Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight

Remember when I talked about the straight to video series this is basically a sequel of and said it felt like it was a retelling of someone's role playing game campaign? Well it turns out that's exactly what it is. Well, a retelling of a book series which itself is a retelling of a game. You can definitely see it when watching, as it follows the basic formula of a party of adventurers containing warriors and sorcerers pursues a quest and occasionally messes up before emerging victorious. The structure's a bit odd as it begins a few years after the last series and has a little story with the familiar main characters before it jumps again another decade and has a new main plot, with a new main cast. The old characters still show up frequently, but the focus is on the new ones, who are neither as capable nor as interesting.

And that sort of describes the entire show for me. It wasn't terrible, I just didn't care about the story or any of the characters too much. The animation never really impressed and I was basically slightly bored the entire time. Each episode ended with a couple minutes of cute versions of the characters engaging in poor attempts at comedy. Uh... I really don't have anything to say. Thoroughly unremarkable.

Record of Lodoss War

Record of Lodoss War is an older fantasy series that was released straight-to-video. Like most OVA's, the animation is better than a normal TV series but not as good as the standard theatrical film. As far as things made in the early 90's go, it's a pretty good looking show, with some well done fight scenes and only a few noticeable errors. It's fairly bloody, although relatively tame otherwise besides a single unnecessary nipple near the end. It borrows from some Western ideas but still has a visual style of its own.

Adapted from a series of novels, Lodoss War tells a story that sometimes feels like a retelling of someone's Dungeons and Dragons campaign, but is usually pretty interesting. After a first episode that jumps into the middle to show a fairly impressive part of the journey, it goes back to the beginning to show how the hero Parn meets his allies and begins his quest. There's a solid cast of characters, some die, and some get together. It all feels a bit compressed and sparse sometimes, but there's a nice, epic sort of plot that unfolds at a pretty good pace. Sometimes I got lost when the narrator kept talking about the different gods and kingdoms whose names I couldn't keep straight, but for the most part I enjoyed it. Some threads are left dangling, but the main things are taken care of. The relationship between Parn and Deed was handled about as well as I've seen an anime do something like that, and I'm interested in checking out the newer series, which is apparently a more accurate adaptation of the source.