OVA Impressions: Eiyuu Densetsu – Sora no Kiseki

My main reason for wanting to check this out is because the Kinema Citrus team is behind it. They already showed that with .Hack//Quantum they can put down a good rpg adaptation. This is a genre that is exceptionally challenging to do, because 1) you cannot animate grinding, leveling, or talking to everyone in the continent to get a feel for the setting, and 2) a lot of RPG adaptations are OVAs that need to find a way to condense their huge stories into a much shorter timeframe. And despite all that, there have been quite a few shows that actually pulled this off. Eiyuu Densetsu though… not so much.

And don’t get me wrong, this OVA was well produced. The characters were well acted, the animation was very good, the action was well directed. In terms of production, it all lived up to Kinema Citrus’s standards. It’s just that the content in this episode had one major flaw: it assumed that its viewers were familiar with the source material…

… so yeah. If you played Eiyuu Densetsu: go ahead and watch it. This OVA is entirely dedicated to pleasing you. If you haven’t though, it’s a whole different story. This movie ultimately boils down to an abridged version of the TV-series, but it doesn’t bother to introduce anything. It refuses to explain anything. Who are these characters? Why are they on this journey? Why is all this important to them? The explanations that are there all assume that you know these things. On top of that, this OVA has a really bad Deus ex Machina near its climax, and it doesn’t even attempt to make full use of its time by wasting three whole minutes on a hot spring.

To tell epic stories like this in a limited time frame, you need to use your time cleverly. The best way is to put in a lot of small details that flesh out the characters as you go along. but Tales of Symphonia’s method of rewriting the story to make the pacing flow better in anime format works as well. This one wastes too much time on fanservice and random pointless scenes that would have worked on a 26-episode series, but not a short OVA. Even though this is 40 minutes, that’s still short.
OVA Episode Rating: 7,25/10

6 thoughts on “OVA Impressions: Eiyuu Densetsu – Sora no Kiseki

  1. Yeah, the hot springs bit turned me off big time, and I found the fight scene between Walter and Joshua to be poorly executed, especially at the part where he punches Joshua so hard he literally breaks a million rocks in the process! That I find hard impossible to take seriously, even if it’s in a fantasy world! It also didn’t help that the sound quality of the footage I got was SOOOO BAD!! I thought it was kinda bland. I mostly watched it for Joshua (Mitsuki Saiga FTW!!!).

  2. Well the problem is that they released it as an OVA…Anyone who knows the series, knows this is not something to release as an OVA. It deserves it’s own series because of just how large the story gets (for a video game). The story spans games….

  3. just hope you guys put all the episode soon.i like this anime because i got play this game is cool and good feeling and pls finis the episode soon if you can

  4. good luck finis the Eiyuu Densetsu – Sora no Kiseki The Animation try your best i know you can do it hope you see this msm good luck msm from:joshua-san ^_^

Leave a Reply