OBSCURE O.V.A.S, *Fire Emblem

The 1990s were lousy with OVAs based on video games, most of which never even got an English release like Sakura Wars and Galaxy Fraulein Yuna. Being cautious to allow their titles to be turned into animated productions after the fiasco that was The Legend Of Zelda American series, Nintendo somehow got motivated to have its Fire Emblem RPG formatted into a 2-episode OVA based on the third chapter in the series, Fire Emblem: Mystery Of The Emblem. The anime came out two years after the initial game's release with the possibility of extending it based on its sales, so how well it did in comparison to the video game it is based on is hard to say, but the OVA got gobbled up by ADV Films in their crusade to get nearly any anime they could get released on the American market. The anime got both episodes released on a single dubbed and subtitled VHS with most of the ADV regulars as the cast, so there's a number of people on the original Evangelion dub that will sound familiar upon watching. Despite having five studios behind this brief anime romp, the animation itself is largely basic which might be due to Nintendo not wanting to get their feet too wet in their first major anime-related release just prior to them launching the unstoppable juggernaut that is Pokemon.

The anime opens with a bewildering ton of narration asking you to digest an entire Silmarillion's worth of backstory involving several different kingdoms bickering with each other leading to the nobler house of Aritia getting invaded with its Prince Marth and his knights obtaining sanctuary in the nearby land of Talys whose Princess Caeda has a major crush the outcasted prince. Talys gets invaded by pirates, so Marth and his posse ride into town to rescue the city. Afterwards, Marth decides to take Caeda and his buds on a crusade to reclaim their homeland. Along the way the help a rogue swordsman they free a priestess from a band of slave traders as they begin their long journey which never got a continuation after low sales.

The problem with the Fire Emblem's anime adaptation is that it expects you to already know a bunch of lore prior to seeing it of which was completely lost on American viewers who never even knew what Fire Emblem was until some of their characters were featured in the Super Smash Bros. franchise. For a fantasy-based RPG, there are incredibly few fantasy elements involved in it aside from a random evil wizard and the Princess' Pegasus, leaving most of the story leaning towards the video game's tactics angle. The OVA has never been released on DVD or Blu-Ray in America, and isn't regularly on streaming either, so this may pique your interest if you became a fan of the game series after they became available in the West, but you are not really missing out on anything by avoiding it.