August 30, 2010

Asobi ni Iku Yo -- ep 8

We'll just pretend that episode 7 never happened, OK? Moving right along to episode 8, it begins with Aoi, Manami, and Kio up in the Cathean ship, using the holodeck for training purposes. It's a gun range, and Aoi is explaining how Cathean antimatter ammunition works.


It's the same stuff that Yun Fat fires out of his guns, and that those strange hammers do: it instantly destroys non-living matter (without causing a nuclear scale explosion) but has no effect on anything living. High tech indeed.

Manami wants to let Aoi have some quality time with Kio, so she skips out. Aoi misses the point, and eventually comes down and confronts Manami about it. Manami pretty much says, I don't need training. Aoi pulls a gun on her, and they tussle a bit, and in fact Manami holds her own pretty well. Eventually they start shooting at each other, with make-the-clothes-go-away bullets. (It's a high-tech version of the Most Common Special Attack.) And it reaches a standoff, which is to say that they both run out of ammunition:

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The signs say, "Please please please buy the DVDS!"

So it's gonna be a duel. The two of them head out to the sticks, to a wild area of rain-forest that approaches jungle in terms of flora and fauna. Seems that Manami knows it well because her dad used to take her there to do survival training.

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And it's a fight of bets. Whoever loses has to do one thing the other dictates. Just after the conclusion, though, both Manami and Aoi are fired on by someone shooting real bullets. Agents of the doggies.

A good episode, with the show back in the groove. More Aoi and Manami, less greek heiress, no high school. The heiress has a segment at the beginning but fortunately it's very brief.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 11:52 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 311 words, total size 2 kb.

1 Totally buying the DVDs when this one comes out.  Sadly it's doing the stupid Japanese release schedule of "2 eps a month, and 80$ a disc" that seems designed to drive sales as low as possible.  

Posted by: tellu541 at August 31, 2010 10:05 AM (pJ1uW)

2

I sometimes wonder whether the reason they release the DVDs/BDs so slowly is that if they were to release on a weekly schedule, the sucker-base would run out of money. By releasing monthly, they give the sucker-base time to save more for the next round.

If they were doing significant reanimation for the DVD/BD release, a longer release schedule might be justified. That has been known to happen, but I think that these days it isn't very common. For fanservice shows they do remaster (in order to remove fog and fronds and beams of light and shadows etc) but with digital production that takes negligible time.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 31, 2010 12:39 PM (+rSRq)

3

You pretty much hit the nail on the head on why the Japanese release large numbers of low episode count DVDs for a given series.  The loss on potential sales (And thus the potential margin.) is why the Japanese have been reacting very badly to importing R1 DVDs into Japan for the same series.  It is also a clinching explanation on why DVD releases in R1 take as long as it does to actually happen - to prevent loss of sales in the domestic (Japanese) market.

You see a few exceptions (Date and day release of Gundam Unicorn in both Japan and R1, though it is an OVA.), but unless US licensors want to go through the trouble of funding and participating in the production side of anime titles - which is not going to happen for most things - date and day DVD/Blu-Ray releases are just not going to happen very much, especially since R1 is now in boxset releases.  IMHO, it is that limitation that has Navarre looking to sell FUNimation, because their current parent company does not want to spend the resources on financing anime production, and participating in production is the only way to get better licensing deals (I love to see the terms of the license for the non-Gonzo stuff FUNimation got, because it is almost certain they had to pay premiums for getting such good terms.).

C.T.

Posted by: cxt217 at August 31, 2010 12:49 PM (OOAmN)

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