 2 or 3 times, our First guesses were wrong.... (Though one of us didn't know about what the tone meant in the game. It resulted us to insult him... )

i think advent children is a great film.
it was highly criticized for its lack of story and emphasis on action, but i believe the "story" section was dealty with roughly a decade ago (FVII the game), so there is no need to repeat or rephrase known events, because this will only eat up screen time. the action part was emphasized, as well as emotional scenes, to give more "flesh" to the characters. it answers the "how would the characters act, given more *fmv time*".

another criticism was the absurd and "godlike" movements displayed shown by cloud and friends. i think that this is somewhat true, to the extent that extended "no critical, life-threatening" hits can bore some people, but the action itself is eye candy. the one with the J-E-N-O-V-A track (cloud vs kadaj) really displays finesse.. the sephiroth-cloud duel comes second, bringing sentiments from years past, although the battles reek of power and less of finesse. not necessarily bad, it's just my preferrence.

the rest of cloud's crew have been put aside, gave more room for cloud and tifa... a bit of Aeris here and there. i think that although this is a logical step, they should have also tried to flesh out the other characters as well. at least Vincent gets his Dirge of Cerberus. haha.

there's only so much you can put in a movie, and advent children, for all the limits and expectations set, has done its best to entertain loyal ffvii fans.