Want to know why Media Blasters could release Aoi & Mutsuki so cheaply? There's no dub. And they didn't redo the credits into romaji/English.

The only setup choice is whether subtitles should be displayed.

UPDATE: How many, many high school boys are there in anime with voices done by women? I can't count that high.

How many high school girls are there with voices done by a man? I just encountered my first. And might I mention that she is not a trap? How peculiar.

UPDATE: Some frame grabs and comments below the fold.

UPDATE: When one of the good guys summons up and runs a mecha, and his best weapon is called "Karaoke Beam" and uses a big loudspeaker, you know the series has no intention of being even slightly serious.

But it's still really eerie listening to Aoi speak. The seiyuu is a tenor and is putting his voice as high as he can, but it still sounds wrong. A man's voice doesn't have the same timbre as a woman's voice.

Mutsuki is the blonde. She is a galactic police officer, and bodyguard of Aoi, the brunette, who used to be a boy, and is now Queen of the Galaxy. Or something like that. Aoi's voice is done by a man.

This is Mito, Aoi's mom. She's a pirate.

This is also Mito. She prefers this form, apparently.

This is the series villain. Note the two cowering priests at the bottom for scale. Not yet known what the story is on her, but her resemblance to Mito's adult form is obvious.

The video transfer is awful, and the original animation is far from the best I've seen. This DVD does nothing to dispel Media Blaster's reputation as the industry bottom feeder.

Which is OK. There's a place in the ecosystem for a bottom feeder. And it turns out that a fair number of the disks I bought this time came from Media Blasters: this one, and also Noodle Fighter Miki, and Grenadier.

They've done high quality releases, too; their portfolio is not exclusively junk. Their release of the first season of Ah! My Goddess! had superb production quality, and that license can't have been cheap.

But they're also willing to grab low class stuff no one else would touch, if they can get it for a small license fee. Considering how silly this one is, and how crappy the conversion, and the lack of dub, it's hardly any wonder the price is low. It was originally produced in 1999 and seems to be one of the last titles that didn't partake of the digital revolution, based on what I'm seeing. The video for the R1 release is clearly taken from film. The colors are off and the video is dark. The sound is stereo, but not very good. I don't have very many DVDs with technical quality this poor.

The low price is not because it's an old title repackaged. As far as I can tell, this two-DVD set is the original release in R1, and it just came out a month ago. The reason it's cheap is that Media Blasters cut every corner they could and did the absolute minimum possible work on it they could. And passed the savings on to us...

But how about the story? Well, dunno about that yet. It looks as if this is not even slightly a serious story, based on what I'm seeing so far. So it comes down to whether it's funny, and whether there's any worthwhile fan service. So far no sign of either, but I'll watch a bit more before giving up on it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 06:38 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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