March 12, 2008

New order, soon

New order, maybe? Not yet, anyway. I'm holding off for another week until the first DVD of Tweeny Witches becomes available. But I'm starting to plan for it.

So there are a couple of titles I'm considering that I'm not completely sure about. One is Kannazuki no Miko. The good news: the girls are gorgeous. It's the same character designer as UFO Princess Valkyrie, and for all the faults of that series, the character design was one of the strong points.

More good news: miko magic. (Every series is improved by the presence of miko magic.)

The bad news? Could be lots of angst. At its fundament, this appears to be shoujo-ai. And there are mechas involved. It's a 12-ep series and it's a bit expensive at $55. But it's also a Geneon title, so it probably won't be available for much longer, and the price isn't going to come down.

Anyone know anything about it? If it's mainly angst, I'm not interested.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to include the full Tsukuyomi Moon Phase series in the next order. Yeah, it's vampires, and I don't like vampire stories, usually. But it's supposed to be light (for a vampire series), and if the OP is any indication it's a fan service comedy, mostly. (With a few dark parts, including one point where we get to see the true form of the girl vampire, presumably much more grotesque.)

As mentioned, the first DVD of Tweeny Witches is definitely on the list.

I'm probably going to order a trash series called Mouse. 12 eps, lots of fan service, probably a brain-damaging story, and it's only $24. And just for the hell of it, there's a $15 TRSI title called Weather Report Girl that promises to also be a source of brain damage and fan service.

If everything goes according to plan, the final DVD of Venus versus Virus will be out by then. I'm thinking of giving the first one a try, but I won't order the whole thing now.

Actually, maybe what I really should do is buy the second one. Word is the story doesn't really get started until about the sixth episode.

The other series I wanted advice on was Kiddy Grade. Look, I know it's junk, with a plot that makes little-to-no sense, but Funimation has it out now as a 24-ep boxed set for $38. Is it worth that? I sure as hell wouldn't pay full price for it, but I'm thinking it might be reasonable at this price.

Or will it turn out to be another Godannar, where I buy the whole series and only watch two eps before giving up entirely?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 09:58 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
Post contains 449 words, total size 3 kb.

1 I wouldn't recommend Weather Report Girl, even for $15.  It's just not enjoyable.

Oh, and Tsukuyomi Moon Phase?  Gothloli, emphasis on the loli.  It's not terribly blatant, but I know you were more offput by that aspect of Popotan than I was, so fair warning.  (Also, I only saw about 8 or 9 episodes of it, so I'm not the best judge.)

Kiddy Grade looks pretty, and it's been sitting here on my computer since it was fansubbed (it even survived the Great Calamity), and I've never watched a single episode.  I blame the opening song, which starts with the immortal line "Every planet's keeping twinkle."

On the face of it, that's no more nonsensical than, say, "Pick me up foxy night game", but somehow I've just never been able to get past it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 12, 2008 10:52 PM (PiXy!)

2 Weather Report Girl  is one of those series which I can't recommend.

It's ecchi, with the occasional descent into hentai, and there are some moments in which--

Look, if the pubic hair in High School Girls grossed you out, you're not going to like WRG. 

There aren't any pubes in WRG but there is something worse.  Two words:  "Gorilla laxative".

Judging by what you said in the past, you wouldn't like this.  Also, the chins are extra-pointy for no good reason.

Posted by: atomic_fungus at March 13, 2008 02:03 AM (IaeJC)

3

I've looked over Kannaduki no Miko several times, but the answer has always been no.  It's got great character design. It's got yuri. And, from every review I've read, it's got angst and a completely disjointed plot.  People show up at entirely contrived times and attack for no reason, switch sides without adequate cause, and in general, just don't act consistantly believeable.  The mix of mecha and mystical didn't work for the reviewers either.

Fox-girl(?) priestesses of the moon, an ancient war, and enemies who use mechs. Uh-huh.

Posted by: ubu at March 13, 2008 05:18 AM (dhRpo)

4 Atomic Fungus said what I'd have said if I'd had more than two hours sleep the previous night.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 13, 2008 05:53 AM (PiXy!)

5

Chris Beveridge liked Kannazuki no Miko. He gave the three volumes ratings of B+, B+, and A-. Maybe I should actually read the reviews, though. He and I have disagreed in the past.

HC wrote: "Buy kannaduki no miko iff you intend to watch it as unintentional comedy. If you intend to throw popcorn at the screen (metaphorically?), have fun - in that case, the angst shouldn't bother you. Otherwise, it's a complete train wreck... with crazy lesbian miko fanservice."

Yum. Crazy lesbian miko fanservice.

Alas; it really doesn't sound like my kind of show. I just don't do shoujo-ai.

Tsukoyomi Moon Phase is about a goth-loli, of course, except that from such teaser art as I've seen, the loli isn't the washboard that Mii was.

 

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 13, 2008 06:01 AM (+rSRq)

6 The HC comments regarding KnM are pretty much spot on, though I've ultimately come to the conclusion that it's intentionally that trashy. In any real critical sense, it's entirely awful, and fanboy pandering at it's worst, but it's all done with such over the top, melodramatic flamboyance it's really, really hard not to see it as hilarious.

It also has my favourite OP song in recent memory, though the animation which accompanies it basically lays out the events of the entire series in the course of ninety seconds.

Tsukuyomi is a good show, but do bare in mind it's an Akiyuki Shinbo as director. It's more schizophrenic than most - it very much has one foot in his earlier horror/action titles like The Soultaker and Petit Cossette, and it's other in his PaniPoni/Zetsubou mode, but it lacks the overt pretension of the prior and much of the non-sequitor referential randomness of the later. It's one of his better shows, anyhow. The OP really doesn't adequately put across the tone of the series.

Oh, and as fair warning, the video encode on Funis DVDs aren't great here - their encodes have been pretty poor the last couple of years anyway, but the shows visual style and choice of colour palette makes the artefacting more obvious than usual.

Posted by: DiGiKerot at March 13, 2008 12:54 PM (8Sg8e)

7

As to video transfers, I've noticed that some shows (e.g. Girl's High) have extremely clean video transfers, and some (e.g. Girls Bravo) have terrible artifacting all over the place.

It certainly doesn't have anything to do with the show's inherent quality, given that both of those are fan-service trash. Nor does it seem to be related to the amount of DVD storage they apply; about 1.1 gigabytes per 25 minute series seems to be an industry norm.

It seems to be a function of how the video was delivered to the R1 release company by the Japanese production house. I have come to believe that the lousy ones are being delivered as VHS videotapes, which are digitized here. The clean ones are being shipped as very high quality MPEG files (e.g. 2G or more per 25 minute show) which the R1 company deliberately downgrades (to 1.1 G) for release.

But that's just a guess. There doesn't seem to be a continuum; either you get lots of artifacting or you see almost none, which is why I think it's the result of some sort of process difference in the data pipeline.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 13, 2008 01:12 PM (+rSRq)

8 To continue that thought: if that's really the situation, then it isn't the R1 release company's fault if a given DVD looks lousy. The fault lies with the Japanese production company and its choice of means to deliver the product.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 13, 2008 01:13 PM (+rSRq)

9 In some cases it's definitely true that these problems have come from the Japanese side providing sub-par materials - you mention Girls Bravo, which from what I remember looked like it had been passed through some kind of composite video process. FMP?F, released via ADV around the same time, had very similar problems (both, curiously, came from Kadokawa...) VHS tape probably isn't far from the truth with either of them.

In the case of Tsukuyomi, though, I think the blame can be layed very firmly at the feet of Funimation. There's been pretty widespread disgruntlement with regards to the quality of the video on Funimation releases over at AoDs forums ever since Funi stopped outsourcing their DVD production. On most their releases it's only really ardent videophiles who are likely to take exception, but in the case of Tsukuyomi the video shows occasionally horrific levels of macroblocking. It's more indicative of a poor video transfer than it is of a poor video source.

Apparently their recent release of Shuffle! is much improved. Unfortunately, I have no interest in that show ^^;

Posted by: DiGiKerot at March 13, 2008 01:53 PM (8Sg8e)

10

That's a different kind of artifact. Macroblocking (I know exactly what you mean) is an MPEG failure caused by too few kilobytes on the DVD.

The artifacts I was complaining about were checkboarding in the luma whenever there's a sharp change in chroma saturation, like this:

http://denbeste.nu/Chizumatic/images/RAND_959.jpg

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 13, 2008 02:08 PM (+rSRq)

11 Heh.  Fix your .htaccess file to allow Chizumatic.mee.nu.  You're giving us the "No Bandwidth Theft" picture.  My eyes hurt now.

Posted by: ubu at March 13, 2008 03:47 PM (GeU+Z)

12

Oh, crap! I thought I checked it, and forgot that I already had a copy of it in my browser cache.

Sorry about that.

That image is supposed to be obnoxious; its purpose is to convince bandwidth stealers to stop doing so by making all their readers complain. Looks like it worked, too.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 13, 2008 04:11 PM (+rSRq)

13

I'm pretty sure I'm going to go ahead and get Tsukuyomi Moon Phase. For one thing, I just noticed that Elfride's voice is the same seiyu that did Dita in Vandread and Misaki in Divergence Eve. I love her voice; and while Elfride isn't the main character in this series, she's apparently one of the main ones.

AnimeNFO categorizes the series as "Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Love-Romance", but not as "Horror". Of course, I've had major disagreements with their categorization in the past, but this tends to jibe with hints I'm getting from other sources that the series isn't as dark as you'd otherwise expect from a series featuring vampires.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 13, 2008 06:03 PM (+rSRq)

14

Kiddy Grade is pretty, there is some character development, and there is a satisfactory ending. I've watched it twice. Tsukuyomi Moon Phase has exceptionally strong secondary character development, good animation (except the last episode where they must have run out of budget), and a story. It's not a horror story per se, more a struggle against strong wicked opponents, with breaks for comic relief. I've watched it many times.  I don't think the loli aspects are objectionable.

That said, the video transfer on the Funi DVD is so bad that it was obvious from a previous viewing of Ep 1 from a fansub.  I'll wait for a remastered thin pack.  I don't have room for other than thin packs anyway.


Posted by: conrad at March 16, 2008 01:10 PM (MDfbw)

15 I doubt that Funimation will remaster the series. It doesn't strike me as one that's popular enough to justify it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 16, 2008 01:48 PM (+rSRq)

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