Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Legend of Crystania: The Chaos Ring

June 20, 2004 on 6:35 pm | In Legend of Crystania | Comments Off on Legend of Crystania: The Chaos Ring

Directly after “The Motion Picture”, everyone’s names change and Pirotess acts once more to free her beloved Ashram while Redon befriends twins who have been unfairly treated by the gods of Crystania.

The Chaos Ring is essentially just a three OVA continuation of the film, with the existence of this sacred realm finally explained in the opening of each episode. It’s a pretty funny reasoning, really. “The gods of Light and Dark were having a war, and all of the gods who didn’t care went out and started their own country and closed it so the fighting gods couldn’t get in”.
It explains these things well, and the production values are a darn sight better than its predecessor – the characters actually having skin tone this time around.

As for the rest of it, random elements are brought in to spice to story – Beld, the ruler of Marmo until Ashram’s succession, comes along for the ride. The capacity of his role seems to contradict history moreso than it already has been through the course of the Crystania offshoot. Narase and Guild (now known in the subtitles as Kwairde) have even less character than they did before. Irim and Kirim are traditional freaky twin children, and Orville (now Obiere) and Laifan (now Raifan) don’t get enough screen time.
The council of the gods is a recurring scene now. The gods don’t have physical forms and it’s basically a collection of slightly transparent people vaguely resembling animals sitting about. Each time they talk, several closeups of their faces fly over the screen.

Thematically it’s flawed, but in a highly traditional way. In anime, people’s ancestors are always terrible. They seal away the great evil without destroying it, knowing full well that the seal will one day be broken and the great terror will return. What makes it even worse is that the seals affect the public consciousness, persuading them that the great evil never existed. This is counter productive, so the idea that the Villagers of the Seal exist is just … bad. It’s always the way it goes!

Ashram has been redesigned again and at times he looks like himself, and other times he does not. There are some very nice looking scenes in this, but parts of the chaos worlds are sometimes just collections of freakery. The twins and the old woman are also weird, and Aderishia has a different hairstyle, possibly to do with the seal.

Capped off by an ambiguous ending, Legend of Crystania: The Chaos Ring is a two hour confusion. The characters would have been likeable had they been given more to do, but they essentially sat through this and watched it happening. It’s not terrible, but by neglecting the idea of El Djana, the travellers have very little to travel for.