Although it’s still going strong today, Final Fantasy almost died a long time ago, and I’m glad it didn’t. The nature of Final Fantasy is reinvention, which means no two games are ever alike. Each one attempts to innovate on the last, whether it’s in combat systems, mini-games, story, setting, or scope – although it’s usually a combination of all of the above. While this tradition of innovation has spawned some of the greatest RPGs (if not the greatest games) of all time, it’s also led to more than a few clunkers.

Perhaps Final Fantasy‘s greatest misstep, however, might just be its mostly-forgotten 2001 venture into the world of film – Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The first film effort by Squaresoft, the developers behind Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within was an ambitious attempt to launch an entirely new kind of movie, headed up by an entirely new kind of studio. It ultimately failed to recoup its investment, shuttering the film studio behind it and almost sending Squaresoft itself up the river along with it. But everything that came after it almost makes me glad it flopped, no matter how much I complain about the current state of Final Fantasy.

The Spirits Within Almost Destroyed Final Fantasy & Squaresoft

Why FF’s First Film Flopped

After the international success of Final Fantasy 7 and its animated, full-motion cutscenes, Squaresoft looked into expanding its operations. It established a film studio, Square Pictures, and set about making what would eventually become Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It was to be a computer-animated feature, using the latest advances in CGI to create a realistic, yet highly stylized vision of a fantasy world.

With an original script written by series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi (later rewritten by Al Reinert and Jeff Vintar), Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within soon garnered the attention of Hollywood studio Columbia Pictures, which agreed to co-produce the film. With a team of over 200 devoting 120 years of work hours to painstakingly animating its hundreds of thousands of frames, The Spirits Within was four years in the making.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within features an all-star voice cast, including the likes of Ming-Na Wen, Alec Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, Ving Rhames, and Steve Buscemi.

Finally, in 2001, The Spirits Within was released to an incredibly underwhelming reception. Make no mistake – Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a technical marvel of its time. Released in 2001 (the same year as Shrek), it pioneered state-of-the-art animation techniques for fluid motion and realistic facial expressions, all of which hold up surprisingly well today.

All that CGI couldn’t mask what was ultimately a nonsensical and soulless plot.

The problem was, simply put, that the movie wasn’t interesting. All that CGI couldn’t mask what was ultimately a nonsensical and soulless plot. Fans of the series disliked it because it had nothing to do with the Final Fantasy they knew and loved. Critics were largely impressed with its CGI, but found its story fairly lacking. What resulted was a box office bomb: on a budget of $137 million, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within earned back just $85.1 million, failing to break even (via Box Office Mojo).

Despite The Failure, Great Games Like FF12 Followed

FF’s Flop Led To Countless Successes

The Spirits Within‘s failure altered the face of the Final Fantasy series. Square Pictures shut its doors not long thereafter, Final Fantasy X was delayed, and talks with rival game studio Enix – who were looking into acquiring Square – ground to a halt. Final Fantasy had to reestablish itself as a dominant cultural force, and Square focused entirely on game development in doing so.

It paid off, too. Only a few months later, it followed up with Final Fantasy X, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking games in the series with its all-3D graphics and its voiced cutscenes – likely inspired by Square’s work on The Spirits Within. Even those games it began after The Spirits Within‘s box office failure, like Final Fantasy 12 and Kingdom Hearts 2, are valued as some of the best of Square’s output, landmarks in their field. Each of these completely revolutionized the combat systems of their predecessor, and are still beloved today.

Even Square’s future film endeavors were much better executed. 2005’s Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children applied the same expert, high-budget production to a much more familiar and more marketable setting – that of Final Fantasy 7. It was direct-to-video, so we can’t cite the same kind of box office figures to compare its performance, but it was much better received critically.

We wouldn’t have the Final Fantasy series we have today without The Spirits Within’s sacrifice.

Eventually, talks with Enix resumed, which ultimately ended in the two companies’ merging into Square Enix, which remains a major force of the gaming industry today. I’d argue that we wouldn’t have the Final Fantasy series we have today – all those great games like FF15, 7 Remake, Kingdom Hearts 3 – without The Spirits Within‘s sacrifice.

A series like Final Fantasy is never going to be entirely consistent. By nature, each entry has to reinvent itself, and every so often, one is destined to fail. But that’s not a bad thing. Flops like The Spirits Within can teach a series valuable lessons, letting it know what to avoid in the future. These failures have ultimately made for a stronger Final Fantasy.