Onto volume 3 of 12 from AnimEigo for Kimagure Orange Road. This entry features episodes 9 - 12 from the 1987 television show. As with the prior two releases, the quality here is lacking. The video tracks are a miss, while the good audio isn't able to raise the overall value here, especially given the virtual lack of extras.
| Video: |
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One step forward... one step back? Compared to the earlier two volumes, the video tracks here have some areas of improvement. As before it still uses the same isolated intro, which looks better than the main episodes. As for those episodes, the colors here are a bit better. None of them are super washed out and overly bright. Most of them do have that blue tint to the color spectrum, although 11 looks the best of the lot here. None of them are vibrant in the color department, though, and could best be described as a bit muted. As before, there is notable compression applied to the video source. That leads to soft details, which masks some pixilation although it's still apparent. Motion also sometimes looks iffy, especially for slow-motion sequences or slow pans, which was likely the result of a low amount of keyframe intervals being set as part of the compression.
What separates this volume from the prior two is the source damage, though. While it doesn't have the flicker at the top of the screen, the frame is very unstable. This is especially true for episode 9, where it's constant through out the episode and is pretty distracting. For the others it's less consistent, but I do want to stress how bad it is for episode 9. That aside, there are some damaged transitions, such as around the four minute mark in episode 10 or the eighteen minute mark in episode 11, but these aren't overly noticeable.
Kimagure Orange Road is presented in its original
aspect ratio of 1.33:1.
| Audio: |
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The audio presentation on these DVDs remain the bright spot. Each episode has a single audio track, the original Japanese presentation in two channel stereo. These audio tracks could best be described as clean, having good clarity in dialogue and without notable discrepancies. There isn't anything particularly flashy about the presentation, such as a lack of speaker distinction, but that's more a result of the original show than the presentation here.
Each audio track can be accompanied by removable English subtitles with two options present. One is for limited translations while the other will translate all speech and text.
| Extras: |
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For extras, there isn't much to talk about. The disc sports a very ugly menu, which is preceded by a short segment from the show's intro. From the menu one can pick an episode, which causes the on screen text to change to state which episode it is, but is very no frills. Speaking of, the only selectable chapter breaks is to pick which episode to watch, which isn't too bad since each episode is only about 22 minutes. Beyond that, the DVD does have extended English credits. It's an odd extra, but essentially the show's outro plays while subtitled credits are overlaid on the entire screen.
| Overview: |
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Bottom
line, I'm reviewing these DVDs in order and so far they have been pretty consistently subpar. I'd be shocked if that changes in later volumes. Still if one is a huge fan of the show and is outside Japan this is the main way to get them on DVD. In general, though, one would be a lot better off going for the Blu-ray release by Discotek.
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