Oh, wow, it’s a reader submission, courtesy of Author. That’s kind of rare, probably because I tend not to publish my contact details (though, seriously, if you can’t guess a valid e-mail address for me, I’d question if I’d want to talk to you ^^;).

Anyway, this is from Astro Fighter Sunred, from the second episode from what I can ascertain. There’s not really much to say about it – it’s nice and clear and front of screen, so at least no squinting and wondering about whether nor not it actually says Mikan is required.

DiGiKerot 3 – Kadokawa 3. Two volumes to go, and things are all even now. Except, it’s Kyon, again. I almost feel like Kadokawa are still trolling me here…

Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s really not much point in protracting these posts out at this point – there’s never anything new to say about them. The only really significant thing to say about this volume that doesn’t apply to the ones preceding it is that this volume sees the move from Endless Eight into Sigh’s.

So, apparently NISA have decided to have a go at this anime thing. The reactions to it seem to be a little on the mixed side.

Reaction on some of the gaming forums I read is kind of just a massive, simultaneous facepalm – the Japanese parent company has just announced a massive drop in profits (note – drop in profits, it’s not like they’re in the red or anything), and here they are throwing their hat into an industry that’s been in a state of freefall for the last couple of years. It probably doesn’t really help that in recent times NISA has gone from being a fan favourite (mostly on the back of titles that ATLUS handled the localisation on) to a laughing stock generally known for a lack of quality control. The lack of quality control thing came to a head when Ar Tonelico 2 was published in the US last year.

To establish a little context here, the Ar Tonelico games are, rather than being developed by NIS, developed by a Japanese studio called GUST, and published over there by Namco Bandai. NISA publish a number of their titles in the US. GUST aren’t particularly renowned for their technical prowess – they tend to produce RPGs with low production values that target the otaku market in the precise fashion that higher budget projects can’t really afford to focus on. Typically, their first titles on any given platform will look an awful lot like a C-grade game from other publishers on the previous generation of hardware.

Take the recently released Ar Tonelico 3, for example – that game looks an awful lot like a C-grade PS2 game, by which I mean not a Final Fantasy, a Xenosaga, a Tales game, Tri-Ace game, or even a Shadow Hearts. It’s a game in which most of the dungeon-type areas are built flat, with ladders providing verticality, because the game isn’t advanced enough to understand the concept of running down a ramp – on those occasions where the game has something like a staircase, reaching it tends to result in your character continuing to move forwards, like Wily-E-Coyote running over a cliff. Downwards momentum is provided by licensed Havok Physics engine, but because the characters have so little weight, the result is that they bounce along in a hilarious fashion.

Even beyond that, GUSTs quality control isn’t typically the greatest – Ar Tonelico 3 even left the debug menu available from certain screens in the release build. It’s good for getting some easy Trophies (Level 99? No problem!), but it doesn’t exactly leave a good impression. Basically, GUSTs games aren’t unknown to have bugs.

But, hey, the game has an unbelievable amount of fanservice, including a combat system built around stripping the female characters.

GUSTs typical standard is why it isn’t really a surprise that, for the US release of the game, NISA kind of managed to introduce a bug that causes the game to freeze whilst fighting one of the bosses towards the end of the game – you kind of get the impression that GUSTs games are easy to break, and NIS release an awful lot of them.

That said, that’s only one of the many reasons that made Ar Tonelico 2 notorious. In the state that the game made it out onto the market, it’s hard to believe that anyone had actually bothered to play it before release, or that Sony actually passed it through the approval process. The games script is full of grammatical errors and mistakes in the text which go beyond mere typos to being simply the wrong words – and that’s where they actually translated the text, there being a commonly recurring piece of dialogue which wasn’t translated at all. It was pretty embarrassing mess, really, particularly coming after a couple of minor hiccups in other games, not to mention the name changes in Mana Khemia.

NISA have, at least, turned something of a corner since then – there’s been minor glitches in a few of their games since then, but no hysterically bad translation issues or game breaking bugs or anything like that, as far as I’ve ran across anyway – but people have long memories.

The point, I guess, is that Ar Tonelico 2’s reputation proceeds it, which means a lot of people are freaking about the possibility of NISA ruining their animu’s. Seriously, we are getting all kinds of reactions, from people expecting broken scripts, name changes and, god forbid, changing the order of the characters names. It’s kind of hilarious, given that it’s mostly unfounded. I mean, anime is a completely different kettle of fish to videogames – the scripts are far, far shorter, and there’s none of that pesky programming stuff to worry about. It’s a lot harder to screw up than a game is.

We don’t really know all that much about the direction NISA is going to take with their anime publications, but we can make some pretty good guesses based on the press releases and hearsay. The likelyhood is that we’ll be seeing 13-episode, subtitle-only releases that’ll only be available from a handful of online-only stores – I’d reckon NISA’s own RosenQueen, Rightstuf, Amazon and possibly Roberts. There’ll probably be extras of some kind, and you’ll almost certainly get more of them if you order directly from RosenQueen.

Chances are, though, that they’ll run it similar to how people (at least tend to) think of them running their videogame business. They’ve already claimed that these shows are going to be limited print runs, which is what they also tend to say about their games. They like to build the assumption that, if you don’t buy their games immediately upon release, you’ll probably not be getting them as they’ll be impossible to find later. You can’t wait for the games to get cheap like the major studio releases, because they’ll no longer be available. This, of course, kind of flies counter to the way the US anime industry works, where people tend to wait for the boxsets.

That works for games, because there’s not necessarily another option for getting ahold of that material. Not everyone has the hardware to play pirated games, nor the bandwidth to download them. Toradora, on the other hand, has kind of already been “available” – you can’t really increase the value through scarcity at this point, because even those who they are going to be target the release to will already have seen it. Still, I guess the idea is that they’ll only produce what they think will sell at retail in the first couple of weeks. No pesky returns to worry about and reduced warehouse requirements and all that, and no ongoing concerns – a small but guaranteed profit instead of risking the kind of long term returns issue that caused the US market so much pain a couple of years ago.

Ultimately, it’s kind of a wait-and-see situation, though. Chances are that the releases themselves will be entirely fine. If there’s one concern I’d have over this enterprise, it’s that it could potentially have a negative impact on their gaming business – frankly, I’d rather see them announce English Ar Tonelico 3 already instead these anime titles. I’m kind of concerned about the titles they’ve announced as well – I think it’s telling that they led things off with Toradora. I don’t mean to say that Toradora is bad, but rather exactly how badly the move reflects on the quality of the Persona anime. Given the popularity of the games, the fact that they aren’t shouting about it sends what I gather are all the correct messages about it…

I’d think that another release of My-HiME would probably be pretty near the top. Long-term readers (of which I suspect there are few) may well remember that at one point I even wrote up a comparison between the R1, R2J and R2E releases DVD of the show – not that I have more than one volume of the R2E release. I still have the show twice over on DVD, though, and, honestly, half those US disks are still in shrinkwrap.

Which is why I had absolutely no intention of pre-ordering the recently released My-HiME Blu-Ray boxed set – after all, at the point when I managed to bring myself to not to buy the BR release of Zwei, I figured I’d finally managed to free myself from the franchises rigid grasp upon my wallet. Even regardless of that, it was a TV show from 2004, and there’s generally a limit to how much better a show of the vintage is going to look on the HD formats – it’d benefit from the reduction in compression issues which comes with the jump, but otherwise history informed us we could expect nothing better than a slightly better looking upscale.

But then people started getting their copies, and informed the world that the set had actually pulled the dub and the subtitles from the US release, and my will began to crumble somewhat. Then came the speculation that it was, infact, not an upscale at all. Needless to say, I ended up buying the thing. Sometimes I really don’t know why I even try to resist.

Still, it was worth it. It’s been a good four or five years since I saw the show last, and although I probably shouldn’t have been, I was kind of surprised to rediscover exactly how good a show My-HiME was. Not that I’m really all that interested in discussing the show at any length at this point – I kind of got that out of my system five years ago, and I really don’t want to risk getting into yet another debate about the ending.

The BR release is really rather lovely, though, even just to look at – it’s nice and compact, and all the covers feature new art by the shows character designer (and Queens Blade stalwart) Hirokazu Hisayuki. Well, at least I think it’s new – I don’t recognise it, and can’t spot any of them that pictured stack of books I’ve just looked though.

The experience of putting the disks in the player is quite pleasant as well. The fact that, like practically every other Japanese anime Blu-ray I’ve picked up, it’ll play quite happily on my European, Zone B player is highly appreciated, particularly given the way that Japanese still insist on region encoding their DVDs (even one’s with English subtitles, like Haruhi). Each of the disks boot-up to a menu enquiring as to whether you wish to play the disk in Japanese or International format, the later of which switches everything – from the copyright warnings to the menus – into English. Kind of makes one think that they are planning to release this thing in the US, doesn’t it?

The actual show itself looks pretty fabulous. Honestly, it’s a little difficult to tell if this is an upscale or not. If it is an upscale, it’s certainly a very good one. I kind of suspect that the video (it’s 1080i on disk, matted black bars down both sides in order to keep the aspect ratio) is taken from a source that, whilst not in 1080, was certainly higher than what it was broadcast in. Even taking into account compression issues, it looks an awful lot better than even the R2 disks. It doesn’t really matter, I guess – the point is that its far and away the best looking release of the show that exists, and the line-work is just so gloriously crisp and clean, without any sign of nasty edge enhancement. It’s just so beautiful *sniff*

If I’ve got one complaint about the release, it’s that it’s missing the “Next Step” text from episode 20’s next episode preview. Seriously, Bandai, how could you screw up something so important?

Well, okay, not really, but Bandai obviously consider it serious enough an oversight that they’re actually running a replacement program for that disk in Japan ^^;

Really, though, my complaint is about the extras. It’s not that it’s the only disk for which none of the content has subtitles – the only place you are going to miss them is with the all-new, four minute long omake feature (which, by the way, I love them for producing). Rather, it’s that for something they’ve devoted an entire additional disk to, it’s kind of light on them. It’d be understandable if there was a lack of additional material for them to pull from, but it’s not even like that’s the case. I mean, they’ve pulled the original promotional movie (did that even make the US release?) from the first pressing DVD vol 1 bonus disk, and the music videos from the My-HiME Fandisk, but the bulk of those disks was a good couple of hours of voice actress interviews and voice session footage that it’s a real shame aren’t duplicated here.

It’s a small complaint, I guess, and it’s not like I’d really get much value out of having them on here myself anyway, but it’d have been nice to see. Otherwise, these disks are an overwhelming pleasant experience, and being one of the weirdos who preferred it to HiME, I’m really looking forward to getting the ZHiME Blu-Ray set when it’s released next month. That’s got an new omake feature as well…

Evidently, these posts are somewhat like buses – you wait four months for one, then a bunch of them come along at once. Although I guess they aren’t really like buses in so much as it’s rather kind of unlikely that you’d actually wait four months for a bus, and, quite certainly, no-one was actually itching for me to make a Mikan Watch post (I think someone on the Something Awful forums put it best when they exclaimed “Why on Earth would someone spend their time doing that!?”).

(Does the Bus joke actually translate outside of Blighty, or are people just wondering what on Earth I’m going on about here more that usual?)

But, yeah, Motto Marutto Railgun (or MMR for short) – it’s the Index-tan styled gag featurette shipping with the Railgun DVDs and Blu-Rays. I suppose I’ll be throwing together a post on the Railgun release at some point, so I’ll hold off on discussing if for now, but rest assured there’s a Mikan Box in Komoe’s apartment. I’m pretty sure it’s there in Index as well, come to think of it.

Not that it’s particularly clear. I’m pretty sure it say’s Mikan, at least…