The film's voice acting cast includes Takahiro Sakurai, Ayumi Ito, and Toshiyuki Morikawa in Japanese, and Steve Burton, Rachael Leigh Cook, and George Newbern in English.

An extended version, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete, was released on Blu-ray Disc in 2009, adding 26 minutes of new and expanded scenes to the 101-minute original.

[1] Advent Children takes place two years following the events of the 1997 role-playing video game Final Fantasy VII, during which the antagonist Sephiroth attempted to absorb the Lifestream, the lifeblood and soul of the Planet, and be reborn as a god.

Since the end of the game, the survivors of Midgar founded the new city of Edge, where Cloud and his childhood friend Tifa Lockhart now run a courier service and are the caretakers of an orphan Denzel and the adopted daughter of Barret Wallace, Marlene.

[3] Rufus asks for Cloud's help to stop Kadaj, Loz, and Yazoo, who are the physical manifestation of Sephiroth's surviving spirit and seek to resurrect him using the remains of the extraterrestrial villain Jenova.

He attempts to destroy it, but Kadaj saves it and flees the city with his companions, with Yazoo and Loz being caught in a blast by an explosive planted by Reno and Rude.

[7] Advent Children began as a short film by Visual Works, a company used by Square to develop CGI scenes for their video games, based on Final Fantasy VII.

He decided to make the project longer and grander in scope when the early word of the film generated great interest among Final Fantasy VII fans, most of whom wanted something feature-length.

The battle between Cloud's group and Bahamut was the most difficult to design due to the size of the area and the number of objects the staff had to add to the scene to keep it realistic.

[24] Nomura said that the team decided not to worry about making the fight sequences realistic, as they felt this would restrict their ability to give the film a "cool look".

[26] Other themes Nomura and Nojima were concerned to include Cloud's feelings of guilt and regret for failing to save his friends Zack and Aerith.

Some of the arrangements, including "Advent: One-Winged Angel", are performed by The Black Mages, a rock band formed by Uematsu, Fukui, and Sekito.

[37] Advent Children and the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII series were first announced at the 2003 Tokyo Game Show in September, the former as a direct-to-DVD film.

It was first moved to November,[43] then to January 2006,[44] and finally scheduled for April 25 for release on DVD and Universal Media Discs for the PlayStation Portable.

[40] Before the film's release, Square Enix serialized the web novel "On the Way to a Smile" written by Kazushige Nojima on the Japanese Advent Children website on September 5, 2005,[46] which was later released with "Episode: Tifa" by Shueisha in a 118-page book about the film's story titled Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Prologue Book on September 14, 2005.

[50] A special one-time-only theatrical screening of the English version of the film took place on April 3, 2006, at the Arclight Theatre in Los Angeles.

[51] The screening included trailers of the video games Kingdom Hearts II and Dirge of Cerberus, and featured appearances from the English language cast and the Japanese developers.

Final Fantasy VII Advent Children (Limited Edition Collector's Set) was released in North America on February 20, 2007.

[54] A director's cut of the film, entitled Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete was released on the Blu-ray format.

[60][61] Themes expanded in Advent Children Complete include Cloud's development, Denzel's background, and a more in-depth view of the Turks and Rufus Shinra.

Written by Kazushige Nojima, the first story, "Case of Denzel", was released in a serialized form on the official Japanese Advent Children website.

[88] During 2009, the regular version of Advent Children Complete sold 49,000 units in Japan according to Oricon, ranking second in their category "Animation/Special Effects Blu-ray Discs".

[91] The computer-animated graphics were generally praised; 1UP.com's James Mielke, who awarded the film an "A−", said the quality and clarity of the CG visuals were "genuinely amazing".

[94][97] The story digest "Reminiscence of Final Fantasy VII", included with the DVD to explain the plot of Final Fantasy VII, was described by Anime News Network's Santos as "just as confusing as the movie" and of no help in explaining the plot to anyone who had not already played the game, though Carle of IGN felt it was helpful to those who had not played the game in a while.

[31][93] The music received mixed reviews; Eriani of Mania Entertainment heavily praised it, as did Santos of Anime News Network, but 1UP.com's Mielke called it "a bit sappy".

[99] Kotaku saw the focus on the Midgar's ruins as a parallelism with psychological trauma due to how all of its survivors suffer a disease that cannot be fought with Cloud's striking weaponry on its own.

Joystiq's Andrew Yoon found Advent Children Complete a better film, feeling it was more accessible to people who had not played Final Fantasy VII.

[102][103] Douglass also found the addition of On the Way to a Smile - Episode: Denzel to be a welcome edition, though he felt that the bonus features as a whole were underwhelming, belying the "Complete" title.

[101] Kotaku writer AJ Glasser, however, summed up the director's cut as "26 extra minutes and it still doesn't make any sense", saying that the new scenes did little to improve the plot of the film itself.

[108] In April 2008, the Seoul District Court ruled that the video was considered plagiarism and ordered Fantom Entertainment and Hong to pay the fine.