Record of Lodoss War

1990. OAV. (13 X 30 min.) Fantasy. org Ryu Mizuno (role-playing game). dir Akinori Nagaoka. scr Mami Watanabe, others. des Yutaka Izubuchi, Nobuteru Yuuki, Hidetoshi Kaneko. -jd

An anime fantasy series based on a role-playing game campaign, Record of Lodoss War tells a Dungeons & Dragons–style quest story set against the backdrop of warring kingdoms that have been turned against each other by a powerful sorceress.

The story follows Parn, a young knight, on his travels across the island of Lodoss with a fellowship of companions: an elf, a dwarf, a wizard, a cleric, and a thief. A prologue episode shows the group’s adventure already in progress, and then the story skips backward in time to show the origins of the team and the nature of their quest.

Ghim the dwarf is searching for Leylia, the missing daughter of a priestess. Hoping to enlist the help of the wizard Slayn, Ghim arrives in Parn’s village. Meanwhile, the hotheaded young Parn has been fighting goblins in the forest instead of ignoring them as per village policy. Ostracized by the townspeople, Parn decides to leave the village and join Ghim’s quest. Etoh, a childhood friend of Parn’s who has just returned from his studies to become a cleric, joins the group as well, as does Deedlit, an elf they encounter in the woods. When the fellowship is thrown into a dungeon in a neighboring kingdom, they meet Woodchuck, who is already a prisoner in the dungeon, and he also joins the group.

The overarching plot involves a war between the kingdoms of Lodoss and the neighboring island of Marmo, which is ruled over by the Dark Emperor Beld. With the help of Karla, also known as “The Grey Witch,” Marmo’s armies of evil knights and goblins threaten to overrun all of Lodoss. Parn and his group eventually offer their support to King Fahn, a powerful Lodoss ruler who opposes Beld.

The witch Karla, however, has other plans. A survivor of a kingdom of sorcery that was utterly destroyed by civil war, Karla has decided that no single ruler should ever have too much power over its neighbors. To that end, Karla works her magic by manipulating the kingdoms of Lodoss into waging war on each other. Her support of Beld is only temporary—she betrays him as soon as his campaigns grow too successful. Parn and his companions quickly realize that Karla is the real threat, and they mobilize to deal with her in a climactic showdown with tragic results. Unfortunately, Ashram, Beld’s second in command, begins to follow his own agenda after Beld’s death, and a new enemy rises, hoping to resurrect one of Lodoss’s ancient evil dragons. Parn and his companions, as always, are caught in the crossfire.

Several sequel series and spin-offs of Lodoss were produced. The Chronicles of the Heroic Knight TV series is an extended remix of the events after the Karla story line in the Record of Lodoss War anime, resurrecting some characters and reintroducing others. Based on Mizuno’s novels, the TV series reclaims more of the Tolkienesque quest feel that characterized early Lodoss episodes, with a continent-spanning story involving pirates and the search for a dragon’s treasure. A series of comedy shorts called Welcome to Lodoss Island are bundled together with the Chronicles of the Heroic Knight TV series in the U.S video release, and do a lot to explain the series’ world in general, from the landscape of Lodoss, to why Parn is a “free knight” as opposed to a knight in service of a single king.

Legend of Crystania: The Movie (1995, movie)

Legend of Crystania (1996, OAV, 3 eps.)

Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight (1998, TV, 27 eps.)

Rune Soldier (2001, TV, 24 eps.)

A series of mini-episodes, Welcome to Lodoss Island was compiled into a thirty-five-minute movie that premiered in Japan on April 25, 1998, just over three weeks after the Chronicles of the Heroic Knight anime debuted on Japanese television. It was screened together with an unrelated main feature, Maze: The Mega-Burst Space.

Lodoss creator Ryo Mizuno has also created a mini-empire of Record of Lodoss War novels, and there have been several Lodoss manga, many of which have been translated into English, including Louie the Rune Soldier, Record of Lodoss War: Lady of Pharis, Record of Lodoss War: The Grey Witch, and Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit’s Tale. Lodoss video games have been created for PC Engine, Mega CD, SNES, and Game Boy Color, but only a Dreamcast game, Record of Lodoss War: The Advent of Kardiss, was ever released in English translation.

The character designs are easily the most distinctive element of Lodoss, re-creating all of the traditional Dungeons & Dragons character classes, from elves and dwarves to goblins and dragons. Character faces are rugged or smoothly beautiful, with pointy chins and wide-set eyes. Brushlike linework is used to create interesting textural effects, and careful attention is paid to the details of armor and weapons, and reflections in the metal of jewelry. Costuming ranges from simple yet accurate re-creations of medieval heavy armor to priestesses and monarchs in simple robes and circlets. The only design elements that seem dated in retrospect are the ridiculously high collars and wide shoulders sported by many of the characters—Deedlit, the woodland elf, wears a cape with shoulder pieces that are hard to imagine fitting through the average doorway, and the Dark Emperor Beld’s fur-lined high collar seems to suggest an uncomfortably frigid temperature in his castle. But the characters are all memorable, from Karla, with her brimming, liquid eyes, jeweled headband, and gothic coloring, to the enigmatic black knight Ashram in his black-on-black armor, and the dark elf Pirotesse in her anachronistically short mini-dress and thigh-high boots. Oddly enough, Parn, the main character, is perhaps the least interesting figure in the series, costumed in armor of drab brown and green.

The fantasy backgrounds of the story range from mountainous landscapes to elegant castles and crumbling ruins. The dragons are particularly well done as elaborate, long-necked creatures with maws full of sharp teeth and batlike wings. Paintings accompany retellings of the legends of Lodoss, and other static illustrations are sometimes used to re-create epic battles described in the story. The climactic aerial dragon battle in the final episode suffers from low-budget animation, with still frames and cels sliding across each other to simulate motion.

The story behind Lodoss is arguably better than the story itself. While far from anime’s first foray into armored knights, dragons, or magic (Aura Battler Dunbine preceded Record of Lodoss War by seven years) Lodoss was unique in that it was specifically inspired by actual role-playing game campaigns. In Japan, an “RPG” originally meant a computer game, not a pen-and-paper game. Dungeons & Dragons had taken off in the U.S. in the 1970s, but Japan only discovered the craze through computer fantasy games such as Wizardry (a game that, incidentally, was cocreated by Robert Woodhead, founder of the anime translation and distribution company AnimEigo), a tradition carried on today through video games such as the Final Fantasy series. “Table talk RPGs” was the term for paper-based games in Japan. In 1986, a serialized story by “Group SNE” began publication in the personal-computing magazine Comptiq. Group SNE, which consisted of Lodoss creator Ryo Mizuno and his gaming buddies, were enthusiasts of table talk RPGs, and the serialized story was a “replay,” or an account of the group actually playing a game of Dungeons & Dragons. The intent was to familiarize computer RPG gamers with the pen-and-paper source material that had originally inspired them.

However, as the serialization progressed, the members of Group SNE realized that copyright issues would prevent these articles from ever being collected into a single volume, and so they came up with an ingenious plan to prevent the world, story, and characters they’d created for their game from going to waste. Ryo Mizuno, who had served as the Game Master in the original game and created the story and world setting, released a series of Lodoss War novels, and the group created its own table talk RPG under the Lodoss name. The serialized articles switched to the Lodoss War RPG system, and a franchise was born. Record of Lodoss War was itself later turned into computer games, plus manga and animation, gathering new fans with each new medium, and Group SNE went on to develop several other stories set in the same world.

Lodoss was a landmark series; produced when the OAV format was starting to hit its creative peak, it was the right subject matter for the right time, exotic for Japanese viewers still learning the fantasy genre, and thrilling for Western audiences who were amazed to see an animated fantasy that took its subject matter seriously. Lodoss was intended for the same young adult audience as the Dungeons & Dragons games, unlike the Dungeons & Dragons animated TV series broadcast in the United States, which was aimed at children. There were violent battles, characters had to confront the reality of death, and sexy dark elves revealed their cleavage. It was the sort of series that fans tend to point to as the reason they first became excited about anime.

As animation, Lodoss has not aged particularly well; the characters are beautifully designed and drawn, but the animation quality drops off sharply after the first eight-episode story arc, with ruthless recycling of cels toward the end (one shot of Deedlit is used over and over during a climactic scene). But for modern audiences, the main appeal of watching Lodoss is to see the Western fantasy genre interpreted through new eyes. For all its origins in table talk RPGs, the meandering story still has more in common with a computer adventure game than a Dungeons & Dragons campaign: characters wander from town to town, asking questions of the residents, and have complicated politics explained to them in each new place. Early on, the character dynamics are completely recognizable as Dungeons & Dragons stereotypes, but the fellowship of dungeon crawlers soon goes away in favor of concentrating on Parn, his training as a knight, and his shy romance with Deedlit, who is a more ethereal and comic figure than would be typical in a Western story. It’s an evolution that would continue in later Japanese fantasy epics, such as The Vision of Escaflowne, as animators became more familiar and comfortable with the genre and began to make it more their own.

The opening credits, backed by Akino Arai’s hauntingly romantic theme song, “Adesso e Fortuna,” performed by Sherry in Japanese, show the land of Lodoss as an atmospheric, mist-covered landscape through which Parn and Deedlit ride on horseback as dragons take flight.

The travelers’ first confrontation with a dragon in episode 1, “Prologue to the Legend,” has all the fire breathing, sword stabbing, knife throwing, and axe swinging that any role-playing game aficionado could want, and the crumbling ruins of the Great Tunnel, lit only by flickering torchlight, are fabulously claustrophobic as a dragon emerges, snakelike, from its lair, red eyes glowing.

Best known at the time as a mecha designer for Patlabor, Aura Battler Dunbine, Mobile Suit Gundam 0080, and Char’s Counterattack, Yutaka Izubuchi created the original character design drawings for Lodoss, and subsequently gained recognition as the creator of RahXephon, and as costume designer for Gundam Wing and the live-action movie Kamen Rider the First.

Ghim, the dwarf, is an homage to the character of Gimli in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

As a franchise, Lodoss has outlasted the original RPG boom that spawned it, and was one of the first anime series to achieve success with a large-scale “media mix” strategy of novels, animation, manga, and games all supporting each other. The series has been translated into English, French, Chinese, Italian, and other languages worldwide.

The opening song to the Chronicles of the Heroic Knight TV series was composed by Yoko Kanno (The Vision of Escaflowne, Cowboy Bebop, Macross Plus) and sung by Maaya Sakamoto, voice actor for Hitomi in The Vision of Escaflowne, and also singer of the Escaflowne opening credits theme song.

violence Many battles and swordplay. There is quite a bit of blood, although it’s tastefully handled, probably nothing older children couldn’t handle. nudity There’s no outright nudity, although Pirotesse’s breasts are almost fully exposed by her plunging neckline.