Legend of Crystania: The Motion Picture - And Old School Anime Review

I was looking at older anime movies I missed and may want to check out, and I came across this title. The thing is I remember at some point watching this, but I couldn't remember a thing about it. I remember enjoying it though, so I figure I would give it another watch and maybe jog my memory a bit. That did not happen, as nothing in this movie rang any bells for me. So, did I really just not see it and my memory is wrong, or did my mind actively prevent me from remembering for my own sake?

Because this movie is pretty terrible. It apparently takes place after Record of the Lodoss War, another show I think I saw some of but have no memory about. Though after a quick bit of research there really seems to be just one character from Lodoss that is important but knowing about his role there isn't necessary to understand the story of Crystania.

The story starts with a man wandering with his people, all of whom seem likely to die on the ocean. A voice calls to him, and he enters Crystania by offering up his body to one of its gods. Fast forward and we follow around a character who is looking for revenge for the death of his father, though as he escapes the ones invading his home he hears the same voice as the man from the beginning of the movie, and enters Crystania with his companions in hopes of gaining the power to fight.

This is where the problems of this show begin, specifically that the forces who invaded his home are never relevant to the story again. To make matters worse, Redon himself is actually not all that important to the narrative at hand. The story is clearly more about Sheru wanting to rescue the one possessed by one of the gods of Crystania. There is suppose to be this whole arc where Redon realizes that making a deal with an evil god for power is a bad idea, but the problem here is the moment he realizes the offer is coming from an asshole it becomes clear he is never going to take the deal, so his entire story is out the window in one scene.

That's kind of the story for everyone that enters Crystania along with Redon. You have a Wizard who always wanted to come here, though now that he is you never really find out why. The visiting priestess that escapes the assault with Redon is apparently a potential for chaos within Crystania as she channels the power of a foreign god, but that's never really a factor either. I'd go on, but you get the picture, the cast most of the movie focuses on is largely disconnected from the plot.

This also creates the issue that the actual main focus on the plot is a bit underwhelming as Sheru isn't really much of a player in the entire movie either, but suddenly becomes the main focus for one scene at the end, and only one scene before where you find out why it is she is even important to the story at hand anyway. The way the narrative is structured is a complete mess. I haven't even gotten into the ridiculous inclusion of 'The Tribe of the Seal' and their involvement in everything.

While I don't think this is intentional, there are three fantastic moments where the show just goes out of its way to immediately halt any semblance of tension in the exact same way. There is a scene where a village is getting destroyed, I'll talk a bit more on that in a minute, but one of the people who has been a threat up until this point uses the opportunity to mount a sneak attack on Redon, and then BAM! She's taken out immediately with a shot to the face. Later on, when the characters assault the castle, Sheru goes head to head with one of the higher-ups in the enemy army. She closes in on him with all these fancy backflips and positions herself behind him, and he turns slightly and BAM! Punch to the face and she goes down.

Slightly different for the next one, ignoring the really out of nowhere revelation that Redon has about how all life is equal, something that hasn't even been a theme of the show up until now, he gets his big heroic speech as he is about to face off against the big bad and BAM! Evil king waves his hand and crushes Redon with a force of psychic power of some kind and he is now completely irrelevant to the events to come.

Are you starting to see the problem with this show? At no point does it really seem to realize what story it wants to tell. It focuses almost entirely on a group that has no connection to the story of Sheru, who is clearly the most important character in this story, it has no real consistent themes, and too top it off you never really find out why Redon was necessary for the god in the first place as he already had a perfectly suitable body.

This isn't helped by the consistently subpar animation of the show. There really isn't a scene I can describe that actually looks good, just a lot of mediocre. If it was just straight up bad it wouldn't be a problem, but even a day or two later it's hard to visualize anything I saw in the show because of how dull the whole thing looked.

This show gets a hard pass. It's disconnected enough from Lodoss that you don't need to see that show too understand what's going on, so it's not a matter of not having seen the rest of the franchise. This Movie is just a mess of a release that lacked the focus it needed to actually make it worthwhile.

That review out of the way, I have a question to ask of all of you. I run my podcast, Illuminated Discussions, infrequently whenever I can. I wanted to upload them on to Dtube, but I found out it also creates a post on Steemit automatically, so I opted not to do keep doing it past the first one I uploaded there since I did link them once already as they are on Bitchute.

Though they were all posted as I was slowly growing and many probably haven't seen any of them, and I would like to ensure they are up in more places than just Bitchute, would you guys be okay with me uploading the remaining three podcasts?

If I do, I will be doing so once per day when I don't release another article, so it will all be up by weeks end (Hopefully with a newly recorded episode that will be up regardless if I can get it set up).

I set up a Straw Poll for those who don't want to use up their RC just to post in the comments about it.

https://www.strawpoll.me/17408898