Fainaru fantajî

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.

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.

People tend to give this anime a lot of flack due to its simple art, simple story and lighthearted tone, saying it conflicts with Final Fantasy's "mature, serious" appearance. Thing is, this is based on Final Fantasy V, a game known for its humor, and it was released long before the series made a name for itself as being "mature and serious". The animation looks just like the game art come to life, and is bustling with action. The music is wonderful, equaling Nobuo Uematsu's game work. And the story is a simple-yet-engaging hack-and-slash fantasy adventure that is fun to watch. The characters are fun and inventive, the setting is gorgeous... this is one of those anime that should be considered a classic, but isn't due to a number of boneheaded reasons. If you run across this, PICK IT UP! It's a great story, and you won't be disappointed.

I absolutely love Japanese anime and I didn't really think that this would be too good when it said on it: CONTAINS MILD VIOLENCE - ACCEPTABLE FOR ALL AGES. Then I watched it and Wow! This is a great movie for fans of the genre it is also very action-packed! Forget the violence - for once think about action and a good fantasy story!

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.