It was perhaps coincidental that anime production entered a massive boom period at around the same time that video games also started to really come into their own, the late 80's and early 90's. Anime is not, never has, and never will be a medium that loves originality, so as video games got popular, anime producers started snapping up licenses like crazy.
Not every anime based on a video game is bad, but the adaptations that work best are usually self-contained films or long-form TV series. Back in the late 80's and early 90's, the format it seemed everyone wanted to cram their game adaptations into was the OVA, usually a TV-quality episode (or short series of 'em) distributed direct-to-video.
Production quality on OVAs ranged from "pretty good" to "WTF", and the writing... look, your average OVA series barely achieved coherency even if it wasn't trying to make sense of a deeply Nintendological 8-to-16-bit plot. Once you were throwing a game the writer probably never played (or played too much) into the mix, well... you get the six series I'm about to discuss below.
6. Ys
The original Ys was originally a somewhat obscure TG-16 release in the US. This week, it just got re-released as Legacy of Ys Books I & II for DS. In Japan, the original release was pretty huge and the Ys series - and its developer Falcom - picked up a lot of die-hard fans. I'm sure they lined up in droves to pick up copies of the seven-episode Ys OVA, creatively called Ys, and I'm sure while watching them it suddenly occurred to them that the plot of Ys is really pretty stupid if you try to take it outside of its video game context.
This is a recurring problem that game-based anime runs into to this very day, where being faithful-ish to the original story means wasting a lot of screentime on things that are really boring or ludicrous. Even the stuff that the Ys anime just completely makes up feels like it must have actually been from the game, and that's... well, kind of a problem. For instance, your average video game protagonist is often rock-stupid by the standards of any other medium, since he (or she) doesn't have to be self-motivated. The character exists so the player can poke around in the game's virtual world, so he doesn't really need to be clever.
Adol Christian, a.k.a. Adol the Red, is a much-beloved character by Japanese gamers and Ys fans in particular have enormous affection for him. In the OVA, his head appears to be made out of spent uranium and it seems like he wouldn't be able to accomplish anything if not for total strangers being willing to give him food, shelter, and provisions basically just because he exists. If you don't believe me, check out the clip above.
5. Sonic the Hedgehog
There have been a lot of media spin-offs of Sonic the Hedgehog, each with its own unique level of terribleness. The OVA is special for a lot of reasons that don't have to do with the plot being an excuse for a big fight with Metal Sonic. Mostly, it's a big fight with Metal Sonic that doesn't make any sense and tries way, way too hard to be something between a Warner Bros. cartoon and a typical kid's action anime.
What really makes the OVA odd is the characterizations, though. As you see in the clips above, Sonic goes way beyond his "snarky cool dude" persona of many years to actively wallow in total indifference to the suffering of his fellow man. He's Sonic the Slackhog. Knuckles is unrecognizable as a rival character and is instead a sort of friendly, flying hobo who has a really great hat. Tails is pretty recognizable, but as you can see above, his voice in this could shatter glass.
Probably the strangest aspect of the story is that while the OVA was clearly made around the time of Sonic 3, and while Sonic was never the type who had to save princesses, the OVA feels the need to introduce a princess-type character to serve as damsel in distress that Sonic must save from Robotnik. Every subplot relating to her is surreal, especially if you watch the full storyline and realize she spends most of the series passively participating in Robotnik's plans to... kill Sonic. What?
4. Fire Emblem
So if you picked up Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon when it came out a few weeks ago, you probably noticed that it didn't have an especially complicated plot. In fact, the game's pretty simple. The Fire Emblem OVA is based on an SNES Fire Emblem that was also a remake of the original game, so it's pretty much about the same stuff as Shadow Dragon... only Marth is completely unrecognizable in it.
No, seriously, the story somehow appears to have gotten every canonical detail of Marth's personality - and there's not a lot! - completely wrong in the OVA. The OVA's Marth is a gentle soul who would not even slay a deer and manages to get in all kinds of swordfights where he never stabs anyone and nobody bleeds. Just about all Marth is about in Shadow Dragon is fightin' and slayin' guys for vengeance and honor and country, so is there any damned reason why he's Magical Boy Pretty Marthie in the clip above?
A funny note: any Fire Emblem OVA translation you see floating around the internets is a rip of the old, old VHS release of it that ADV did back in the mid-90's. This was long before Marth's first Smash Bros. appearance, so ADV's translator decided to call him "Mars" throughout the OVA. I suspect ADV is not really proud of their work here; they've pretty much allowed their license for Fire Emblem to lapse despite the fact that the games are way more popular in the US now than when ADV first released it.
3. Ninja Gaiden
The Ninja Gaiden OVA was never officially released in the US to my knowledge, I guess because it was into the 2000s before Tecmo decided to let Team Ninja revive the property. It's a shame, because it fits just about every American stereotype of what anime was like at the time. It's short, stylishly violent, fairly well-animated, and at heart a basically pointless exercise full of characterizations that are exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness.
The plot appears to be set shortly after Ninja Gaiden on NES (but I guess before Ninja Gaiden II?) and takes place in New York for some reason. Roberto is running around as an ex-CIA guy with a couple of sidekicks I can't place from any of the games, investigating an evil pharmaceutical company that is, of course, using the corpse of the evil god Jakyo to make werewolves and malformed corpses and lizardmen. What else would you use it for?
The clip I've included above is my favorite moment of insanity from the OAV, where Roberto and his sidekick Jeff stop in the middle of a fight to have a philosophical and inclusive discussion about the meaning of masculinity. I would have picked a clip of Ryu doing something, but he's honestly the amazing man with no personality in Ninja Gaiden. The OVA is far more interested in the New York setting and Roberto's wacky antics, for the most part.
2. Salamander
This OVA is kind of why I decided to write this, since Salamander in its mangled localized form as Life Force hit the Virtual Console last week. The OVA is just an amazing snapshot of everything right and terribly, horribly wrong with video game anime in the late 80's. It's very well-drawn, fails to be faithful to the source material in a well-meaning sort of way, and appears to have been scripted by an encephalitic chimpanzee.
The basic problem with turning Gradius into an anime is that the games don't really have any characters in them, and what little plot it has is spread out over the course of hundreds of years. Salamander copes with this by making up a bunch of characters to pilot Vic Vipers and the Lord British, and totally rewriting the plot in a way that involves telling the story out of order and spending a lot of time pointing the camera at things other than wicked-awesome space dogfights.
What really kills me about the Salamander OVA, though, is the fact that the series decides to have the Lord British piloted by a guy named Lord British. Note that he's not a Lord who happens to be named British; he is the prince of planet Latis, which means people have to address him as Prince Lord British, pilot of the Lord British. That is right up there with President Fuehrer King Bradley in the realm of stupid name-title combinations in anime.
1. Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals
Hey, shouldn't just about any Final Fantasy plot be something you could turn into a pretty good anime series? That's probably what the company that licensed this turd back in the late nineties though, too. Final Fantasy VII was making console RPGs a stylish genre for the very first time and gaming shops got flooded by VHS copies of this thing. You know innocent fans snapped it up, thinking it would be all awesome and at least kind of like Final Fantasy VII in some regard.
Except... Legend of the Crystals was a sequel to Final Fantasy V, which a) hadn't been released in the US at that point and b) features less story and characterization than even some of the 8-bit entries in the series. In short, Pierrot decided to make an anime sequel to one of the few games in the series that was completely unsuitable anime material. So what Legend of the Crystals ends up delivering is a story about irritating new characters (aided by Mid, probably the most irritating FFV NPC!) going through a set of fantasy cliches right out of... well, actually, the whole thing really looks like it badly wants to be one of the Akira Toriyama Dragon Quest anime.
Probably the most memorably awful bit of Legend of the Crystals, aside from the climax involving murdering Cid's undead brains with gold chocobos, is the heroine Linaly and the series's entirely creepy fixation on giving the audience glimpses of her pristine white panties. This goes so far as to become a plot point that requires the Crystal of Wind to be absorbed into her body, so her panty-clad butt can shoot lasers. Don't believe me? Watch the clip, and consider that Squaresoft had absolutely no problem this.
