[BluWacky]

Originally Posted by darkchibi07

Spoil it for us!

Okay... it's been a while since I played the game, and my Japanese is poor to non-existent, but here's how it goes as far as I could tell (it could all be complete bollocks, though - I definitely understood the first five minutes almost perfectly, but after that almost anything goes). If you've not played Phantasia, you won't understand anything I say here.

Spoiler:

The episode begins with the re-awakening of Dhaos in the "present" by Mars (I think that's his name), Chester staying behind to fight him and Mint/Cless heading into the future thanks to Morison (who tells them to find Arche and Klarth).

We then fast-forward to Midgard 100 years in the future, and the massive demon assault you may remember from the game (I only just remember this bit, so bear with me). Cless, Klarth and Arche fight off the monsters (not without some banter between Klarth and Arche about how much Klarth sucks at summoning, though) while Mint is put before an assembly to try and convince them not to fire that massive gun thing they're preparing since it's playing into Dhaos' hands. They don't believe her, though, and fire the damn thing anyway - the blast begins to engulf all of Valhalla and destroy the city. Mint has a vision of Maetel telling her to protect Yggdrasil and she shields herself from the blast, but will she survive?

The OVA is basically targetted at hardcore fans only, which is a shame given that the production values are really nice - great animation and music (I really like the OP, "Yume no Hate" by tomo, but can't find a release date for it anywhere unfortunately - maybe it's only coming on the special edition BGM disc with one of the posh collector's editions of the DVD) and some half decent voice-acting (Mint is a wuss, but Arche is suprisingly non-annoying thus far and the blokes are fine as usual).

The main problem is the god-awful plotting structure. ToP isn't exactly heavy on plot anyway, but we have no indication of who these characters are whatsoever, we're just plonked into their story completely unaided and very quickly thrown some stuff about Dhaos, their parents and then wheeeee sent into the future by a man we've never met before. As far as I could tell nothing got explained in the future either! Having played the game it all made a fair amount of sense and I was able to enjoy seeing it well animated, but I can't see this being at all successful in Region 1 where only a relative minority of people will have played the game in any shape or form.

Once I've seen subs I may revise my judgement, but I can see why Sairai_X didn't enjoy it. I have to admit I didn't mind it - it's certainly better than Star Ocean EX! - but it is a little disappointing.