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Rurouni Kenshin Wandering Samurai - Premium BoxRating:
Release Date: 18 November, 2003 Retail Price: $139.95 OUR Price: $125.99 You SAVE: $13.96! |
Rurouni Kenshin Wandering Samurai - Premium Box Reviews
Greatest Animated Series Ever, Box set not so much
It is an uncontestable fact that Rurouni Kenshin is a great, great series; and I will say up front that this box set is worth buying despite its faults. The show has everything; silly comedy, political intrigue, real, complex emotion; fascinating character development and conflicting purposes; and of course crazy-beautiful over the top, landscape-destroying, bouncing-off-the-ceiling swordfights.
But: there were several issues with the box set that buyers should know.
One: the DVD encoding quality is not great; it doesn't get in the way too often, but you can see it.
I preface Problem Two by saying that it is not worth buying this OR ANY ANIME (only exceptions being Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Kiki's Delivery Service) if you are only going to watch the dubbed version. The American voice actors are all completely atrocious; please disregard anything you have heard to the contrary, and imagine a bad porno movie with no sex. The American voice actors have apparently never heard of Japan, or listened to the Japanese dialogue they are dubbing over; the DVD's "outtakes" consist of the voice actors demonstrating their inability to pronounce japanese words, and these outtakes are not much worse than the takes that made it into the presentation. Regardless, none of the characters in Rurouni Kenshin can be separated from their original voice actors except for an occasional generic villian; the show makes no sense when Kenshin is played by a gravelly-voiced caucasian punk trying to sound badass and not succeeding. I'm sure Richard Hayworth has his talents, but he has no business trying to be Himura Kenshin when he can't pronounce his own name.
On to Problem 2: Only 95% of the dialogue is translated into subtitles. This is irritating. Someone will be saying something and you read the line underneath and understand. Then they will follow with a setence that inexplicably lacks a subtitle. This seems to happen at least once almost every episode. Definitely not worth switching to English for. But sometimes you can just tell that what that guy just said was pretty important.
Problem 3: Partly my fault for not researching a little better, but this box set cuts off before the end of the major story arc, the Kyoto Arc (Shishio). It stops after Sanosuke fights with Anji in Shishio's fortress, which those who know the series know is a painful place to have to stop.
Problem 4: If you buy from a customer "used and new" because you don't have 145$ to burn, expect to get the bootlegged version (like I did). Bootlegged anime is very common and the quality is still good; I hear it is somehow legal in Hong Kong and Korea where this happens, but whatever, lower prices, woohoo! This is the version shown in the "customer photos" above; it has all the episodes, but not all of the extras that the legitimate version has. It has a sort of crappy photo gallery/character bios feature (only Aoshi and Megumi have bios and the gallery is really pathetic) and the aforementioned outtakes: essentially nothing worth checking out. No character greetings, no attack list and no liner notes. To me, that's worth the difference of 80$, though.
And one last thing: the second half of the first disk and the first few episodes of the second disk are filler episodes in the series. While hardcore fans might make themselves endure these, they are not canon, they are not in the manga, and they are really terrible. The animation in these is the worst you will see in the series and you will skip them if you value your time. :) Knowing the quality of the series overall makes it painful for a fan of "good Kenshin" to watch Kenshin foiling a band of train robbers on horseback, or teaming up with circus sideshow actors.
All that said, the Kenshin box set is still 5 stars because the quality of the show--much like _true love_--conquers all.
Kenshin
It's ok, great quality (video), poor quality in the box, printing not even plastic all is cardboard (shame, I simply expected more for the price). 3 stars 'cause of the quality of the playing/viewing only.
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