Final Fantasy would have been better if I had brought my mp3 player with me and just watched it without bothering myself with the banal dialogue, the terrible soundtrack, and the absolutely horrific audio mix. It wasn’t a terrible movie, and it was a gigantic leap forward in realistic character animation, but the plot was “generic sci-fi movie” or a bit more specifically “generic anime movie”.

The audio mix… What can I say? It always seemed as if the various voice actors were licking the microphones, and there was absolutely no spatial depth to the audio, whether a character was close or far, it always sounded the same.

The animation was much, much better than I expected, but it was still slightly over-hyped…. But I was very surprised at the accuracy of movement, the realistic look of the characters (the hair was amazing), and the skin movement was impressive. The eyes were never proper, and the characters blinked way too much. The lipsynching was impressive at times, and completely wrong at others…

Anyway, it was neat to watch, but impossible to actually enjoy.

I am working on the distributed load-test client for work, which is a lot of fun. We have been talking about it for awhile now and we finally just said “screw it” and are hacking it out quickly with improvements to come later.