The all things Anime related thread.

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I've read the first volume of the xxxHolic manga but didn't really get on with it personally. I've currently been re-reading a load of 4koma style manga, (Sunshine Sketch vols 1-3, S.S. Astro, Tori Koro, and currently G.A.) plus the first few volumes of the Maison Ikkokou manga (managed to get vols 1-3 for <£1),

Watched World of Narue after replacing my **** poor R2(UK) release with the new ADV R1 release which was good and fun and really could have done with another series and Kannagi part 1 (and it being Bandai yes I had some disk issues on one episode) which was ok. Managed to watch the first half of Solty Rei at the weekend too which brings me up to about where I got to before and that's been good so far, ... would have watched more but had to spend a lot of time dealing with a couple of corrupt Vista installs and failing system drive :(

Started rewatching Petite Princess Yucie earlier.

Werewolf, given what you've just watched I was suggest A__a Season 2 before Nuku (but that's a bit of a guess I admit as both the titles you say you have just watched are in my back log).


Sorry for the rant before ... wasn't having a good day which was topped off by some muppet on a certain auction site trying to get me to sell some anime at way less than it was worth just because he could get a fansub release at the lower price ...


 
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Aye i think i'll be trying A**a before Nuku, as I'm about at the point where I want something relaxng to watch :) (did I mention I got the papercraft boats and President in my order?;)).
 
I almost went with A__a myself this evening instead of Yucie but I wanted something I wouldn't mind dropping so much if Sola and/or True Tears ship early (both currently due for release 18/08 and I had my Lucky Star and FMA OVAs over a week early recently).



ediy: typical, say that and Sola's been delayed until mid September :(
 
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That's good news about the fate/stay movie, as I really enjoyed the TV series :)

Nothing exciting to report, except to say i'm loving A**a the Natural so far (only) two episode in and it's just as good as the first series, although I do find it a little hard to watch more than an episode at a time unless i'm in the right mood and able to give it my undivided attention (one of the reasons I don't mind dubbed anime too much).

I think when I get the free time* i'm going to try and do myself an **** based sig, as i've been meaning to do a new one for ages and as i'm really enjoying the series :)


*when i'm not on the forums, doing diy, painting models, watching anime, reading etc :p
 
It'll be interesting to see how they will sell the dvd's lol. Japan usually has what 2 episodes per disc? so thats 4 volumes with basically the same episode or 2 volumes with 4 episodes per disc as is likely to happen in the us/uk. Great publicity for the series and even though it would have cost them time and money to produce these 8 pointless episodes (2-3 would have been fine, the end of the arc wasn't even that surprising) they'll more than likely rake the money in with die hard fans and new fans from all the publicity.
 
Anyone seen the huge Haruhi posters they have been sticking all over Tokyo?

They seem to be making one huge advertising push at the moment.
 
Demoniser said:
It'll be interesting to see how they will sell the dvd's lol. Japan usually has what 2 episodes per disc? so thats 4 volumes with basically the same episode or 2 volumes with 4 episodes per disc as is likely to happen in the us/uk. Great publicity for the series and even though it would have cost them time and money to produce these 8 pointless episodes (2-3 would have been fine, the end of the arc wasn't even that surprising) they'll more than likely rake the money in with die hard fans and new fans from all the publicity.
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They are selling them with the usual number of episodes (2 or 3) per disk. You can see this due to the way DVD's are solicited in Japan which means that all of the releases for the series should be searchable on the Japanese Rainforest site (for example) very soon after the series starts airing, which has the downside that if you want LE's sometimes you have to order them for the whole series when you've only seen a handful of episodes. There is an added complication that the DVDs for this series, (other than disk one), are being listed with strange numbers as names ... for example, on said site, a seach for Suzumiya Haruhi returns DVD 1 for the 2009 series but DVD 2 is instead indicated as being called 5.142857. Found the reference, I can't link to the site here as it's not family friendly but the following gives a few details:

A site that won't be named said:
With the ongoing Endless Eight debacle disaffecting what remains of their pathetically masochistic fanbase, Kadokawa and Kyoto Animation have seen fit to continue their jolly antics; their latest fascinating marketing strategy is visible in the release details for the DVDs of the “new” series.
As you can see, not only will there likely be four discs of Endless Eight at full price, they are also patting themselves on the back for their cleverness in identifying the discs only by lengthy and non-sequential series of numbers. As expected of marketing geniuses.
涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱5.142857 ¥6,930 (Disc 2)
涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱5.230769 ¥6,930
涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱5.285714 ¥6,930
涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱5.428571 ¥6,930
涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱5.571428 ¥6,930
涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱5.714285 ¥6,930
涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱5.999999 ¥4,830
​
Doubtless the fact that four of these discs would have to have the same title never even entered into their thinking.
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It's one of those times when the move to cour long sets in the western markets instead of singles may be a very good thing ...
 
Not knowing how much yen is to the pound i just looked at a currency convertor.

£42 each?! Thats just insane tbh.

I know Bandai have jumped onto the Blu Ray bandwagon and have released a few things in the format now but i can only hope that the old/new episodes of Haruhi are bundled together into a neat hi def collection for a US release instead of the above strategy.
 
That's the sort of price range Anime DVD's are in Japan ... disk two is listed on the site at 27% off so that's only £33 which isn't bad for a R2(J) release ... as I've said before their releases are very expensive particularly when you take into account that a 1 cour series will be 6 disks normally and a 2 cour series will be 8 disks compared with 3 and 6 (assuming a singles release schedule) in the west .... in fact a 1 cour series over there, even with Rainforest discounts, could come to the best part of £200 when on R1 it may ship as a single series box for <£30-40!

It can be worse though, the list price for the Clannad After Story LE's is 7980Y per disk, so that's ~£52 disk before discounts (which take it to ~£39 a disk). .... that's assuming you can get the disks now as for volume 8 they are only listed on the market place at new/use minimum prices of ~£148/£78 respectively ... this is for a disk which was only released in July and was solicited in November a month after the series started airing.

We have it cheap with the release patterns used in R1 and R2(UK). Bandai did try to follow the R2(J) release pattern for a couple of series (using their Honneamise label) for things like True Tears but it just wasn't going to work ... hence in the case of True Tears the solicitation being cancelled and 18 months later us getting it as a single shot Anime Legends collection (next week yay!)

I'm hoping that whoever picks up K-On!, as with its Japanese sales and hype it will be picked up, releases it on Blu-ray as the Japanese release is supposed to have really good video/audio. As for other things ... yes they would be nice on Blu-ray assuming decent authoring but hopefuly it won't just be an excuse to put the price up ... and I have ~10 devices in the house which are capable of playing back DVD's and only one Blu-ray player so it would limit my viewing options (and multi-region Blu-ray players are still expensive).

Note: conversions have been done using an exchange rate of 154Y = £1 as that's what M&S currency exchange was selling at yesterday ymmv ...
 
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I've always found it strange that the japanese anime firms haven't cottoned onto the idea that by simply adding an english subtitle/cover and sorting out distribution (ie rainforest or similar) they could easily market the same identical disk to other region 2 markets without any major additional cost to them, they may even make more money as they would probably be able to sell them at a higher price than the 'UK' releases as there would be no time delay. Most people want to watch anime in japanese anyways.

Xam'd was a perfect example of the above idea (albeit on playstation network) and iirc it was received pretty well (except on the playstation only part), crunchyroll seem to be getting pre subbed anime too so it can't be that hard to just sling in a sub file on a dvd can it?

Anyways, I've just finished Toradora, its pretty predictable outcome but it was still pretty enjoyable none the less. Kind of the familiar of zero (Zero no Tsukaima) in both plot and character style (ie main female character is a angry loli) although obviously without the [edit]magic :)
 
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lsg1r said:
Anyways, I've just finished Toradora, its pretty predictable outcome but it was still pretty enjoyable none the less. Kind of the familiar of zero (Zero no Tsukaima) in both plot and character style (ie main female character is a angry loli) although obviously without the music :)
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Same voice actress too. She seems to have been type-cast into tsundere roles. :p

Is anyone else as angry as I am for the Haruhi thing? After 8 boring and stupid episodes, I was expecting something epic to make it all worth it. It wasn't.

I've started watching Umineko No Naku Koro Ni. I can't work out if it's supposed to be a spin-off of Higurashi or it's just a coincidence in the name. It's less "slice of life turns gory" as much as "murder mystery turns gory".
 
Some R2(J) release do have English subs, some Studio Ghibli releases for example, but I agree that the Japanese anime companies could probably do quite well if they just put the subs on everything and made it available easily in other countries through some form of online ordering. They probably do best by using importation companies like UP instead of places like the rainforest place in order to minimise the amount of stock being held in different places, (i.e. you order from them, they then requet that stock from a central point ship in bulk to themselves (to minimise customs issues) and then ship to you). But on the downside they would likely want to use the Japanese release model which would be bad for us volumes and cost wise.

Toradora .... I've seen the first few episodes but haven't got around to watching the rest.

Just finished watching Solty Rei which I thought was pretty good although I'd have probably lost the extra episode and run the finale over an extra episode as well if it was me. Also been rewatching Petite Princess Yucie which is amusing and easy to watch.

Probably going to watch Misaki Chronicles from the depths of my backlog ...

Good to see that the earthquake earlier affecting Japan wasn't very strong and hence it turns out that Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 wasn't advanced advertising for it afterall :)
 
got my hands on ergo proxy, havent started it yet, got no idea what its about but a friend told me its pretty epic, anyone else seen it?
 
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