Legend of the Galactic Heroes

can go over that, but I think a true OVA... is a very tightly packed 90 minutes.

Or, you know, it's Legend of the Galactic Heroes and it's 135 episodes.

Yep.

It's

But above me is the ranking of Grandmaster.

then Ultimate Master, and then Legend.

Legend's the absolute top players, right? So this person is a rank above me bordering on two ranks above me, like an Ultimate Master, and yet he was playing the same mindless gameplay as that 1300 Ryu, as that 1450 Ryu.

And it just kind of bothered me because I was like, why the fuck am I working so hard to try to improve and get better when you're being rewarded for playing like this? Just sweeping at the ground mindlessly, throwing attacks out that aren't going to hit, but just hoping that I walk into it.

Because some of those attacks are so busted that there's no way I could punish it at that range.

It was like the quintessential animated space opera series.

Probably alongside something like...

I think it's technically after Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

Yeah.

And then y- your alarm goes off, you wake up, and you're just a commander of a ship in Legends of Galactic Heroes.

[laughs] It is essentially this.

It's like, "Oh, what the hell? How did I got here?"

No.

Or no, um, Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

Legend of Galactic Heroes.

It reminds me a lot of that.

That is a fantastic pivot, and there is no better place to start than with a genuine titan of the medium.

We are talking about Legend of the Galactic Heroes, the massive original video animation series that ran from 1988 to 1997.

Yes, the source material here is a 10-volume series of novels written by Yoshiki Tanaka in the 1980s.

And the genre is space opera, but we need to put a massive asterisk on that immediately.

It didn't flinch.

It respected the dry, mechanical nature of the source and made it compelling through sheer gravity.

And if Legend of the Galactic Heroes grounds its massive space conflict in the grueling mechanics of political science, our next example grounds a fantasy setting in the incredibly unglamorous, highly mathematical mechanics of economics.

Which brings us to Spice and Wolf.

And yeah, most of the series just has no physical release at all.

And another one that got an extremely limited physical release was Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

Only 1,000 copies, each of them $800.

MSRP $799.98, perpetually on sale for $799.98. And those eventually did sell out after a couple of years and not too long after that, high dive lost streaming rights as well.