RG Veda

Hmmmmm, this was not exactly what I was expecting from this anime, I'm not sure what I was expecting but this wasn't it.

Taking it with a view of the manga its.... odd. The main premise is the same but Ashura has changed sex and the God King was Lord Ashura. Slight differences which can be explained by less time to tell the story in the OAV's run. Except they don't tell the story, they don't tell any story, maybe a quarter of a story or half a story, but not a full one. It's left with no resolution.

Taking it without a view of the manga ... and ... well I can see why it didn't get picked up for a whole series. It's a middle section of a story with no start and no end, not even a semi resolution. In my opinion without the plot of the manga to lean upon this OAV flops, and I am so disappointed about that.

The characters have been brought to the screen well, I have no qualms there, the music is fitting and the animation is good for its age. One other thing I feel the need to comment on is that the OAV doesn't have the grip on you that the manga has. It's a lot less intense and emotional, I didn't shed a tear watching it and I had been hoping for that, I love CLAMPs ability to tear your heart out but it just wasn't there. That could again have been time constraints but in the manga it doesn't take long for you to love a character and then have him/her killed.

I'd say don't watch this if you haven't read the manga, there's not much to be gotten from it (except pretty Soma). If you have read the manga then watch it but with no expectations, it's nice to see the characters on screen but that's about it.

Nanashi Moriko *disappointed fangirl*
29/05/07

Imagine if the Star Wars trilogy was redone as a single movie, and the only parts they included were the fight on Jabba's floating barge, and the conversation between Yoda and Obi-wan about the Skywalker family tree. Newcomers would have no idea what was going on, and those familiar with the story would be furious at how it was butchered. If you also randomly turn Luke into a girl, you would have the relationship between this OVA and the source manga.

Rg Veda is set in a complex, beautifully drawn, fascinating world. Some of that is translated to the screen. The main characters ... are strikingly done, and the main, if not only, enjoyment of watching is seeing them come to life in full color. The nameless soldiers and mooks? Seem to have been done on more of a budget, prompting flashbacks to 80's morning cartoons.

I watched this having read only the first five volumes of the manga, as my public library never bothered to obtain the other half of this series. So I can't say how closely the second part of this anime comes to the original, that part must take place in a later volume. As to the first half, it isn't so bad as a 5-minute version of the story, but we're definitely in Cliff'snotes' territory. Also, Ashura's sex change lends a disturbing, Lolita-esque quality to some of her scenes with Lord Yama.

Honestly, there are better things to do with an hour and a half.

I actually found this OVA pretty decent considering the widespread hate it got. I'd say it delivers what it promises, and I'd really love to see more of this story animated.

The premise is about the journey of the young king Ashura, who fell from his throne, and his six guardians lead by warrior Yasha, who try to help him reclaim it. The OVA focuses the journey of the king and his guardians through deserts, castles and icy landscapes in search of the 6th and last guardian, while briefly encountering the main villain, Taishakuten.

Although having a pretty generic fantasy-adventure setting I found the cast to be ... what set it apart from other titles of the genre. Being from the shoujo genre, the guardians consist of beautiful and delicate yet kick-assing guys and three girls who aren't hyper-sexualized for a change. Being only 2 episodes short it's hard to say the supporting characters have depth but their basic archetypes are unique enough and I would love to see similar representations more often in anime.

The two characters that gets most of the screen time are the main couple, Ashura and Yasha, which are simply adorable. In the manga, which I plan to read following this OVA, Ashura is born genderless and thus being referred to mostly as male, I also saw him as male yet the DVD English translation insisted on referring to him as a girl, which is annoying since his being male is one of the things that make his character, and his subtly-romantic relationship with Yasha so interesting.

Yasha is being very protective of Ashura and they both seem madly in need of each other which is very sweet to see.

Other than that, the art is gorgeous. The animation, detail and movement, can't be compared with today's standards but the shoujo-ish art is something that is sadly very rare in modern anime and it gives a great feeling to return to it. The character and world design is also very pretty.

In conclusion I recommend this OVA for any lover of romantic adventures, I was surprised at how much I found it enjoyable.

I was a bit hesitant going into this OVA, as i've been a fan of the RG Veda manga for a long time and i've heard the OVAs were terrible. Once i finally watched them, the first was a pleasant surprise. The second was a letdown. I was prepared for some changes, such as how the staff didn't want to be bothered with the whole "Ashura was born without a gender" thing, so they turned Ashura into a girl. It does simplify matters, and with so little time to work with, simplifying whatever you can can only help. On the other hand, some other changes ... didn't make much sense to me.

There's nothing especially wrong with the first OVA. It's a straightforward adaption of the "demon of the frozen castle" arc. There were some plot details i was disappointed were cut, but they weren't necessary to the story and i fully understand why they were left out. The story works just as well as it did in volume 4 of the manga.

The second OVA is where it falls apart. It combines original material with events from all over the manga, especially the last two volumes. With a lack of proper setup for the ending, it simply couldn't happen the same way it did in the manga. This is where the OVA's simplification started to work against it. Characters' motivations, never what they appear in a CLAMP title, were changed to the surface explanation. Because they were motivated by different things, they behaved differently for the major confrontation, with the result that the ending felt incomplete and, to me, illogical.

The animation, on the other hand, was excellent. I feel like this would have been best handled with ten OVAs of this length, one for each volume of the manga. That would have enabled them to show the full story, which i believe was the cause of the problems. If they had time to set up and foreshadow later events, the story told would have been more interesting as well as more complete. It would also make more sense – always a plus in my book.

As a companion piece to the manga, it's perfectly alright, although not what manga fans would want. But to watch it on its own, without the manga as a reference point, i doubt it would make much sense. It certainly doesn't tell a full story. I fully admit that i'm biased in favor of RG Veda, which is why on my own list i give it a 6, but really it's more of a 5.

There is not much to say about this awful OVA. The story is just confusing. I dont know about the manga, but in the animated version, they dont care if you was familiar with the original version. They give you ilogical sentences, and spect you to alredy know why that stuff was going on . I could understand nearly nothing. I was patient. I had to rewind several times, and i still dont get the story. I guess im stupid. I dont know, lets just skip this, like i did when i watched. "whatever, lets move on, maybe they wil explain it better later". Well, ... they didnt. I was lost from the first to the last minute.

The art on RG Veda wasant too bad, but also didnt was too good. I give 6/10.

The music was so bad! I know it was the style *cof* *cof* of the epoch, but its not good. Not good at all. The efforts to sound good just makes it more pathethic.

oh god, the characters. I honestly am without words to describe them. Ok, here si what i got from the characters: A powerful gril with fire powers, a powerful fighter that made a promise with the gril, he must protec her(i think i have seen this somwhere else), a powerful boy, a powerful sorcerer, a guy. And a hell bunch of kings, including a evil one. Also, the male fanservice its damn repulsive. I normaly dislike when there is female fanservice(Im not looking for a hentai, give me content), so i dont have to say i didnt like the bunch of shirtless guys. The development of the characters is lame. I know about the characters the same i know about the plot.

I didnt enjoy RG Veda at all. Thats all i have to say. Overall, its a bad OVA.

I can understand that this is an ova trying to tell a small part of a larger story from the source material. I understand that if you don't understand the original source material you be lost in understanding many things in the anime such as character development and motivation, world building and of course an actual story. That's what this anime does as it does a poor job giving exposition on the history of this land and story as it appears we're dropped right in the middle of an adventure.

Yeah I have barely anything good to say about this anime, apart from
its decent average ... animation, nothing was great from the bland or often ridiculous character design, boring fight scenes and boring sound design playing in the background. I actually thought I heard the THX sound effect playing in the second episode, as maybe the anime trying to wake up its sleeping viewers.

The story goes nowhere, which is saying something as its clearly starting in the middle of a larger adventure. And most of the cast of characters that are introduced do nothing to advance the plot, the anime gives us no backstory for most of the cast and this is true I actually forgot that a character was even there for most of the anime's run time until the final ten minutes. And she was in the main party group, that's how little she actually contributed to the story.

I watched this dubbed, I found the Manga UK dub, it is bad dub and its something I feel that most of the actors had a tough time with the script and hiding some of their ascents.

So to try to make my final summary short, it's an anime based on a Clamp manga that probably is much better and then what the anime delivers. My guess is if you have read RG Veda and liked that, then you might like this better than I did, as someone who went into watching this without knowing much about the manga. Because I'm someone who believes that even if an anime is adapting only part of a larger story from the manga its adapting from, it should still be good enough to please its fans and entice newcomers. Yet for me RG Veda failed be enjoyable or even make me want to check out its original source material, at least for a while.

RG Veda is a convoluted, generic, boring OVA, with glimpses of what it could have been serving only to highlight its various flaws. Beginning with the story, this anime just sort of drops the viewer in the thick of it without much context, but once things get going it unfolds as a somewhat typical fantasy adventure tale. A quest to unseat an evil usurper, with side quests along the way. Nothing's wrong with this formula, but this anime gives you little reason to actually care about the events unfolding in the anime. The pacing is also all off, and switches ... from moments of action to drawn-out stretches of moral pontification and callbacks to things which the viewer had no opportunity to see in the first place, robbing the moments at hand of whatever emotional weight they could have theoretically had. Also, other than the fact he is a usurper and took the throne from the protagonist's father, we have little evidence to show just how supposedly evil the warlord Taishaku-ten really is. Hell, when they arrive in his city, people are letting off fireworks and going about normal life. They even cheer for him when he lets them into the palace courtyard! Not really what you'd expect the realm of a mad tyrant to look like.

The art is fine, with a unique art direction that we should really attribute to the manga, but there are a variety of aspects which seriously fall behind. The animation is stunted, the fight scenes are awkward, the backgrounds are grainy, and the characters suffer from what I term the 'dreaded mask', where facial animation is not properly applied when and where it absolutely should be.

The sound is just barely the strongest aspect of this anime, largely thanks to the soundtrack, which oscillates from soaring and orchestral to synth-heavy and electric. However, there are still a lot of problems in this category as well. The voice work is corny and unremarkable, the sounds of life sound artificial, if they're even there at all, and they also rely on these cheesy stock sound effects way too much. One jarring example is how they use the THX Deep Note sound, which is that loud 'bwaaah' noise they play alongside the THX logo, on two separate instances. I don't even think THX was affiliated with this anime to begin with, so hearing that sound was downright bizarre, and i had to go back a couple times just to make sure I wasn't imagining things.

The characters are generally bland, with little in the way of characterization to separate them from one another. As such, it makes little sense to say who's the relative 'best', but if I had to I'd say it's a tie between Taishaku-ten and Ashura, because they're the only ones who don't fall quite so neatly in the generic character bins that all the others do, but it'd still be a real stretch to say they're 'good', per se. Overall, RG Veda is an ignominious example of a failed adaptation, a product which is thoroughly boring, and ultimately, forgettable. Don't waste your time with this one.