Reviews
The Trigun: Badlands Rumble Blu-ray Review Is Now Available
The Trigun: Badlands Rumble Blu-ray review Is now available in the reviews section and here.
It was nice watching Vahs and his friends one last time on TV. Truth be told, although there was nothing wrong with the old TV series Badlands Rumble gives me false hopes that someday some studio will do an HD reboot of Trigun and follow the manga closely. A fan can dream right?
Simoun DVD Review
The Simoun DVD review is now available in the reviews section and here.
Well-crafted series are always fun to watch and Simoun is one such series. It’s a shame that the series’ biggest flaw is its English subtitles. I usually don’t lower the score of an anime even if it does contain some spelling errors or an untranslated bit here and there. Translators have a hard job and hundreds of words to translate each episode. That said, Simoun had too many mistranslations for me to not mention them, and when such a thing becomes a major issue for a series some review points will be decreased.
On a more humorous note, one of the Simoun DVDs had a trailer for Kujibiki
Unbalanced 
I bet Media Blasters never even sold a hundred copies of that thing. In fact Media Blasters was probably forced to license it as a condition for licensing Genshiken…
The Sky Crawlers Blu-ray Review
The Sky Crawlers Blu-ray review has been added. You can find it in the reivews section and here.
The characters’ faces in this movie are a bit on the ugly/unimpressive side. Perhaps the most frightening of all is Kusanagi’s daughter. She looks like a murderer!
I really like the concept behind The Sky Crawlers’ universe. It’s a pity the light novels on which the movie was based were never translated to English. There’s a Wii game for it in English though, so if you liked the movie you might want to check it out.
The Melody of Oblivion DVD Review
The Melody of Oblivion DVD Review is now available in the reviews section and here. Since I pretty much summed up everything I deemed important in the review here’s some light trivia about the series:
- The mechanical baby dolls shown in the series are “duplicates” of Kewpei – the famous mascot for a Japanese Mayonnaise company by the same name.
- The names of the attacks used by the Melos Warriors are all names of winning hand in Poker.
- Some characters in the series are named after a single English letter. For example, one girl is called Q, while another woman is called P.
- Sayoko’s chain was designed to have the same ability as Haruko’s chain (from FLCL). However, unlike Haruko’s chain Sayoko’s chain actually functions from time to time.
- All the women in the world of the Melody of Oblivion possess large breasts. This is presented as a fact of nature. Coco, the only woman with real proportioned breasts, is said to still be a child.
- The Melody of Oblivion is one of the rare series in which Japanese money bills are depicted in realistic detail.
.hack//Quantum Blu-ray and DVD Review
The .hack//Quantum review is now available in the reviews section and here.
It took me a lot of time to write this review, and for good reasons. You see, I’m a huge .hack fan, to the point where I even read obscurities such as .hack//Zero. So I was pretty excited to watch Quantum. But when I did something strange happened: It didn’t make any sense to me!
So I decided to take up my PSP and finally finish my old save of .hack//Link – the game that chronologically came before this OVA. Only after playing the game a bit, and watching the OVA a second time, did I understand .hack//Quantum’s plot to the fullest. Well, except for the Sophia part. What the hell is Sophia?
I hope .hack fans will forgive me for not giving this title a better score, but it’s not hard to see why I scored it the way I did. I look forward to seeing the movie .hack//Beyond the World sometime in the near future in the hope that it will shed more light on the newest iteration of The World.
Trigun DVD Review
The Trigun DVD review is up in the reviews section and here. If you watched the Trigun anime and liked it you might want to check the Trigun manga. The manga starts similiar to the anime but after the first two volumes branches off into a different direction. If I’d have to point out the difference I’d say the manga is a little more sci-fi then the anime.
One thing that often stands out about old anime is the use of Engrish – badly written English that was probably never spell checked by anyone remotely familiar with the English language. Trigun has its fair share of Engrish too: The city of May is misspelled on a sign post that refers to her as Mai. One character is called Rem Saverem, but the production studio horribly misspelled her name and she appears in the population archives as Lem Sayblem. Funny how these things used to pass unnoticed. I’m sure that the animation studios are more aware of these problems today and fix them in time for the DVD/BD release.
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