PinkuBentoBox

A couple of days late, but here’s another boring update from Negs.

I haven’t been very diverse with my anime watching recently. For the most part, I’ve been watching Hajime no Ippo, which I’m getting close to finishing now. Very enjoyable series, would recommend it to anyone who likes the style.

I just watched Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu (UFO Boobs) ep 4. Another enjoyable installment, though it looks like things are getting a bit nasty for the cast now. It’s reminding me a lot of Saikano. Normally that would be a bad thing for me - Saikano is one of the most boring series I’ve tried to watch, far too much melodrama. However Iriya does things right, by establishing a more diverse and interesting cast, and easing you into things gradually rather than throwing it at you and forcing you to swallow. Because of the added development that the characters have gotten, you feel much more empathic towards Iriya. The fact she’s cute - especially with her hair gone white - is icing on the cake.

Kamichu continues to impress with it’s ghibli-esque atmosphere. While episode 3 cut back on the astoundingly detailed character animations a bit, it seemed to have moved that budget into creating lush background visuals. The episode itself was once again excellent, this is shaping up to be one of the signature series of the season. It seems Meyrin will continue it, and I seriously suggest picking up the MKV releases they’ve put out. The video is in massive quality HDTV, 720p (1280×720 frame). The fact that they’re soft-subbed helps a lot here, as the other groups doing hardsubs are forced to re-encode and thus the video is degraded in quality due to further information loss during compression. Considering that there’s very little difference in size, you’d be insane not to go with Meyrin’s. Why stick with antiquated formats like AVI?

Da Capo Second Season episode 2 was also good, though featuring less Kotori :(. I’m really surprised with this, by all measures it should be terrible but somehow it isn’t.

Ichigo Mashimaro has been pre-licensed by Geneon USA, so the only subs we’re seeing at the moment are from underground groups. ICE-CREAM would be my pick at the moment, and I’m not just saying that because I know the guys. Read my rant above about MKV. The first episode was good, though it seems they’ve changed Nobue’s age to 20 because of her smoking habit. Fucking censors.

Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid also screened last week. I watched the raw, currently waiting to see which groups (and I guarantee there’s going to be lots) end up subbing it. My pick at the moment would be SD, translation wise, but I’ve heard that their video quality is less than impressive. This is a well-animated series, and it’s in HD, so sub-standard video quality isn’t ideal at all.

Finally, last week’s Gundam Seed Destiny was a bit of a surprise. While I can’t get over the new OP (whoever okayed that should be SHOT) the episode itself was extremely good. It also had an almost complete lack of Destiny characters, relying on the original cast. It had Lacus actually doing things, and it had Andy kicking ass. Strike Freedom is absolutely fucking ridiculous though. Freedom wasn’t powerful enough, they had to add more guns and a funnel system, making it the bastard offspring of Freedom and Nu. They’ve basically burned through the entire UC tech tree now, to boot, since Destiny’s ‘Fairy Magic’ engine is quite reminiscent of F-91.