Erm, you are standing on the beach of a tropical island, and Natsumi has just been kidnapped by a robotic crab. Is it really the time to be worrying about car chases, Giroro?

Having heard that a decent, subbed release of the Evangelion 1.01 movie had been released in Hong Kong (legally, of course), I ended up heading over to Yes Asia to grab a copy. The thing with HK DVDs, though, is that the releases of Asian movies tend to be pretty cheap (£6-7-ish), and as a result the intention to order just one DVD ends up escalating to more like a dozen, though it is a shame it’s pretty slim pickings when it comes to anime. This probably goes some way to explaining exactly why I have a copy of obviously terrible The Oneechanbara, and is also why I picked up the ended up picking up the first three Keroro Gunsou movies (even though I already have the first on R2).

Anyway, the English subtitles on those HK releases that sport them are a bit of a crap-shoot in terms of quality – those on the Evangelion movie, aside from few minor typos, are pretty good. The same can be said of the subtitles to the first Keroro movie – there’s nothing overwhelming wrong with them.

The same can’t really be said of the second Keroro movie. I’m inclined to think that whoever wrote the subtitle script at least had a grasp of the Japanese language (or maybe Cantonese?), but it’s almost like they based the translation on just the audio without any idea of the context given by the visuals – aside from a few points where they’ve clearly misheard the audio, there’s a lot of lines which would make sense given different circumstances. It just a shame that the movie they were probably imagining was likely more exciting than the one I watched, though at least the subtitles added some additional humour value…

Yes, I realise the last couple of Mikan Watch posts have both been game related, but I’ve not fallen to the gaming Borg or anything (at least not any more than usual) – it’s just that anime has been failing me in this regard recently.

Anyway, that picture above is from the Dojima residence, though the two boxes on display in the room are underneath the cameras usual location when you are in the living area, so they aren’t typically entirely visible. I did notice them fairly early on in the game, but I’ve been waiting to get a decent shot of them before I took a picture.

As for where I am in the game, those playing will be able to ascertain that from the image above. I’m actually about a half-month ahead of that now, and things seem to be approaching the end game. Not sure I’ll get much of the game played through the next week, but I’ll probably be able to get the game finished off next weekend. Good game.

Just when I didn’t think I’d find time nor reason to make a post today, I was saved by the most unreliable of features. I’d been watching some El-Hazard this morning (which was prompted by slightly more than my current inclination to watch old anime, but that’s a subject for another post at some point) when I was suddenly stricken with an urge to go see Hellboy II (Not bad – probably the second best movie I’ve seen this year behind Speed Racer, but I’ve not been to see much this year). On arrival home afterwards, I found a couple of boxes had arrived, so after checking to see if Author had made a post about MariMite as he suggested he was about to, I ended up delving into those rather than returning to 90s OAV goodness. From the new arrivals, there’s not much to say about Black Lagoon other than it been awesome, despite it being one of the first of Geneons titles to hit from the Funimation deal (largely because the disks have clearly been sitting around in a storage facility for the last year). I’m undecided as to whether its worth saying anything about the new Negima OAV (sorry, OAD). I did get the last volume of Simoun, which Jeff has been writing about again, but I’ve not yet cracked open the first disk of the show. That’s a project for the upcoming weekend, I guess.

So I, errr, ended up watching the last volume of Kujibiki Unbalance – the TV version, rather than the old OAVs, of course. I get the feeling I’m repeating myself here, but whilst the show clearly isn’t the greatest thing in the history of anime (and I probably wouldn’t have bothered ever seeing it if I hadn’t wanted Genshiken), it’s got a really bad rep that it really doesn’t deserve. I suspect it’s mostly a result of the first episode having repulsed people by neither being the show people wanted or expected coming out of the old OAVs, eschewing the over-the-top parody of shonen and harem series tropes in favour of something, if no less of a parody, then rather more sedate. Having gone in aware of the fact, I found the whole thing pretty enjoyable. Not great, not really worth making any huge effort to track down, but certainly not something I regret sinking any time into. There’s other, similar shows with far bigger fanbases which are certainly worse, at the very least, but I’m not going to pretend to understand how anime fandom works.

Oh, and if you hadn’t realised, it’s actually the same box as appears ontop of the fridge in the Genshiken clubroom.

Proving that this Mikan box thing isn’t new, this one is going back a bit – to 1996 for the first TV adaptation of Pretty Sammy, released in the US as Magical Project S (and no doubt now really hard to find), as opposed to the earlier OAV series or the more recent Magical Girls Club thing that Funimation are releasing pretty soon. Yup, this one goes back to those mythical days where shows were drawn on things called cels, coloured with something called paint, and had OP sequences which ended up looking like horribly grainy VHS transfers when they were re-released on DVD.
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Yes, I’ve heard the news that iDOLM@STER is coming to PSP by the end of the year – or more accurately, coming to PSP three times by the end of the year. I can’t say I’m particularly surprised that they are doing three separate releases due to the amount of audio data in the game – aside from all the spoken dialogue, there’s obviously all the song data, stored multiple times for each character. Hopefully we’ll get the 360 and Live For You songs as a trade off for the missing characters, but there’s not been anything said about the song selection yet.

Anyway, in a move that probably isn’t a surprise to anyone reading, I’m presently planning to buy all three versions. For those who haven’t been following the news, or hasn’t heard everything yet, I’ll sum up what I presently know about these releases…

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