Nigorimasen! Blog

I mentioned in one of my AX posts that I bought Rescue Me Mave-chan from Bandai’s booth for $8 (MSRP $10), a cheap price compared to the full pricing of another OVA from a different publisher, Voices of a Distant Star. It’s a spinoff from the Yukikaze series of OVAs. Does it entertain within its 25 minute runtime, especially to someone who hasn’t seen the originating work?
Read the rest of this entry »

The moment I read the news that Viz would be releasing the Shonen Jump-based series Hunter X Hunter in season box sets beginning in Q4 2008, a huge grin appeared on my face. At last, this awesomeness will be brought to America! The manga by Yoshihiro Togashi is already on volume 19 (Vol. 20 comes out May 6th) and for those of you who have never heard of HxH, shame on you! (For a good introduction to the plot, read this Animefringe feature from September 2005.)

To get some perspective of how long it has taken for this anime to hit US shores, the anime was created in 2000 and it has since been dubbed into French, Spanish, Italian, Portugeuse, Tagalog, and even Arabic. Viz pitched HxH and Monster to television broadcasters at this year’s NATPE and they have DVD rights for both so the next logical step would be to get Monster on DVD and perhaps TV. (Adult Swim, you know you want a psychological thriller/drama to replace InuYasha…) Failing that, just Hunter x Hunter getting onto Toonami would be fantastic.

P.S. Did you know Viz is a part-owner of a future 150-seat movie theater to be the main attraction of the yet-to-be built J-Pop Center in Japantown?

Cropped from this Flickr image

This week, Best Buy is having a 50% off sale on select anime box sets. (I was tipped onto this earlier in the week from this thread on Cheap Ass Gamer but waited until now to write about it so as not to get anyone in trouble.) The titles being discounted are:

• Tokko: The Complete Series - $12.49
• Elfen Lied: Diclonius Report Thinpak- $15.99
• Noein Complete Series Box Set - $17.49
• Dragon Ball Z Season 4 Uncut Box Set - $19.99
• Mars Daybreak Anime Legends Set - $19.99
• Fullmetal Alchemist Season 2 Part 2 (ep. 41-51) - $19.99
• Neon Genesis Evangelion Platinum Thinpak - $28.99
• Samurai Deeper Kyo Complete with GBA game - $29.99 [game trailer]
• Robotech Protoculture: Collection (85 dub-only episodes) - $37.49

These prices are also now up online while some of them already backordered. I’ll going to get Noein and Tokko for sure, and perhaps Elfen Lied, and pump up my Reward Zone points in the process while also snagging R.E.M.’s new album this week. Maybe I’ll get xxxHolic #1 as well…

P.S. A warning: the Eva thinpak discs lack the extras from the singles, something I found out during my interview with Sean McCoy who had done a couple episode commentaries for #20 and #26. I believe the Elfen Lied thinpak also lacks its previous extras.

Original pic courtesy of Lelouch’s Myspace blog

Lucky Star’s first US volume got dated about three weeks ago and now we find out about the extras that limited edition purchasers expect to find inside the pretty art box come May 6th. The $35 ”upgrade” will yield you pack-ins in the vein of the Haruhi LEs but tweaked a bit: the opening theme and Konata character single CDs, a T-shirt version of Ryou-ou Gakuen’s winter girl’s school uniform that frankly looks kinda lame, and a chocolate cornet screen wipe that actually might be useful. The regular edition will still feature liner notes so you can understand the more obscure references as well as “The Adventures of Minoru Shiraishi” which may or may involve footage from the fan events he hosted.

Considering the Haruhi CD singles are individually priced at $10 each and T-shirts sell for about, you’re getting a bit of a deal. One question: will all the tees be the same size, e.g. large? If so, that may cause trouble for some buyers. I remember the FLCL Ultimate Collection included a postcard to send in for your free shirt but it took over a year and a month to finally get it in the mail so there’s definitely a tradeoff between speed and getting the right size.

I saw the first episode of Pumpkin Scissors when it premiered in fall 2006 and found it marginally interesting but not enough to continue to the second episode. Recently I got around to watching the Volume 1 DVD that I had bought during RightStuf’s Xmas sale and I now feel the same way about the second disc: I’m kind of interested in the story but not enough to buy the next volume to find out.
Read the rest of this entry »

I read about the release date for the Evangelion 1.0: You Are [Not] Alone special edition DVD announced as April 25th on Furu Anime Panikku and thought that finally, around late April or early May, the rest of the world can see this first in the series of four films that reimagine the Evangelion plotline (through fansubs). But then, I wondered what the packaged extras would be and found this story on ANN wherein this sentence caught my eye:

The extras disc will include the Explanation of Evangelion:1.01 — an exclusive edit which superimposes Japanese commentary text over the actual film to explain each scene to fans.

Wow. I can’t believe that there will actually be an extra that will tell viewers WHAT THEY ARE WATCHING. I’m not sure whether to interpret this as the producers thinking the film is too complicated (not very likely) or as them thinking the fans are too dense to figure it out for themselves using their own eyes, ears and brains! Perhaps they believe there are a lot of first-timers who saw this film in the theater and don’t know the intricacies that a long-time fan would and I suppose I could conceive a certain portion of the audience being that way. But still, the extra comes off as patronizing to me and likely many other fans.

Oh, and there will also be a standard edition release on May 21st for 1000 yen less than the special edition mentioned above as well as a 400-page Complete Records Collection (release date unknown) and a 330-page animators’ drawing collection in April.

Wild Arms TV (short for Twilight Venom) is an anime based on the first two installments of the future Western series of video games and aired in 1998. I haven’t played any of those games so I was not familiar with the world nor any characters before I watched the five episodes on the first disc and expecting that it would be decent. It met those expectations.
Read the rest of this entry »

When I first saw the trailer for Red Garden, I said that I would be interested in watching it and now that I’ve seen some of it, I see that there is more drama and downer moments than the horror-action-oriented trailer conveyed. I got the first DVD in the mail last week after ordering it from ADV as a part of their 15th Anniversary Sale and also received Wild Arms v.1 as a free gift. The first thing I noticed when I popped in the disc was the larger-than-usual font size on the menus. The video itself has some grain on it when watching on an LCD monitor (similar to what I experienced with Tsubasa v.1) which is kind of sad considering this is a Gonzo title, but it doesn’t show up for the most part on a CRT television.
Read the rest of this entry »

While in Germany, I have looked for cheap anime DVDs that I also had at home so I could compare technical details such as compression rates as well as more thing like dub voices. So far I have grabbed volume 3 of hack//SIGN and School Rumble Vol. 1 (should get the R1 version by the time I get home) as well as one disc each of Inuyasha, Shaman King, Tenchi Muyo, and King of the Hill. I can’t wait to hear the German version of Boomhauer.

Also on the manga front, I bought the first volumes of Honey and Clover and Love Hina to accompany the Japanese copies I have. This brings me to the new poll question: Do you own multiple physical versions of any anime or manga? This is meant to exclude fansubs or scanlations. After the jump: final results from the month-long “classic in 10 years” poll that I should have ended a while ago.
Read the rest of this entry »

This month, I lived up to a “promise” I made back in August 2006 that I would buy Solid State Society when it came out. I managed to get the limited edition for $16 from Best Buy three weeks ago and decided to review all three parts of the package: the feature itself, the extras disc, and the soundtrack CD. I wrote the feature part right after I watched it (and revised it slightly recently) but I somehow managed to misplace the extras disc until a few days ago so this entire thing was delayed until now.
Read the rest of this entry »