Lodoss-tou Senki: Eiyuu Kishi Den

This anime is sortof a sequel, sortof a retelling of the original Record of Lodoss War OAV. Continuity-wise, it seems to be something of a combination of the two. Some things distinctly happen after those events, some things seem to happen during the same period of time. In my own head, I think of it as a sequel.

This anime is a more "anime" anime. The characters are more colorful (visually), and although it is good, I don't like the animation quite as much as I did the animation from the OAV. Although I think the characters are a bit more interesting. This one is longer, ... and it has more time to flesh out the characters.

The music is lovely.

I also do really enjoy the short animations at the end of each episode. I think they're hilarious.

Honestly, I was very disappointed by this. I'm a big lover of fantasy, I read a lot of fantasy novels and play D&D, I also loved the original OVA, but this one was far below what I expected.
The writing was extremely predictable and often, I found myself wanting for more. Something unpredictable, something that would explain character motivations, particularly the villains who came off as "evil for evil's sake" and not someone with actual meaningful motivations for the things they did. I didn't care for most of the characters and honestly, it was a drag to get through.
I still love the character designs, honestly, I ... still think they have one of the best designs for elves and even if the animation is subpar at times, I can't complain about the art style itself. But I still wouldn't recommend this at all - stick to the original OVA and keep away from this one.

Ok... Wasted enough time on this already.

After the Lodoss War OVA this is an utter multi-train crash where all the trains contained trash.
I've been trying to get through this for the last 24+ years since it's initial release. Back in the day before the internet made finding this easy it was all dodgy VCDs from some random model shops... and this was always a struggle to find... and then you did and you understood why: it's offensively bad.

I'm struggling to find a nice thing to say about this... except the OP Music: it's surprisingly great - and you'll find yourself humming it around the ... house.

But I know what you're really here for - some more chibi bashing... and my god does it need bashing so this crap goes away and never ever comes back into this type of anime. It's utterly charmless and hugely annoying rubbish that takes up sometimes over half the run time of an episode... for what? I want to cause harm to whichever idiot decided this needed to be there.
I don't have the words to reach the depths to describe quite how backed up a sewerage system this is.
I know much like Fate there's a whole "Chibi Cooking thing" for the painfully short of adult as well... but that's a whole separate series that can be very ignored by anyone who's not a child.

As others mentioned, there is a lot of overlap with the OVA (due to how the OVA is a mix of stories from the LNs/Manga).
So what to do if someone has already covered the same material? You make it better right... right??? right???????
Nooooo, lower quality everything: animation, voice acting (both Japanese and English dub), and somehow make the story bad - upping all the poor aspects.

Unlike the OVA which is the closest thing I've still seen to a proper enacted RPG session (even better than the recent US ones), this ditches that entire feel for a very poor run of the mill 90s fantasy anime.

Someone needs to save everyone a lot of time by removing every ms of Chibi crap from this and reducing the runtime to about 1.5hours. Or just go watch the OVA again, as everything is done better... 8 years earlier.