by Rayearth on 12th of November, 2000
Contents
It contains 5 DVDs in 5 cases, each with different cover art and descriptions of contents on the back. They cover all of season 1 (episode 1 to 20) of the TV series, the extras on the DVD contain:
- Art Gallery
- Alternative Auditions
- Out-takes/Bloopers
- Character Profiles
- Roll Call/Cast List
- Interviews with Cast/Creators (English Cast)
- Magical Spell Index
- Openings and Endings (including Omake Endings)
- Alternative Versions of Songs (English version of theme songs)
- Interactive Menus
- Scene Access
- English Language Dialogue
- Japanese Language Dialogue
- English Subtitles
|
|
Review
To put it simply, it's a great Anime placed in a bad DVD. The DVD menus look dull and are sometimes even non-responsive. Even at the standards of when it was released (July 2000), it would be marked as a poorly made DVD. If you use a computer to play the DVD, you'd notice you cannot use the search bar to scroll through the movie, you'll have to rely on the Scene Access, which at least allows you to go into the middle of an episode (where the commericals are).
The extras aren't pretty interesting either. The character profiles won't be anything new to anybody who's seen the series already, the spell list might be interesting, but again, it's nothing new. The Art Gallery contains of randomly selected cells and art, some you'll be able to find on the net. The interviews were a total miss. The audio recordings were made so poorly that you can hardly hear what they were saying, and considering the dub wasn't that superb, it won't be long before you give up trying to hear out the English cast. The Omake was the "Guess who it will be this time?" thing, and there's only one for each DVD, meaning you don't know which episode they came from.
The English track was done in surround sound, while the Japanese one was just in Stereo, but since I don't have a monster sound system, it's good enough for me. The picture is clear and I don't remember seeing any flickers. Some people were bothered by the way they didn't keep some of the Japanese words (such as Mashin being dubbed to "Rune God"), but that didn't bother me, they also took out the whole "chan" and "san" business from the subtitles.
Verdict
Personally, I was not impressed by this DVD, but then again, if you want to watch MKR in high quality while also understanding what they're saying, this is your only choice.
