Roll-playing in Japan: RoLW

I honestly still don't know why I arbitrarily decided to announce in that video that we are doing roll-playing week, but this should be the last day I torture myself for it; I probably won't get to a computer this weekend.
Anyways, amidst the dark ages of nerdotainment, there was the shining beacon that was a few booklets filled with children's drawings. AKA D&D. It made it's way to Japan first via fan translations. Some innovative geeks recorded their game sessions and actually managed to sell the transcripts, called リプレイ (replay). Things snowballed, and the group became a company, creating novels, anime, and their own RPG systems.

Record ofLodos War is the name of their saga, and you can see it in the video below.

The group is full old school D&D archetypes and cliches. See if you can spot the blatant Tiamat/Dragonlance ripoff shot. And the animation, with bad dubbing, is totally goobery old-school anime.

I first saw this anime as a teen, when TBS broadcast the episodes backwards. Needless to say, it's a lot better in intended order, and you can catch a playlist of many episodes here. But I hold no grudge against TBS; it is, in a rather convoluted way, the reason why I am in Japan. Maybe someday I will tell that story. But then again, I think I have said the proceeding sentence before... Old uncle Clay's brains don't work so well since he got zapped by Mordenkinen's Bad Blogging Curse in 84...