So, this one is not exactly an “Anime Film Club” in that this isn’t a theatrical release. But, it’s a 1-episode, 50-minute OVA, so in my mind that’s close enough. Let’s take a look at this brief little blast from the past and see what makes it so… well, we’ll see what it is at least.
So, out story begins on the terraformed former-death-world of Libertia with a girl named Alcia Grace. She goes home from her annoying-voiced friends, Blick and Dorothy Twaif, to the home/lab of her grandfather. There, Grandpa has her test-pilot his new mecha (“Armor” in setting) design, the titular Legaciam.
This is when hired goons belonging to the powerful organization simply known as the Guild attack. They capture the professor, but Alcia herself manages a chaotic escape since Legaciam is way faster than their armors (and similarly strong despite being way smaller). She runs out of batteries, crashes, and can’t open the cockpit.
In this state, she’s found by Blick and Dorothy, who decide to take her to their roguish mutual acquaintance in the city, Zeno, who should be able to pop Alcia out of there and thus ensure her safety. They get in a bit of a high-speed chase with guild-aligned cops on the way, but Zeno gets in the robot, beats up all the cop cars, and meets them back at his hideout.
Thereafter, we get a scene where one of Zeno’s men ends up infiltating Guild HQ after escaping a halfhearted arrest, learning that they have the professor. We also see the antagonist who has masterminded the kidnapping of the professor and hunt for Legaciam, a highly placed woman of the Guild known as Felmis Reek.
Felmis wants to use the heat-resistant abilities of Legaciam to destroy something called The Tower that exists in a zone of extreme heat, and seems to… not actually be that evil. She has a history with the professor and Zeno where she lost her father (and they people close to them) on a previous Tower expedition, and evidently the Tower emits a sound that’s doing horrible things to lower-class citizens who Felmis can get no traction with the Guild’s leadership to protect, even when she’s sure the problem will be everybody’s problem soon enough.
Of course, the Professor as well is horrified by the thought of destroying the Tower, so presumably she’s in a “well intentioned extremist” sort of space. In any case, Zeno and the gang plan a rescue of the professor from the Guild’s impressively sci-fi headquarters
The attempt is hampered somewhat by Alcia’s PTSD from her previous ride, but despite her not getting in the robot, things go pretty well, with Zeno making a diversion by way of massive property damage while the rest of the crew goes to retrieve grandpa from the hospital, sneaking him out under guise of his being dead.
Once they’re hiding out, grandpa explains the plot some more, clarifying that the previous expedition died when their cool truck fell into a fissure, and that Legaciam is something they found, which the professor has since tuned for Alcia’s exclusive use since evidently only females can drive it and the cockpit was kinda small anyway.
He also seems to confirm Felmis’s worries about the tower doing something that will eventually drive everyone on the planet insane, but he seems to have a plan to fix it rather than just blowing it up. With a mission of peace, Alcia is also willing to overcome her fears and pilot.
Thus, with Felmis tracking them, they hatch a plan to steal a heat-resistant transport and get to the Tower (wisely leaving the old man with Zeno’s henchman), having a fun mecha battle with Felmis’s henchman on the way out.
Great, now we just… oh, wait, it’s over. We get well-wishes and a final ominous shot of the tower that awaits our heroes to see us off.
Seriously?
I get it, the antagonists can’t exactly follow where the heroes are going, but that just means we needed maybe five minutes of animation to see Alcia fly around, do a thing that feels hard to do at the tower, and return safely by the skin of her teeth. Did they really run out of budget with that little story left to tell? Or did they really think there was a whole entire act that they could make a sequel on?
Perhaps the creators just didn’t know how to do a climax at the tower and decided “heck with it, we’ve got to ship this thing and make some money.” It seems like the kind of problem that should have been worked out in pre-production. We’re leaving basically everything unresolved here, guys. Did nobody think that might be a kind of bad idea?
The world may never know. The credits roll and the end card says “See you again” but we never will see anything from this setting ever again. Relic Armor Legaciam stands alone.
Legaciam has not much in the way of provenance, nor did it seemingly leave much of a legacy. No great art was created here, it’s not a landmark OVA nor (to my knowledge) really a cult classic. It’s not lost media, though it’s not exactly easy to scare up either, and that’s about the most that can be said for it. This makes sense because it’s got standard to substandard story, animation, and characters. It does have a good sense of fun, with nice pacing of its action beats, but that’s not exactly a claim to fame.
In the light of all that, I’ll issue it a C. It’s average just about everywhere and the “cliffhanger” kind of hurts, but I think it’s fun enough to level out. I mean, it gets us some mechs fighting with wrist-mounted light sabers, at least it’s trying.
The Legaciam itself.
And that’s where my reviews normally end, but Legaciam really got me thinking about… why I do this. What the point of reviewing is. From the very start, I didn’t want to be that guy who just chases the latest seasonals. I wanted to look at everything Anime, from modern offerings to vaunted classics to things like Legaciam that are both old and obscure.
It may not seem like there’s much of a point to reviewing Legaciam, given its age, its obscurity, and the fact that there really isn’t much there. But I come back to that thought about lost media. When I was preparing for this Mecha March, I actually wanted to watch a different show, Strange Steel Fairy Rouran. However, it turned out that at least in the west, that one might as well be lost media – if anyone knows a source to watch a subtitled version that isn’t “order a dubious dvd set from a store in Pakistan”, I’m all ears. I only know Rouran exists because other people have written about it, and details are sparse even then.
To me, there’s something tragic about lost media. People, presumably, put effort and love into something like Legaciam, even if it turned out mediocre. And I have little doubt that someone, somewhere, really loved the result in return. I didn’t think it was anything special, but at least trying to create a record of it, for the sake of anyone coming after, trying to discover this thing… that has to have some value. A review like mine isn’t just for entertainment or decision-making on what to watch next. For a show teetering on the threshold of being forgotten, it’s proof that it was here.
It’s a melancholy note to leave on, but I’ll be back next week with some more non-lost mecha and hopefully a brighter outlook.