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The unforgettable glory of early Idea Factory anime adaptation


Plk_Lesiak

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This might be common knowledge, but while I was aware of VN adaptations being generally cursed, I had no idea to what extent that's true. It turns out that among top 5 worst rated anime in history, two places are taken by none other than Idea Factory and two OVA that promote some very original, totally not Evangelion rip-off PS2 VNs. Mars of Destruction and Skelter Heaven. And what treats they are, so perfect in presenting virtues of VNs to broader world: alien-fighting high school girls, male protagonists perfectly devoid of unnecessary features such as personality, extremely awkward and inappropriate romance scenarios... I can't imagine how VNs never went mainstream with such profound promotional material. ^^

Anyway, I created this shitpost of a thread to see whether anyone knows something about how these abominations came to be, or anything else about their history? They are so hilariously misguided, I can't really wrap my mind around what the people making (and funding) them thought... Particularly when they didn't stop immediately after the first disaster (although to be fair, Mars of Destruction is so edgy and over-the-top gory it's unintentionally hilarious, Skelter Heaven less so, but people still find humour in how atrocious it is). Also, I'll probably want to catch up to all the other masterpieces of Satou Yoshiteru and share my impressions... Truly an Uwe Boll-level genius, shame he doesn't transform Idea Factory VNs into real art to this day. :(

Edited by Plk_Lesiak
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2 hours ago, Zalor said:

Kind of relevant, but Tsui no Sora (the 1999 precursor to Subahibi) has an animated OVA, and it's considered by some to be the worst anime to ever exist. I'm sure there's worse, but damn is it near the bottom of the barrel. 

Ooooh, interesting. Although it seems to be hentai, made by some crappy hentai studio, so I can imagine it suffering from the same disease as euphoria OVAs – ignoring all the cool parts and just throwing in a bunch of porn scenes with minimum context. 2.20 score is impressive though, going to check it out if I can find it online. ;]

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Oh my god, that Tsui no Sora OVA... It's possibly the ugliest and most insulting thing I've watched ever. I know the original wasn't a masterpiece, but there's no semblance of the artstyle or denpa storytelling in that hentai anime... And it's just so hideous and poorly animated... Why do these things exist? I'm sad...

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So, back to the main point! While watching the horrible OVAs, I realized that Spectral Force and Generation of Chaos games share the same, crappy setting – the world of Neverland where bad attempts at dark fantasy and random christian symbolism are joined with casts of terrible characters to create truly memorable and rich experiences. To make that look extra appealing, the OVAs make sure to utilize the ugliest CGI environments and cheapest animation possible.

That's not where the most funny part comes in though, as the most incredible to me is that most of them utterly fail to set up a story. First Generation of Chaos OVA opens with a character that was a talented monster tamer (pokemon trainer), but got too old and lost his ability to control them. So he's just a dude now. Great, isn't it? Always wanted to play as a retired trainer with no interesting skills or features, basically a dream scenario. Than we get a five minute story of a half demon lady that makes carpets but than tragedy happens (humans racist against demons!) and she suddenly becomes a badass warrior and join a random demon on... Well, they don't tell you on what, but presumably some kind of adventure. Cool!

The second OVA, at least, is much more focused! All about a really pathetic kid trying to be a knight and his romance with a Princess in the ugliest CGI castle in history. Thrilling stuff, I kind of hoped for everyone to die after 15 minutes and as they didn't and the game likely won't let you make that hapen, I'll skip on checking it out. It's an RPG, not a VN, so I feel it's unlikely to include appropriately gruesome bad endings for that bunch of losers.

The third OVA finally gets its shit together enough to offer a proper prologue. It's still terribly made and wastes a lot of the combined 48 minute runtime (in 2 episodes), but at least you get a high-stakes conflict, main characters you don't hate and clear indication what the game's story will be about. I'm amazed that Satou only needed like 6 tries as a director to get that part right. I'm sure if you gave him 20 more animes to make and 50 more dollars in budget he'd reach 5/10 territories.

And well, I kind of omitted the Spectral Force OVA, which is the oldest of them all... As I'm not sure what to say about it. It's so badly directed and animated that it's neigh-incomprehensible in the first episode, but after that it just... Is. Bland, rushed, with the main character being unlikeable, it kind of does the "setting up the story" part right, but is so ugly and unappealing it's still anti-adventisement. The one thing I'm likely to remember long-term is the anime opening with a scene of an angel(/demon?) lady being crucified by a mob and bleeding with what was, going by the color, lots of raspberry sauce. It didn't really tie into anything, it was just there.

I wonder if any of these games had decent stories? I'm sure these tie-ins make them a disservice, but could they be this shitty if the source material was decent? I wonder...

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