Probably one of the most underrated manga ever. I read this 20 years ago. There was an anime adaptation at the time, but it barely covered a fourth or a third of the story. And so I am delighted by this reboot.

**WARNING**: If you don't know the story already, DO NOT WATCH THE OPENINGS. They spoil EVERYTHING. The first one is already bad, showing explicitly characters that did not appear yet. But the second one is way worse, showing who fights who in the final battle, techniques or magic that did not appear yet, and even several of the biggest twists of the very end.

First let's talk about the original material.

This is classic fantasy, the kid growing up to be a hero that fights the evil army with his party all the way to the top. But this is extremely well written, avoiding every simplistic cliché of the genre.

Every major character, including the bad guys, and most of the secondary ones goes through considerable growth (not only in power, but as a person), has its own story and motivation. For instance the "bad guy wants to destroy the world" trope has probably the most reasonable, even respectable foundation I've ever seen. And this is all done naturally without much breaking out of the main story (very limited flashbacks for instance).

There might be two tropes that are slightly abused. The turning of an old adversary into an ally, this happens quite a lot. And two characters have a tendency to always appear just at the right time to save the others at the last second.

Otherwise pretty much all actions, growth, power-up, tactics during fight are thought through and justified. This is very satisfying. Just an example from the late story: [spoiler]Avan Strash Cross is described as powerful but very hard to use in a real fight, since you would need to be sure of the future position of the opponent. Every single time he uses it, he creates first the condition, psychologically or physically, for the enemy to take it.[/spoiler] That's a small detail, but almost every detail in fights is thought through like this.

The story has more than its share of twist revelations, some being subtly hinted long before. It mixes main story, character growth, fights and emotional moments with a good rhythm. It obviously takes on the usual subjects of justice, courage, sacrifice, love (but without making it the usual mandatory love story that comes out of nowhere), philosophy of what good and evil are, friendship, revenge, racism (though here it would be more specism I guess). Again, all mixed in to seamlessly integrate in the main story. Really great storytelling.

One slight detail (that might be a quality or flaw depending on people): It might be a little too kid friendly for the genre. Despite the intensity of the fights, specially with swords, there is some blood, but you basically never see any injury (apart from several clean cut arms). This makes it difficult to appreciate the difference between someone totally blocking an attack and ending up a bit dirty from someone having taken a devastating attack and being almost dead.

Now the adaptation:

It stays very true to to the original. Design is exactly the same. You can recognize almost exactly every single panel of the original manga. I've only noticed some slight changes that were clearly deliberate choices to tone down the very rare darker parts or censor stuff that would not be acceptable today. (For instance the original magic circle symbols for good and evil are pentagram and hexagram. Pretty classic magic symbol. I suppose nowadays the hexagram would look to close to a Star of David for a broader audience, so they've been redesigned with nice looking arabesques instead of stars)

On top of it the animation is very fluid, mixing the old school clean drawing with nice camera effects, and sometimes some 3D effects for a great final result.

The rhythm is pretty good, 37 books, 349 chapters into 100 episodes. Adaptation feels just a little slow in the final part, where there is a loooooot of talks in the middle of the fights. It feels like bad guys are waiting around for 10 minutes for babbling to end when they could have wiped everyone in the meantime.

There was just one, but very annoying thing. In no way the original work's fault, but the official subtitles use the game's translation for magic spells. Fan of the game will, I suppose, like it. However, it may seem petty, but for a reader of the manga, that kept the japanese names, I can't overstate how incredibly cringe this is. You learn to ignore it, but it is very very hard to get past it in the first episodes.