Fainaru fantajî

There are flashes of something great in "Legend of the Crystals." The art is very vibrant, with lots of bold colors and neo-retro character designs. There are times where it looks incredibly well animated, reminiscent of a lower-budget version of all-time anime classic Akira.

But too often, that vibrancy works against it, as many characters are flatly colored. That low budget also drops out quite often, leading to some larger scenes that look and move incredibly poorly. Somebody on this project seemed to be very ambitious with certain scenes, but apparently ran in to constraints that end up spoiling the overall quality of the picture. For every moment I thought this anime looked pretty, there were three times I thought it looked ugly.

Story-wise, anything cool about these characters, their world, or the narrative itself is almost always killed by this anime's insistence on being a comedy. The game it's based on, Final Fantasy V, had some humor, but it wasn't exactly a laugh-riot. Legend of the Crystals goes hard on trying to be funny, but it's all typical low-brow anime gags about sex, underwear and bodily functions. I dunno about you, but I grew out of that stuff a long time ago.

It also doesn't help that much of its humor involves Prettz, one of the protagonists. Prettz is often portrayed as being aggressively stupid, to the point where it began making me angry. Like most of the cast, he's a pretty generic anime archetype, but his personality in particular has been amped up to 11. He jumps head first in to every problem, often with the wrong answer, and nobody ever bats an eyelash at his infuriating idiocy. Beyond acting like a clown, he spends most of the movie yelling at and berating everyone else, making him incredibly unendearing.

The story does try and get serious every now and then, which is where most of the callbacks to Final Fantasy V reside, but it's never enough to save it from how much groan-worthy comedy there is. Teehee! Her butt is glowing! I said "butt"!

Mostly, Legend of the Crystals is a disappointment. Its connections to Final Fantasy V feel sort of tangential, and it's a lot of generic 90's anime fluff. Even ardent fans of the games can safely skip this.

This movie was made by people who are into loli undies, because I kept seeing the girl's knickers showing again and again all throughout the movie. This girl also has a glowing butt when the crystal inside of her gets activated. In one scene a big ray comes out of her ass to activate something, if you're into Two Girls, One Cup and jailbait you might find that a turn on, but what's this doing in a Final Fantasy movie? There's another scene where the main bad guy looks like he's masturbating, it was really obvious that the energy of the universe was giving him a hard on. The pirate in the movie is a dominatrix and the scene with the big military guy wearing a leather bra should gives that impression. The pirate gets a scratch on her boob and her general lover goes berserk at the enemy.

There's lots of loli undies, dominatrix's, glowing butts and butt rays and little plot. It's best to forget this movie after you watch it and Square Enix should pretend they never made this movie.

Don't watch this expecting a strong, serious plot like many of the FF games, it's a very fun, action-packed mini-series with a sense of humor. I actually prefer this over the Alec Baldwin FF, even though this is clearly for younger audiences.

This one was much more like an actualy FF story. It had four very different lead characters (the cocky swordsman, the gruffy old soldier, the spunky tomboy and the innocent magic user), chocobos, air-ships, and crystals. The animation isn't the greatest in the world, but it's by no means not good. The action is very well done, but not overdone. The best part of the film is it's sense of humor, however. The film never takes itself too seriously. Some FF die-hards might think it's too light-hearted, but the best thing they can do is remember it's just a movie, and FF is just a video game.

To sum it up: What works: Good action, decent animation, a very FF story, and a sense of humor about itself. What doesn't: It's sometimes a little too light-hearted. Great scene: Trying to get a crystal to leave a girls body, a pirate forces the girl to drink lots and lots of prune juice. Rating: Unrated, but contains mild anime violence and some mild sexuality.

I saw this a few years ago, and remember little except my poor reaction to it. It struck me as very childish, with one-dimensional characters, and an unoriginal idea. 'Save the crystals, save the world' was already getting old in the video game series by this point, and it felt like an attempt to milk something popular. You'll probably like this a lot more if you are younger, and Final Fantasy-obsessed, but it really wasn't worth the rental for me.

This mini-series is action packed and hilarious. The character designs, especially of Rouge and the captain of the Iron Wing (forgive me, I forget his name) are outlandish and fit the personalities. It's very faithful to the Final Fantasy games and much less serious.