In my Sands of Destruction game review, I closed the article by saying that the anime version was “actually pretty watchable” which in part made up for the shittastic game. Between the many pounds of hate-mail I have been receiving for calling this game utter bunk, a few curious fans have wondered “how watchable is the anime, really?” Well, more watchable than you would think, considering how much I hated the game, but in the end still pretty bad.

The anime version of Sands of Destruction, entitled World Destruction (or at least entitled that in the original Japanese, before Funimation butchered the translation) condenses the 40 some odd RPG play through of Sands of Destruction into a 13 episode mini-series. Much like the game, the anime is pretty cartoony and looks to appeal to both a young audience, and obsessive fanatics who have enjoyed the design team’s previous works. There are still goofy looking beastmen needlessly oppressing humankind in a world that is basically covered in sand, and it is up to our intrepid heroes to save the day.

The anime focuses on Kyrie, Morte, and Toppi (Taupy if you go by the English translation) primarily. The other playable characters are set up as antagonists or minor characters at best. The anime doesn’t really follow the game’s canon, in fact it barely borrows from it. We have the same characters, and some of the same settings, but the anime is mostly a production wholly of itself. Morte is trying to destroy the world with the Destruct Code, a tiny little black ball that her dead brother gave her. Kyrie and Toppi, our bungling protagonists, follow her primarily because they have nothing else to do, secondarily because they are hoping to talk her out of her admittedly stupid scheme of causing the apocalypse, and tertiary because, well, she is pretty damn hot. Together, they set off to destroy everything, which is something that they are actually remarkably bad at doing.

The anime is episodic and doesn’t have much of a running plot. Each episode finds our protagonists in a new country based off of one of the four seasons. They proceed to have adventures with very thin moral plotlines that show that not every beastman is bad, not every human is good, and most people are just gigantic dicks who will stab you in the back for no particular reason. Generally our protagonists end up saving the day in some heartwarming manner, which of course is once again kind of dumb, considering that they are trying to destroy the world. Toppi rarely fights and Kyrie never does, in stark contrast to their combatant roles in the game, and the pictures of both of them holding weapons that we see in the game’s end credits. Morte gets in more than enough fights, and they are decently choreographed, but this is another one of those animes that never kills anyone on screen, and although it brings us back to the nostalgic times of the Ninja Turtles that fought robots with bladed weapons and kicked everyone else, it still feels a bit hokey in the end.

Naja and Lia (Rhi’a if you go by the English translation), two party members that you gain control of during the game, are relegated to the roles of persistent antagonists. Neither seems to have inherited their personality from the game, and most of their deeper plotlines are barely touched upon at all, which, strangely enough, actually makes both characters more interesting instead of less interesting. Kyrie also has had a major plot-ectomy, which is strange considering he is the main character, but still goofy Kyrie from the anime is way better than emo Kyrie from the game.

The anime is over before you know it. Eventually it is revealed (OH GOD SPOILERS) that Kyrie is the real Destruct Code, and he has the power to reduce the world to primordial sand (yeah it sounds stupid to me too). Apparently, this power only activates when someone truly believes the power exist, and really really really wants to destroy the world. So, since Morte fits that role quite well, Kyrie sets out to destroy the world. This only happens in the last few minutes of the anime mind you. Then via no motivation other than Morte realizing that destroying the world means … well … destroying the world, she goes back on her original plan which makes Kyrie lose his power an everyone lives happily ever after, except they don’t really. The ainme’s epilogue goes out of its way to say that beastmen still oppress human beings and nothing really changes.

Really, as hokey as the whole “kill people off-screen” thing is, and as much as the anime is meant to be something of a throwback to children’s cartoons, it kept me interested. I blew through the whole thirteen episode miniseries in a couple days, which says something. The ending, and the fact that the majority of the plot is told only through the second half of the last episode, really ruined the overall experience for me. In short, World Destruction is definitely the superior way to experience the tale of Sands of Destruction, but in the end, that still isn’t saying much.

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