The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky Blu-ray Review
Lost in Translation.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, December 19, 2012
Some of the further right pundits on Fox News Channel might want to steer clear of
The Legend of Heroes Trails in the
Sky if for no other reason than that its focal kingdom is named Liberl (pronounced
liberal), and it does indeed
seem to be one of those progressively minded places that bandies about supposedly "socialist" ideas the verge perilously
close to such hot button issues as workers' rights and the power of the proletariat. Of course some of the further
left pundits of Fox's counterpart MSNBC might also want to stay away from this set of OVAs if for no other reason
than that it's based on a videogame and has made a rather uneasy transition to anime. This is one of those properties
that attempts to ease the shift from gaming to "pure" entertainment with a brief prelude that is meant to get everyone up
to speed with various terms and ideas that populate the franchise, but which is too rushed and even incomprehensible at
times to really do much more than confuse.
I've watched
The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky twice through now, and I'm still at a loss to be able to fully
articulate what exactly is going on through large swaths of it. Yes, there's the requisite good versus evil plot, and it
appears that a young girl named Estelle Bright is probably the leading character of the game version, something that
has
been ported over to the OVAs. But Estelle's back story is still a bit of a muddle to me, though evidently at some point in
her childhood something horrible happened to her father, a man who was some sort of upstanding crusader for truth,
justice and the Liberl Way. Somewhere along the line a young boy named Joshua was adopted into the family, and this
set of OVAs begins with the rather weird offering of Joshua "passing" a sedative to Estelle during a rather non-platonic
kiss, in order to deaden her hysteria at the thought of Josh taking off on some sort of mysterious mission.
Estelle pines after Josh and continues to clutch the only thing he left behind, his harmonica, as if it were "Precious" and
she were Gollum. Meanwhile various battles break out, a bizarre little purple haired girl named Renne seems to have it
out for Estelle and there are various mutterings about arcane terms like The Organization and Legion and The Bracers
Guild, none of which is ever really explained very well or ultimately made clear, even within the confines of this relatively
short running feature.
So what
The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky boils down to is a fairly standard battle anime (with some quasi-
mecha overtones) that is probably going to leave anyone who has never played the game (that would include
me, obviously) scratching their collective heads and wondering what all the fuss is about. It's kind of a shame, for this
is an often gorgeously animated piece that offers some really well done backgrounds if some patently weird character
design (virtually none of the people in this anime have noses, only little triangles which make them all look like mutant
descendants of The Scarecrow from
The Wizard of Oz.
The characters in and of themselves are relatively decent as well, with Estelle a good, plucky heroine (even if she's
really annoyingly voiced by Brittney Karbowski) and Josh an enigmatic hero with a mysterious past (a mysterious past
which is
not given any explication in this piece). There's a ranting villain who turns out maybe not to be so bad
after all and Renne, who speaks in a squeaky high little girl's voice, who acts like a petulant three year old but also
seems to have some redeeming qualities as well, at least as evidenced by a third act change of heart where she
actually does something
nice for Estelle after having plotted against her for most of the preceding action.
The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky is an outing that needed a
lot more than just a simple prelude
with a few facts and terms bandied about to give it meaningful context and even more importantly some way for non-
game playing viewers to have a "hook" into the enterprise. What remains is an often visually spectacular looking piece
that fails utterly to connect simply because we're never quite sure what's going on or what various characters are
yammering on about. (I'm
still not sure what The Organization is or does nor what exactly The Bracers Guild is
for nor even what Legion refers to.) After the first time through, I thought maybe it was just me and I had been too
stupid to pick up even the barest strands of some of the back story and the interrelationships between various
characters. After the second time through, I'm still more than willing to admit my own stupidity probably is playing into
my dunderheaded reaction to
The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky, but there's at least a sneaking suspicion
now on my part that
some sort of valuable information just wasn't included for some reason, as if the creators
simply assumed everyone would know the ins and outs of the story without being told.
The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky has what seem to be some solid building blocks for a really excellent
entertainment, but this set of OVAs simply assumes that everyone is going to know what's going on from the get go, which
in my case at least was resolutely not the fact. The barest outlines of the story are clear, make no mistake, and it's not
hard to discern who are the heroes (or heroines) and who are the villains, but so much else in this offering is never
explained or dealt with so quickly and without any development that many will probably cease to care (or never even
start caring) as they watch Estelle battle away and try to reunite with Josh. The game franchise has been very
successful and a feature film adaptation is probably a good idea, but for a general audience to come flocking, someone
needs to spend more time planting a few seeds of comprehension so that a full flowered appreciation can blossom. For
fans of the game who will probably understand
The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky a lot more than I obviously
did, this Blu-ray does offer superior video and audio, though supplements are nil.
