[Anime Review] The Tower of Druaga
Originally published at Highmoon's Ponderings. Please leave any comments there.
My wife has been teaching herself Japanese for some time now, and in order to get her ear accustomed to the language being spoken, we have been watching a lot of anime. This is a series of reviews about some of the shows we have seen.
The Tower of Druaga
Ironically, I watched this show by myself while my wife was away on vacation, so it’s an odd choice to start a series about shows we’ve mostly watched together. But it’s the one burning a hole in my mind at the moment, so it gets to be the first.
The Tower of Druaga is a fantasy anime available for free online at Crunchyroll.com. It consists of two parts, each part 12 episodes long:
It is based on a series of Nintendo videogames from the 80s, though the events of the game are only the springboard for those of the anime. This wasn’t a game I knew of, and the reason I watched this show was because I’d seen a trailer for it while watching another anime (El Cazador de la Bruja, a show I’ll eventually review here as well) and this being fantasy in very much a D&D vein, it caught my attention.
I was expecting this to be a fairly standard fantasy action anime with lots of cool visuals of swords and sorcery. Frankly, I would have been happy just getting that and calling it a day. What I got instead was a show with a well-defined world setting borrowing elements from Babylonian and Sumerian legends, a somewhat complex story with not a few twists and turns, a nice mix of action, drama and comedy, and an idea generator that has taken residence in my brain and is making me start a new game.
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