“Legend of Crystania” must be Japanese for “Boring anime movie I didn’t bother finishing” because I watched the first 55 minutes and then skipped to the ending. That says a lot, because the movie is only 77 minutes long including credits, and usually when I get that far in I just finish it. This time I just couldn’t see the point.
Apparently Legend of Crystania is a spin-off anime of the Record of Lodoss War anime series, so maybe if I’d watched that first I might have been a little more interested. My basic research tells me that the only carry-overs from main series to spin-off is the presence of two characters, Ashram and Pirotess, one of whom spends nearly the whole show brainwashed and crazy while the other has supposedly been nerfed into a helpless damsel in distress. It should have been possible to make a good movie regardless, but the writers probably just put a check mark next to their ‘cameo’ quota and carried on with their own crappy story.
Said story is about a boy named Re-something whose father is killed in a power struggle. Vengeful and enraged, Re-something runs for his life and ends up wandering into Crystania, the Land of the Gods, where the resident evil god offers him power. Of course that’s just a pretext for evil god taking over Re-something’s body, so the rest of his party has to try to talk him out of the deal while simultaneously fending off attacks from the locals and getting involved in a local struggle to resist the evil god.
It sounds interesting on paper, but the 30 seconds you just spent reading that paragraph have given you the exact same feeling you would have gotten from spending 77 minutes watching it: “Ah. I see.” And that’s about it. The art is blah, the animation is TERRIBLE, a.k.a. ‘QUALITY’ with very washed-out colors, maybe because the movie is rather old (yes, 1995 is old now). The English dub voices were rather meh, but more or less okay except for some annoying little girl’s voice. Nothing too remarkable about the music.
I think the writers just automatically expected fans to care because “Hey, it’s Lodoss!” so if you don’t know/care about the world of Lodoss then tough luck. I suppose it would be like complaining because you picked up a random Naruto/other anime movie even though you don’t know or like that show. I honestly didn’t know it was based on anything else when I started watching it at random, so I’ll just have to be more careful next time I’m picking something to watch.
The other flaw on top of “automatically expected to care” is that there were just way too many parties and factions mixing it up by the end. It’s not exactly hard to keep track of, just hard to figure it who, if anyone, to root for. The evil god is evil, certainly, but the good guys are just a bunch of shrill people running around screaming their heads off. Like, okay?
And Sherru/Pirotess is trying to free Ashram from the god’s control, but Ashram and the god made a deal fair and square. He got what he wanted, the god lived up to his end of the bargain, what’s the problem now? Why are you trying to back out now that you’ve got what you wanted? What, it wasn’t what you bargained for? Yeah well you should have thought of that before you got into it. Go file a lawsuit or something. Nope, sorry, can’t sympathize.
And after all that fussing and screaming, sure Sherru/Pirotess manages to free Ashram/exterminate the dark god, but from what I could tell the rest of the guys are left high and dry. Re-something in particular is still on the lam from the people who killed his father and he’s still stuck in Crystania without a way home. Apparently there’s a 3-OVA sequel called Legend of Crystania: The Chaos Ring which may or may not address the issue, but fool me once… I’m done here.
