1821

This season in order of goodness:

1)Canaan: Not surprising since it is a type moon (Kara no Kyoukai, a movie that is 100% confirmed that if you haven’t seen it before you die, you will NOT get in to heaven). Higher quality than i would expect out of a tv series. It strongly reminds me of Kara no Kyoukai without the supernatural element. If Duke Nukem Forever was released tomorrow, turned out to be so good that it triggered the second coming of Christ, then got translated in to an anime, this would be it. The only bad point is it is only 12 episodes long.

2)Spice & wolf - season 2: It is spice & wolf season 2. 2nd season seems to be starting strong and it looks like it will be more about our two main character’s relationship. If you liked season 1, all signs point to loving season 2.

3)Bakemonogatari: An interesting show, although not really in the same league as the higher ups. The first episode was of higher quality than the rest of the series which left me a little disappointed, but overall it is an enjoyable, good show that is different.

Honorable Mentions:

Sora no Manimani: A decent romance/comedy that heavily reminds me of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, except without the super natural/mystery element.

Needless: An amusing, but by NO means good, mindless action show. If you watched guin saga but got pissed off that there was an actual plot, watch this instead.

Timeout corner of shame

Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan!!: We’re talking about a series where scantly clad young girls fly around plugging a large electric cord in to depressed people to make them happy. Did i mention they’re from a different reality/dimension/whatever and invisible and can go through walls like a ghost? oh and the reason they do this you ask? simple, it is their job for some reason.

Still going on from last season, but good

Pandora Hearts: Surprisingly good show that i wasn’t looking forward to. Interesting plot/characters and generally dark. Alice is an interesting character, could teach Bakemonogatari a thing or two about making female characters of a certain personality type.

Guin Saga: An interesting “actiony” series that doesn’t devolve in to mindless 13 year olds screaming “GAR.” Very epic plot and of course guin is an interesting character that heavily reminds me of Utawarerumono (this is a good thing).

Phantom - Requiem for the Phantom: series has had its ups and downs, including the much overused young cute girl assassin, BUT this piece of toast with peanut butter on it landed with the peanut butter side safely facing up.

1822

Look here where I asked the same question.

I’ve recently marathon’ed Zettai Karen Children. Entire run of 51 episodes in 2 weeks. It’s another take of X-men-type characters and problems (humans vs muties, or Normals vs. ESPers here), starring 3 10-year-olds top level ESPers working for the government, and their new nanny/supervisor. I don’t know how to describe why I like it, except to say that they did nothing wrong…no obscene fan service, no plot holes, no pacing molasses. There are many shout-outs to Combat Butler Hayate, because they share many voice actors/actresses. In particular, they like to make fun of Rie Kugimiya as the vocal embodiment of all Tsunderes.

1823

I watched the first (and currently only) three episodes of Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. It didn’t grab me at all. Two of my friends are loving it though. Maybe I’m just a cold, unloving robot.

1824

I’m sure this has been answered already, and I’m sorry, but the 62 page thread frightens me. Where’s a good place online to buy anime? We ordered a few things from AnimeNation because they were the top hit on Google, they took the money, but are out of stock on everything we ordered.

1825

Never order anything from AnimeNation if it’s not currently in stock. What happens is they charge you and then six months to a year later you MIGHT get what you want when they restocked.

Generally I order from RightStuf whenever possible and have never had a bad experience with them. Plain ol’ Amazon is also good for making most purchases, since they tend to stock all but the lowest-print-run items.

1826

Yep, Right Stuf is probably the best. They also have the bonus of usually shipping as soon as they get product instead of adhering to street dates. So you may get a series several weeks before Amazon will ship it.

Anime News Network has a feature in their database that will do a price comparison of various online anime vendors so you can find out who has it the cheapest but it is almost aways Right Stuf or Amazon.

1827

More than a guide about anime I’d need a guide about sub groups. I never know what’s the best release.

For now I learned to go blindly with Menclave and Frostii (whose Bakemonogatari just came out), gg only if there’s nothing better. For the minor releases I really don’t know what to pick.

In the meantime I’m pillaging tvnihon. Getting all the Kamen Rider and Ultraman I could find. The two movies (First and Next) in particular look good, but I really don’t know what are the best series to watch since everyone seems to have a different opinion.

I read good things about Agito but I can’t find a release with decent video quality. I got a good RAW, but I don’t know if I can patch subtitles into it, or how. I wonder why they don’t do a better release since they praise it a lot.

1828

8 times out of 10 it’s whichever release came out last. The usual pattern with fansub releases is crap speedsubbers within 24-48 hours of release, speed-priority subbers within one week of release, quality-priority subbers within one month. Of course, there are exceptions-- sometimes vultures will crap out terrible versions of a show’s early episodes as they try to get up to speed for the big ending, and some speed-priority subbers can be surprisingly good.

Staff members tend to move very fluidly and groups can change a lot over time. Different groups may also be borking different parts of a translation. Generally you can watch whatever doesn’t strike you as self-evidently horrible, but it’s good to never take fansubs at face value as being 100% accurate. The translators are usually precocious students working within the first four years of classes for a nine-year language, after all.

Do your own research on what’s going on with a show’s storyline, talk to people on forums, and usually that gives you the best picture of what’s happening until an official translation using the original scripts can be prepared. Fortunately most anime uses simplified vocabulary so the fansubs will frequently be good enough. You’ll only run into trouble with intellectual series where the fansubbers will suffer from not having an advanced grasp of vocabulary and not having original scripts to consult.

The two movies (First and Next) in particular look good, but I really don’t know what are the best series to watch since everyone seems to have a different opinion.

The First is really disappointing but has enjoyable bits. The Next is so goddamn terrible that it more or less killed that series of movies stone dead. These films are not really a good introduction to Kamen Rider – I’d even consider Kamen Rider Zo from the early 90’s superior – and I hope you don’t decide the whole franchise is not for you based on them.

I got a good RAW, but I don’t know if I can patch subtitles into it, or how. I wonder why they don’t do a better release since they praise it a lot.

The original Agito subber, I believe, never subbed another series. (Around the turn of the century, that was typical for fansubbing-- groups would form to do one favorite show, then disperse.) The fansub is quite good and was in fact one of the very first complete high-quality tokusatsu fansubs, so wanting the entire thing subbed over again strikes me as kind of ridiculous. There’s still no complete Kuuga fansub out there.

Around the turn of the century, anime subs weren’t circulating primarily through encode form just yet and most of your higher-quality translations were circulated primarily through VHS tapes. We just need to convince someone with the original distro to dump a higher-quality version of it, like Central Anime did with their massive back catalog of 90’s and earlier fansubs.

In the case of TV-Nihon, the group has sworn up and down for years that they’d do all of Kamen Rider, even the old Showa stuff. In practice, the group has absolutely no interest in doing shows that aren’t currently airing on Japanese television and currently demanded by tokusatsu fans. The only exception is for Kamen Rider Ryuki, which they’re subbing because it’s the basis of the footage used in the Kamen Rider Dragon Knight series currently airing on American television.

1829

The Irresponsible Captain Tylor

I watched this the other night, recommended by a co-worker. (I watch a lot of anime at work. 8 hours of nothing a lot of times.)

Wasn’t too bad, and it was good for a laugh.

Does that whole accidental hero story, with all the super hot anime ladies throwing themselves at him.

1830

I emailed AnimeNation on this advice, asking to cancel the order and refund my (Paypal) payment. They emailed back within an hour saying the order had been canceled, but I haven’t seen a refund yet. Should I not even fuck around with these guys and just dispute it on Paypal? How bad are they?

1831

Anecdotally, I’ve never heard of anyone getting a refund out of Anime Nation for any reason. This isn’t the same as “it’s impossible, don’t bother,” of course. Still, I’d probably rather deal with PayPal if it was my money I was trying to get back.

1832

Amazon and Deep Discount are fine for the mainstream stuff. Right Stuf is also good, particularly for some of the more eclectic or older stuff, though their prices tend to be higher.

FYI, DD currently has a “25% off all in-stock DVDs” sale going (coupon code CJ25). And RS is in the middle of a clearance sale which ends Thursday.

1833

Well, I haven’t watched them yet, but the “look” is better then the normal series. The costumes are better done and look less like plastic so I thought that maybe even the plot was more realistic.

1834

The big issues with The First and The Next are writing. Despite the slick modern look of the costumes, they’re basically nostalgic retellings of the original 60’s Kamen Rider and its well-regarded sequel, Kamen Rider V3. All of the truly ridiculous elements like Scissors Jaguar and the over-the-top mad science terrorism are kept intact. These goofy elements fight with attempts to grimdark up the basic storylines and the result is just an unpleasant mess.

If you do want to see a realistic approach to Kamen Rider, you want to see the 2000 series Kamen Rider Kuuga finally subtitled in full. This show was considered shockingly radical at the time of its production because it dispensed with every unrealistic genre trope of tokusatsu it could. Kuuga does not announce his attacks, the police aren’t mysteriously irrelevant to the storyline, and the monsters are quite literally just superhuman serial killers. It’s even filmed in live cam to make the events seem more like things that might be happening down the street from you.

Kuuga is the only series produced in that style and was so popular at the time that it reinvigorated the Rider franchise. It’s generally believed that subsequent Rider projects haven’t even attempted to duplicate its level of realism due to a feeling that Kuuga couldn’t really be topped. Agito is well-regarded by fans because it’s slightly less realistic than Kuuga while still presenting its plot in a fairly sophisticated way. You get longer fights in Agito than in Kuuga, and fewer uncomfortable storylines about the tragic consequences of superhumanity.

1835

Who and where?

1836

Nobody and nowhere. It’s never been done. I watched it raw with my husband, cross-referencing with synopses and all kinds of things nobody does anymore.

Most attempts to fansub Kuuga stall around episode 4. The problem is that the series’ dialog is very complex and, in particular, that the monsters speak their own created language.

There are extended scenes between different monsters that occur in this language. The language is a phonetic substitution of Japanese so the original audience could’ve sort of guessed at what was going on in most scenes but wouldn’t have known specifically. It’s a little harder in English but reading an explanation makes it a bit simpler.

(There was also a little game for the original Japanese viewers involving the series website, where “hints” for cracking the language went up with each new episode. This was to parallel the job done by the female lead of the show, who was a linguist trying to understand the meaning of the monster language.)

Fansubbers have yet to figure out how to approach the scenes involving the monster language since there’s really nothing else like it. The original VHS attempts, which also stopped at episode 4, simply did not sub these scenes and included notes explaining why.

Most encode attempts make use of Japanese translations of the monster language provided by a book of scripts you can get with one of the collector’s editions of Kuuga, and actually try to sub what the monsters are “meant” to be saying to each other. (The meanings were provided in shooting scripts only so the actors could deliver their lines in the created language with proper inflection.)

What seems to stall most attempts to sub the series is that someone watches the show to a certain point and realizes that there are episodes where the entire approach to the writing hinges on the fact that the audience cannot understand exactly what the monsters say to each other. There is a particularly shocking episode halfway through where a monster begins speaking Japanese that is wholly undermined if every single monster scene up to that point has been “translated.”

So what tends to happen with Kuuga is that multiple groups attempt it, realize how hard it’s going to be to finish subtitling the series, and then stop before they get in too deep. There’s not heavy demand for the show among current tokusatsu fans because its action scenes are relatively brief and, well, realistic rather than going on for fifteen minutes with full insert songs playing.

Some fans also dislike the ending because it isn’t a great big fight, which is point-missing, but how can you expect people to be interested in the point of an untranslated show? If anyone finishes Kuuga it might be one of the retro-subbing groups who tend to watch an entire series and then figure out an approach to subbing it… but they tend to focus on anime only.

1837

Why not rot13 the alien monster dialog? The completist-watcher can then pause & decode the speech if they want. Come to think of it, that’s stupid. Now, with MKV, you can have 2 subtitle tracks, one with translated monster speech, and one without. Anyways, no more technical barriers. Now it’s a speech and translation barrier.

As for KR series, you will get completely different opinions on the worthwhile series, because each series is a like a mashup of a fixed set of themes, and each year they pick a few to keep, flip a few into its opposite theme, and throw the rest away. For example, I was just arguing with my friend today that all the new KR series has a lot of rider vs rider fighting, and he pointed out that I skipped all the series where this doesn’t happen (or not as often, anyways) because there aren’t many riders.

I think you will have no choice but to watch a few episodes of a series at the beginning, and if it doesn’t grab you, just move on to the next one.

Wikipedia may be able to help you with synopsis of each series, but there are lots of spoilers on those pages.

I can tell you what I’ve watched:

Kuuga: didn’t finish, looks really interesting, but I was watching Taiwanese DVD with excruitiatingly painful English translation. (Think babelfish, but written by Taiwanese.) Single loner rider who changes forms. Pretty, organic design. Most like the older riders.

555: didn’t finish, did not watch from beginning. No opinion about story and characters. I only have opinion on the rider costume design, which flipped from extreme hatred into stylish-in-an-amateur-sense…design is Greek alphabet based. One of the “belt is a Rider System” type of riders, where the belts can be worn by anyone.

Kabuto: Finish. Love love love, because the main hero is fights arrogantly and confidently. So refreshing looking. A lot of riders after this series fights like him, and henshins like him. “Rider System” type of riders. Lots of them, all doing things that sometimes conflicts with each other. I especially love ZaBee, Punch Hopper and Kick Hopper for their design and their silliness. Insect-based costumes.

Den-O. Not finish. Hated the characters, hated the plot, hated the rider design. Popular Japanese mythological characters-based.

Hibiki. Not even started. This is my friend’s most favourite Rider series. It seems to have done some very different things, like based on medieval Japanese feel, has a musical instruments theme, has maybe an ecology theme? Weird organic costume designs.

Kiva. watched 1/4 of the series. It’s actually pretty interesting, but I had to stop due to work, and never went back to catch up. Kiva is the only rider in this series (well, up to 1/4 of the series anyways), and changes form in such a weird way that you just know there must be a backstory. This series tells 2 stories in parallel, 20 years apart. Has vampires. Of course, Kiva’s costume is a Goth Kuuga.

Decade (current series): Totally watching. Silly homage to the previous 9 years of Riders. “villian of the week”, except it’s every 2 weeks. Decade has to travel to each older rider’s world and beat up someone/fix something. The world has the same riders, and the same monsters, but something doesn’t follow the original story. So, it’s way fun for people who watched that series, but it’s not too bad for those that missed it. I love the design of Decade, but hate DiEnd and Super Decade. Those are just disasters. Although Decade is just 2 riders, it has the last 10 years worth of riders around, so there are plenty of rider vs rider stuff.

Ryuki: never watched. I mention this because it seems an important series…the only one where there are no monsters for the riders to fight. Instead, there are 13 riders who fight each TO THE DEATH…THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE. My friend insists that this one is groundbreaking. Plate-mail-based costumes. Why in heck is THIS one getting officially translated for US?

1838

Haruhi season 2: <Rant mode on> I keep downloading a ‘new’ episode, only to find out that I’ve ACTUALLY already seen it! This is so ironic, given the story of the current season. AAAAAA I quit.

Naaa I don’t mean that. I’m such a loser…

1839

The “problem” with MKV is that it’s a format a lot of anime fans arbitrarily hate and will not watch. Part of the issue is that MKV tends to be less portable to non-PC devices than AVI or MP4, and part of it is some groups who did rather poor MKV distros when the format was first gaining traction. So even for a series like Kuuga where the obvious technology solution is MKV, I don’t think a single group that’s attempted to subtitle the show has tried to use it.

Hibiki. Not even started. This is my friend’s most favourite Rider series. It seems to have done some very different things, like based on medieval Japanese feel, has a musical instruments theme, has maybe an ecology theme? Weird organic costume designs.

Hibiki holds a weird position in the Rider franchise because as originally pitched, the series wasn’t going to be a Kamen Rider show at all. The intent was to make it a spin-off called “Ongeki Rider.”

The striking suit designs for the show were provided by Kazuma Kanako, who gamers may know from the Shin Megami Tensei series. He was clearly employed since as conceived Hibiki was going to be a show about musical demon ninjas fighting each other.

The show’s theme isn’t ecological… to be honest, it’s hard to tell what the hell Hibiki is supposed to be about because the show fires its creative staff halfway through and then switches to a totally different writer/director/etc. The way the show ends bears no relation to what the plot was supposed to be about early on.

Hibiki was held in such low esteem by most fans that I’m shocked (kind of pleasantly) to hear it’s anybody’s favorite Rider series. When Hibiki was limping to its conclusion, I remember a lot of rumors circulation about how after Hibiki they were going to retire Rider for awhile and replace it with a Space Sheriff revival.

Ryuki: never watched. I mention this because it seems an important series…the only one where there are no monsters for the riders to fight.

This is not true. There are monsters in Ryuki that the Riders do fight. The battles with monsters just aren’t too important to the overall storyline, just an excuse to get more action into individual episodes. What drives the plot is the battle between the 13 Riders.

Ryuki is notable for popularizing Rider vs. Rider stuff, which hadn’t really been seen in the franchise since Kamen Rider Black in the 80’s. While the three Agito Riders are in conflict with each other, they very rarely have battles since… well, with only three of them, it would get repetitive pretty damn quick.

Why in heck is THIS one getting officially translated for US?

Toys, mainly. Ryuki was the show that made it clear that upping the total number of Riders in a series allowed for much more extensive merchandising, and an extensive toy line is pretty much a necessity these days to support a boys’ action show. I believe the Dragon Knight toys are supposed to be stores before the end of the summer.

1840

I am so completely lost by this discussion it’s amazing.