Audience reviews
5 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
SgtSalamander
*SOILERS AHEAD*
The Legend of Ellcia is a pretty obscure little 90s OVA, embodying many of the classic characteristics that cause people to fall in love with that era- unique creative vision, hand-drawn animation, and a warm, colorful palate. However, beyond these characteristics, it does fall short in a few key areas. Beginning with the story, the viewer is presented with some bizarre yet decidedly engaging worldbuilding, taking the classic evil empire setup and spicing things up with a weird quasi-steampunk world, full to bursting with religious symbolism and strange prophetic mystery. These aspects it nails, and pair well with certain visual elements I'll discuss later. However, the story itself, underneath all the innovative trappings, remains a fairly standard formula with a somewhat…
Read at the sourceGsarthotegga
As far as early 1990 anime OVAs go, Ellcia is exceptionally well-rounded and entertaining. This is a simple fantasy story, and there's never anything unexpected thrown your way: you know, plenty of rambles about a chosen one with a hidden past, ties to royalty, a creation myth, four gods the heroes have to seek out to unlock powers, good versus evil, and the fate of the planet hanging in the balance. The big bad evil poopy-head empire unearthed ancient sci-fi gadgets, granting them supremacy over the rest of the country bumpkins—all of that, of course, suggesting a civilizational cycle and collapse, and it provides a cool archeo-futuristic atmosphere, mixing high and low tech weapons and settings, along with magic and a non-human race, the Selkies (surprisingly, there's little fetish conte…
Read at the sourceVoivodian
Schizo tech is not a stranger to fantasy anime of the 90s, Windaria conjures iconic imagery of crossbowmen fending off assaults from trapezoid Stug-esque assault cannons; and its enthralling. In contrast, Ellcia's unashamedly gratuitous schizo tech sticks out in the most jarring way. This might have something to with the similarly jarring tone, which alternates like prog rock time signatures between slapstick deformation, bog standard high stakes epic fantasy to defeat a great evil and child friendly adventure tale moments.
The problem with this is that immersion immediately goes bust; and the whole thing isn't quite stupid or parodical enough to laugh off like many other forgotten 90s fantasy ovas.
Without immersion, Ellcia can't be anything more than utterly mediocre. Only its art dire…
Read at the sourceShura-shurato
This is one of those ova´s back in the 90´s wich u see an commercial about on another anime VHS, and wether u like it or not, U WANTED IT. And honestly i was a bit suprised when i had my first view about it years ago ,i had no idea it was soo funny ( the trailer only showed the bloody action scenes and scary monsters). And as a kid i got WAY more than i bargained for (saw it in 1996) especially with the violence and dark twists in the overall storyline, that around that time fantasy action genre's like this one popped up out of animestudio's like there was no freakin tomorrow! aside that i really had a big laugh seeing the 1st episode, maybe the animationstyle is not the best made, with some bad habits from 1980's animation but u can look past that, Charachters overall have an funny or ser…
Read at the sourceRobdeFR
This one belongs to my VHS anime old days . I don't know if I still have the VHS somewhere, but I certainly know that I don't have my VCR, so, upon seeing the OVA upped in the net, I went ahead and downloaded it for a nice rewatch and of course, for the sake of nostalgia.
Ellcia, is a fantasy anime of the beginning of the nineties, so you can more or less know what to expect if you are familiar with sci-fi fantasy anime from that late eghties/early nineties. The tale is set in a very far future where civilization ended how we know it and started again from point 0. Some "ancient" technology has been rediscovered but things stayed with that distinct and usually "Japanese" balance between technology and medieval culture (in this case since it portrays a more occidental people.).
Story;
Our…
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