Tuesday, November 21, 2023

OBSCURE O.V.A.S, *Dragoon

Based on a trilogy of JRPGs that never saw an American release, Dragoon got a 3-episode OVA series adaptation that only covered the beginning of the story. Anime studio Magic Bus produced this ramshackle anime about role-playing tropes that gets blended with gratuitous nudity scenes. If they had left out the fan service material, it might have made for a decent enough family anime as there is little action in it and more just the cast of characters meandering from one plot point to another.

A young swordsman named Sedon who finds a naked girl lying out in the snowy forest. She later wakes up and says she is May, but with no memory of her life up until that day. A team of armored hunters from a feuding empire are looking for her, and Sedon's father fights them off. There's a whole backstory involving Sedon's pop being a captain of the guard who fought off an invasion from the evil empire years ago, and vindictive soldier who wants revenge against him for cutting his eye, but all this only really gets mentioned to pad the anime out to three episodes. May, Sedon, along with his annoying healer sister Millie add some more to their party including an outcasted prince and a gambling sexy sorceress as they make way to the same empire who wants to capture May in the first place.

There is almost nothing appealing about this OVA with a total absence of interesting characters. The animation is mediocre by Magic Bus which is one of the last in a line of OVAs they created before going full time into working on movies and TV anime. ADV Films only released this on VHS after the turn of the century with an underwhelming dub. It's hard to say if even fans of the original video games cared about this limp vegetable of a production.

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