The Legacy of Saradomin

Story:
Will is like 18 now, right? So I'm presuming he was about 14 when he wrote this thing? That's a pretty fortunate excuse, because the movie has maybe every fantasy cliche in the book. It's all like something out of an RPG. There are crystals of ambiguous power and importance that were created long ago and need to be collected and end up magically enhancing and psychically mind-fucking the protagonist when they are collected. The team of protagonists include a token magic-wielder, a token wise-guy, and a token silent-but-deadly type. There are armies of generic minions, ridiculously-large swords, treetop villages, ultra-isolated cultural regions. The list goes on.

Despite being somewhat cliched, however, that's not to say Legacy of Saradomin doesn't have something compelling about it. I will concede that I enjoyed the exposition of the characters. I enjoyed hearing about their pasts, and I even might have liked to learn more. Anything to give them less one-dimensionality and distract the viewer from their blatantly archetypal personalities. (not to sound harsh, I mean I can't really fault him too much)

Visuals:
There's some really great stuff here. The animation, for the most part, is really impressive, and while seeing characters pull the whole 'stab-person-and-then-spin-around-on-the-sword' move can start to wear thin, they're worth sitting through just to see every 'camera-whips-around-while-dude-whose-sword-is-on-fucking-FIRE-slashes-his-way-through-a-bunch-of-bastard-forest-thieves-fuck-yeah'-type move. The scenery is also pretty good. I mean, there are some pretty bland towers and fortresses and stuff, but there's plenty badass dungeons and sprawling treetop villages to keep you satisfied.

One thing that kinda irked me was the repetitiveness of the soldiers. It's hard to apply the kind of suspension-of-disbelief to allow you to see armies of soldiers and not just armies of Alexanders and Valentines. Maybe if their faces were obscured by armor or something, but they looked like the clone army from Star Wars, except way sillier.

Sound:
This is a generic fantasy movie and as such it is filled with generic 'epic' fantasy music. Not that that's a bad thing. The music choices are spot-on and fit the scenes flawlessly. The sound effects are a mixed bag, though. There's plenty of good sound effects here, but to be hearing the convincing clashing of steel followed by sudden silence and then *punch fist* can be pretty jarring. Also, it seemed like there were a few synchronization issues with some sound effects.

Voice acting is pretty good. Some of the dialogue seemed a little contrived early on, but I'd say it improved as the movie progressed (or maybe I got used to it?)

Overall:
There's an extraordinary amount of effort in this. Chippy Slade has, from what I can tell, poured his heart and soul into this thing, so you damn well better watch it if you haven't. I really appreciate it for what it is, especially considering its length. The movie is no Vlarion 1, but it doesn't need to be. It does its own thing, and despite its flaws, it's likely secured a spot in the annals of 3DMM history.

[Slade]

Haha oh yeah it's totally cliched. The basic premise of the four generic character types was something I'd wanted to put into 3dmm all along (fantasy movies were practically all I did) before I decided to do LoS, knowing it was unoriginal but wanting to anyway. I suppose it made storylines a little bit easier to follow, because the characters were easily recognisable and understandable. But of course I've been working on their backstories and they're not going to be so generic. Hopefully.

The clone target-dummy enemies have always bothered me, especially since most of the time they hardly fight back. This is partly due to very dated ideas and execution (pun intended), laziness, and that annoying habit I have of depicting the awesome ideas in my head in a very bland and unfulfilling way in 3dmm.

I tried to mix default sound effects and custom ones as smoothly as possible, but after working with the program for so long we can all recognise them in a millisecond and they're not as effective.

But yeah, watching the movie you can tell as it progresses that I'm slowly maturing behind the scenes and trying to balance out the more naive ideas at the beginning.