Final Fantasy Retrospective – Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals

 

In February of 2022, the laptop upon which I was writing the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest Retrospective articles started randomly shutting down, disrupting my work completely and making it hard to finish the Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon article. Not only was the momentum lost completely, I also lost any enthusiasm for the project.

It wouldn’t have been that bad if I was near the start of the game, but I had almost finished it and I was literally on the final quest before the end credits. All I needed to do was retrieve one item from floor 27, and I would be done. I had even been to floor 27 once already, but had to turn back due to bad luck, probably with the Green Dragons.

It took me a year and a half to return to this game, and in the time it took me to get back to it, I was continually wondering if I should just skip over the game since most people don’t bother with it and would just skip over to the sixth game in the main series when covering Dragon Quest. I was also worried that my save would somehow not work and I would lose all the time I put into the game, which would make moot any debate I was having with myself.

But the save file did work and I was able to finish the game and move on to the next title, which presented for itself another challenge. If I’m going by release date, the next title in my Retrospective articles is the anime Legend of the Crystals, a sequel to Final Fantasy V. I am planning on somehow eventually covering The Spirits Within, Advent Children, Dad of Light and the manga Lost Stranger, but the question became, what do I do about something like Legend of the Crystals? It isn’t considered very good, isn’t made by Squaresoft, and most people don’t even consider it canon to the series, let alone canon to Final Fantasy V. I could’ve skipped over this and gone straight to Final Fantasy VI, but I wanted to see how much of Final Fantasy V made it into the anime, as well as how Final Fantasy it even is.

And yet I put this one off, too. It’s been very nearly five months since the last Retrospective article I wrote, and since then I feel like I’ve contributed less than the bare minimum to the blog while promising that more would be coming. I’ve got several articles I’d love to share, if they were finished, and I just need to finish them sometime. First, I’ll work on delivering this article and then that’ll be one less that I have in my backlog.

Going into this, I’ve been hoping that this article would be a nice meaty one while at the same time knowing that I’m not a film student and I can’t write 30,000 words analysing the themes of a short two hour anime. I wanted to at least approach this in a similar manner to the articles I wrote about the games thus far, as much as I can anyway, and hope that it’s at least a little entertaining. However, I know that I could procrastinate this article just as much as I had the Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon article, so I’m going to commit myself to posting it on a specific date first, then write the article. Once finished, this should be the last roadblock keeping me from continuing the Retrospectives. Join me on my journey into an early attempt at Final Fantasy anime, and technically the first direct sequel in the entire series. It won’t be until Final Fantasy X-2 when the developers of the franchise take the plunge for real and open the sequel floodgates, but until then, enjoy this first attempt to revisit a beloved setting.

 

The first thing one notices when listening to the opening theme of Legend of the Crystals is that it pays homage to the main theme from Final Fantasy V. This makes sense, of course, considering what the anime is trying to be.

The anime opens 200 years after the game and declares that it’s the year 1000 in the cosmic calendar in some era or another. I’m not glossing over it out of laziness, this is exactly how this sort of information feels to me. The calendar never comes up ever again in the entire Final Fantasy series, and this is the last time we’ve visited the world of Final Fantasy V so far, so it doesn’t really matter what calendar they use. They could just shorten “year 1000 cosmic calendar of the Kario Yuga era” to 1000 KYE and it would convey just as much information to the viewer.

We find out more about the world of Final Fantasy V from the anime’s opening including that the planet is named R. That’s it, it’s just the planet R. They might’ve been going for the shortest planet name ever, and I think they succeeded.

The rest of the information conveyed before we begin the story proper is that R has two moons in orbit around it, and they don’t keep track of history very well, so the cataclysmic battle for the future of the planet has largely been forgotten in the two centuries since it was fought. Now, I know that in the real world, history can be quickly forgotten as well, just look at how people romanticize Christopher Columbus and the founding fathers of both the United States and Canada, as well as how a certain side in the American Civil War is willfully ignorant of their problematic aspects. There are also certain people trying desperately to rewrite the history of the second World War and paint Adolph Hitler in a more positive light, as well as deny the crimes of him and his followers. But, and this is a big but, I think that if we had to fight a war to preserve the future of the world against a cosmic entity and we won, we would not so easily forget such a triumph.

Then again, this is presuming that the whole world can join forces against such an entity. A deadly pandemic threatened to kill the world, and we didn’t present a united front against it. Russia invaded Ukraine to try to violently annex it and they still found their share of supporters among people brainwashed into thinking that whatever the news media tells them, they should believe the exact opposite out of spite or something. If they’re told Putin is bad, that must mean that he’s being unfairly judged and isn’t actually committing war crimes right now! We can’t even agree that Donald Trump is a bad man, so how would we unite to fight a being like Exdeath?

Legend of the Crystals is a story in four parts, for it originally released as four original video episodes, the Japanese equivalent to the direct-to-video sequel. The first episode is named after the wind, and the second one named after fire, but then the game decides to forego the usual elements and name the third and fourth chapters after a dragon and a star.

Actually, and this is something I’ll be bringing up again when I get around to writing about Final Fantasy XIV, but in the Japanese language, what we translate as “star” can refer to several different heavenly bodies including the very planet we’re standing on. The kanji for “planet” literally translates to “confusing star”. If you thought that referring to Eorzea as a star was a very poetic translation choice… well, you’d be right about that, too, but it’s simply how the Japanese describe planets.

The story starts with a dire prediction that a storm is coming. An elderly Blue Mage in the kingdom of Tycoon can read the wind and the wind is telling him of an approaching darkness. Meanwhile, a girl named Linaly is trying to convince her grandfather to stay home because she’s justifiably worried about his health. As a descendant of the legendary Bartz, her grandfather feels responsible for the continued existence of the world and he can sense something is up with the wind as well, but Linaly promises that she’ll be able to handle things.

Actually, that’s an interesting idea. In Bartz’s time, it had been only a few years since the Warriors of Dawn sealed away Exdeath, but their tales were legendary, even then. However, I guess there’s a difference between kicking a problem down the road as if it were a can of beans and actually picking up that problem and throwing it out, and once everyone realized that the Warriors of Dawn only prolonged the problem whereas the Warriors of Light solved the problem for good, everyone knew who the heroes actually were. It was especially bad for the Warriors of Dawn because they basically endangered both halves of the world by using the crystals to seal Exdeath away. Perhaps, though, you could say that they saved both worlds in this manner, because after the crystals shattered, humanity is assumed to have learned (however briefly) that they shouldn’t have been exploiting the crystals’ power like they had been.

Of course, the crystals reformed at the very end of the game, and knowing how the real world operates, I’d be worried that people would begin exploiting the crystals again, but we just have to assume this is a world where humans are capable of learning from their mistakes.

Another character named Pretz notices the pair traveling during the storm and volunteers to come along as their bodyguard, but Linaly’s grandfather denies him the opportunity, multiple times.

Perhaps the writers were inspired by the sea dragon Syldra, because Linaly seems to know one of her own, a beautiful creature she calls Kisana. This is its only appearance in episode one.

The early impression that the anime gives is that it’s a very lighthearted story full of comedy and pratfalls, and this continues throughout the entire adventure. It is, in some ways, living up to the example of Final Fantasy V. As they journey to the Wind Shrine, a journey which was somehow a lot easier in the original game, a vicious sand monster attacks. Linaly is a summoner and attempts to summon a ferocious beast, but instead summons the strangest-looking chocobo, one that is definitely not suited for combat, so they ride it and beat a hasty retreat.

I assume Linaly doesn’t have a lot of MP, because they don’t get far, necessitating Pretz’s timely rescue. He uses what appears to be a Samurai technique to slice the enemy in half and kill it in one blow, although his use of a motorcycle (and later on, bombs) also suggests that he might have job levels in something like a Machinist, a job that didn’t appear in the original game but would later appear in games such as Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward. The first official appearance of the job is credited to Final Fantasy VI, despite Edgar not equipping traditional Machinist weapons.

Even though Pretz manages to save them both and demonstrates how capable he is in battle, Linaly’s grandfather still tries to order him to go home, and seems to think that his granddaughter can continue on her own, since the fight took a lot out of him despite that Pretz did all the work and all he did was try to flee. Pretz accompanies her anyway, and it’s a good thing he does, because the pair are attacked by pirates.

Here is where we meet supporting cast member Rouge, a pirate in a flying ship who covets what others have but who doesn’t seem to be very good at what she does, because she is reduced to trying to bully a kid out of his motorcycle. Times are tough indeed.

Perhaps times are tough because the Wind Shrine is so much harder to reach these days. Linaly needs to use her earring and cast a magic spell to find the way to the Shrine, when the shrine was just readily accessible on the world map in the game. Maybe the crystals didn’t trust humanity to have learned their lesson either, because the final obstacle in Linaly’s way is the Valley of the Dragons, which is a land that is pretty much wind personified, full of more tornadoes than Tornado Alley in the United States.

The world sure has changed in 200 years.

Linaly is able to calm the wind with her power and the pair of friends manage to make it to the Wind Shrine, which in this anime is a floating shrine instead of an easier to access landborne one. Linaly and Pretz have different ideas about how to get into the shrine. Pretz leaves to find Rouge and threatens her pirates with his bombs if they don’t carry him to the shrine’s entrance in their ship, but Linaly finds and solves a puzzle that grants her easy access.

The pirates don’t stick around, though, because they see another flying ship, the Iron Wing from Tycoon. Its passengers, including a very militant type named Mr. Valkus, establishes through exposition that the other three crystals are already lost and the Wind Crystal is all that’s left. It turns out that someone is trying to acquire the crystals for themselves, Final Fantasy IV style, for their own ends. However, the absence of the crystals may spell doom for the world as it once did 200 years ago.

Inside the Wind Shrine, the crystal shows the pair visions of the Warriors of Light and begs Pretz and Linaly to “please get them back”, then it forces itself into Linaly’s body, becoming absorbed by her completely and apparently residing in her butt because it starts to glow. This is definitely a comedy anime.

Pretz decides this is way out of his league, so he takes Linaly to see Tycoon’s Blue Mage, thus ending the chapter of the wind.

Ordinarily, this is where I would start on episode two, but it’s Christmas, and Geoff could use a bit of a vacation, so part two of the Legend of the Crystals Retrospective is coming on Friday, with parts three and four coming next week on days when he would usually post. Posting these articles like this will also hopefully get me back in the swing of things, writing something on a somewhat regular basis for the blog. Final Fantasy VI, for example, should hopefully be posted in January.