Final Fantasy Retrospective – Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals

 

Previously, on Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals, three of the four elemental crystals were stolen by a malevolent being looking to become Deathgyunos, leading Linaly and her grandfather to set out on a journey to protect the Wind Crystal. A young man named Pretz volunteered to be their bodyguard, and considering how bad Linaly was at summoning, they desperately needed him. Her grandfather refused, even when he was too exhausted to continue.

When Pretz and Linaly finally made it to the Wind Shrine, the crystal forced its way inside her to hide, making her butt glow like one of the Orbs from the original NES version of Final Fantasy. Thus armed with the Butt of Wind, the pair found themselves confronted by the military might of Tycoon, but before they could explain themselves, they’re captured by a group of pirates led by the fierce beauty Rouge. One thing led to another, and the captain of Tycoon’s military ended up falling in love with Rouge. When enemy forces attacked Rouge’s island base, Pretz pulled a Ryu and blew it up completely.

Meanwhile, the Wind Crystal summoned the spirit of Mid, grandson of Cid, to their aid and Mid revealed that the villains stole Cid’s knowledge, “Spock’s Brain” style, and I guess it took two centuries to read his mind, but now that the world’s in trouble, Pretz and his newfound friends needed to make their way to the black blob in the sky known as The Black Moon. Beneath Tycoon slept a dragon known as the Flying Dragon, named after a certain ability all dragons have, and if they could wake the dragon up and secure its help, they would be able to fly to the moon and take both the crystals and Cid’s brain back.

However, not only did the dragon turn out to be Spike from My Little Pony, Linaly was also captured by the forces of evil in order to extract the wind from her butt. Just when all hope seemed lost, the true meaning of dragons shone through and the Flying Dragon grew three sizes that day. Pretz shouted at the sky, declaring that he would rescue Linaly, and this is where we pick up the action in episode four.

In the chapter of star, Radevil reveals to the audience in a bit of exposition that he has wandered the universe looking for answers to questions he’s had about life. The answer he came up with is the evil being known as Deathgyunos, which he considers the ruler of the universe. In an earlier chapter, it is said that Deathgyunos will end the world if he has the power of all four crystals, leading me to speculate that maybe he’s looking to do something similar to what Exdeath did.

I do sort of want to call him Exodus now. That really is a much better name for a villain. I’m surprised the fan translation for Final Fantasy V didn’t go with that.

As Radevil starts to extract the power of the four crystals, the Flying Dragon tows both the pirates and the Tycoon military out to space in their ships (I hope they were airtight) and approaches the Black Moon. Apparently dragons don’t need air to breathe any more.

They do need concentration to maintain their form, though, and a bolt of lightning from the electrically-charged atmosphere around the Black Moon turns the Flying Dragon back into his tiny form, causing everyone to crash land on a world whose design looks like it was inspired by a Shin Megami Tensei game.

Mid gets another call for help from Cid, much stronger this time due to his proximity, and thus everyone heads north to try to defeat the evil forces on the Black Moon and rescue Linaly, get back the crystals, and hopefully allow Cid to finally rest.

During the battle, Rouge experiences a very minor injury, causing Valkus to go berserk and experience what is quite possibly the first true Limit Break in the entire series. Final Fantasy VII will eventually coin the term, Final Fantasy VI will use so-called “desperation attacks”, but Legend of the Crystals predates both of these. You could argue that Final Fantasy V has a character who continues fighting beyond his limits and Final Fantasy IV has a character go beyond his limits to cast a powerful spell that requires more MP than he has, but these desperation attacks lead to both characters permanently dying, and as far as I can tell, self-destruct moves aren’t Limit Breaks, especially when they remove the character from the party.

While under the effects of his Limit Break, Valkus unloads several machine guns and blasts many enemies from the sky.

As the battle continues, the Iron Wing charges straight for Deathgyunos’s base and rams it, successfully infiltrating it. The party splits up, with Pretz looking for Linaly, Valkus looking for the crystals, and Rouge doing whatever it is Rouge wants to do. I presume she’s going and looking for loot to plunder.

Pretz successfully finds Linaly, but she’s been taken over by Deathgyunos. Mid manages to snap her out of it but not before she brings Pretz down to one HP because this is a comedy anime. Valkus also manages to find the rest of the crystals, but the Iron Wing is too damaged to move. That’s okay because there’s still unfinished business on the Black Moon. Mid is reunited with Cid, and Deathgyunos confronts the party.

Mid attempts to hold Deathgyunos back, pointing out that he’s already dead, so there’s nothing more that can be done to him. He presumably uses himself up completely in order to help the group flee.

While in hiding, the Wind Crystal suddenly jumps from Linaly to Pretz, which in the lore of the Final Fantasy series is pretty unusual. Usually, each Warrior of Light represents one of the four elemental crystals and this lasts the entire game. Here, the Wind Crystal can apparently change who represents it, presumably by trading with one of the other crystals, but we never did find out who represents which crystal. I would assume Rouge represents the Fire Crystal (she’s probably very glad she was never blessed with the Butt of Fire, especially on those occasions she eats at Taco Bell), but water and earth are anyone’s guesses. Considering he’s built like a tank, I would assume Valkus is intended to represent the Earth Crystal, leaving Pretz and Linaly to swap the Water Crystal at the Wind Crystal’s convenience.

Deathgyunos is a tough enemy, and Pretz can’t even reach him to attack with his sword. Valkus’s guns are able to do some damage, but all seems lost until Linaly uses her powers to send a wave of wind at the villain. She might not be that good a Summoner, but she seems to have taken levels in Geomancer instead. This gives Pretz an opportunity to actually use his Samurai techniques and finish off the final boss.

Mid, meanwhile, has freed Cid from Deathgyunos’s machine and now Cid can rejoin his allies from two hundred years ago and rest in peace. It’s neat to see him standing with the characters who saved the world from Exdeath. Bartz, Galuf, Lenna, Faris and Krile. Mid fades as well and goes to join his grandfather and his old friends in the afterlife, but he looks forward to seeing his new friends again someday.

In the end, the party returns home and resumes their normal lives. Rouge receives a large reward from Queen Lenna the unknown ordinal number and returns to work, Valkus decides to join the pirates in order to be with his newfound love, and Linaly and Pretz return home.

And that’s the end. Legend of the Crystals ends with the triumph over a villain that’s a bit underdeveloped and a return to normalcy on the planet named after a letter.

The actual Final Fantasy elements in the series are few and far between. The anime’s four chosen Warriors of Light don’t all have clear jobs in the party, and I would assume that they’ve taken levels in multiple jobs. Pretz is clearly the kind of character who focuses on using one main class above all else, but is willing to level others in his spare time. He’s a Samurai main, as that’s what he uses for the majority of the series, with additional levels in some kind of Machinist style job. Linaly is a character who likes mage jobs and has levels in Summoner and, in episode four, possibly Geomancer as well. She, however, is not that good at her chosen main and should consider simply picking Geomancer since she’s much better at that. Considering her rapport with the Flying Dragon, maybe she has levels in Beastmaster, too. The more obvious answer would be Dragoon, but there were never any indications of such. She also potentially demonstrates proficiency in Dancer in the scene where she kicks Pretz’s ass.  Rouge and Valkus might be characters who like using novel and new classes, because it’s a lot harder for me to figure out what they would be. Valkus mainly uses guns of all kinds, long before both Barret and Vincent would introduce bullets to the games, and Rouge has been seen using a whip, which as I’ve discussed in an earlier part, says absolutely nothing about what job she could be and quite possibly also indicates something new to the series.

It should be noted that, whenever the job system comes up in a game, there are always jobs that show up for one game and one game only, then are never seen again. Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy X-2 are going to demonstrate this quite well. Final Fantasy XIV is also looking to create brand new jobs soon, with the upcoming Dawntrail expansion introducing the Viper job.

What’s interesting to me about the jobs present in Legend of the Crystals is that the Blue Mage job is name dropped a number of times, with an elderly character representing it this time around. We don’t see any Blue Magic in action, though. It really does seem like the studio who made the anime decided that Blue Mage must be similar to a Sage from the third and fourth games. This tells me that they likely had access to information about the games but didn’t play them.

Although crystals and chocobos make a return in Legend of the Crystals, there actually aren’t a lot of other Final Fantasy elements that could’ve made it into the anime. The bestiary of each game had very little overlap back then, with goblins as the starting enemy and that’s about it. Behemoths, Coeurls and Malboros were introduced in the second game and randomly returned to the series a few times between games two and five, but at the time the anime was made, no one knew which enemies introduced in the fifth game would return in later games, if any. The Cactuar wouldn’t be introduced until the sixth game and no one knew the developers were going to turn the Tonberry from the fifth game into quite a popular mascot.

In fact, it wouldn’t be until the PlayStation era when Final Fantasy games could begin to use mascots to promote themselves, most notably the Chocobo games.

Compare this to the Dragon Quest series, which tends to not only keep a consistent bestiary between games, they’re always adding to that bestiary. Dragon Quest VI did some interesting things with the game’s enemy encounters, owing to the direction the brand new developers decided to take the story, and if all goes well, the Dragon Quest VI Retrospective should be ready by February 2024.

One thing which stuck out to me about this anime is that its villain isn’t as well developed as some of the others in the series. He isn’t as passive as the first few Dragon Quest villains, but his only real motive is to become a death god. Even Chaos from the first Final Fantasy and the Emperor from the second are much better developed than Radevil and Deathgyunos. In my own personal head canon, Radevil must’ve had questions about the purpose of life and in his wanderings throughout the universe, he concluded that the purpose of life is to die and so he decided to become a god to rule over this universe. I may have stolen this idea from somewhere, but admittedly it’ll take me years to fire this Chekhov’s Gun. If you didn’t already figure out what I was talking about, just trust me when I say I’m leading somewhere with this.

Legend of the Crystals did eventually get an English release on VHS, but it has since become abandoned media. No DVD or Blu-Ray version exists. Given that the second-hand market is the only place to find the English dub, some fans released a subtitled version in 2006, and it is this version I’ve been working from. That said, it doesn’t feel like the subtitlers played Final Fantasy V either, since Cid became Shido in the subtitles, Exdeath was mangled several times in different ways, and the only reason that they didn’t know Hiryuu should be “Wind Drake” is because the Game Boy Advance version wouldn’t come out until later that year.

In the end, I think Legend of the Crystals isn’t the best anime, but it also isn’t the worst. If I had to describe it in simple terms, then it’s pretty much exactly like the summoned spirit of a character from the game.

Mid.

And with that, I think the final road block has been lifted and I can start posting Retrospectives again. The next game in the series is Final Fantasy VI, and if all goes well, it should be dropping onto the blog sometime in January.