It only took 20 years! The original season of Precure is available subbed in English in blu-ray for the first time, over at nyaa.si, thanks to the true hero [DmonHiro]. He's released many great series in blu-ray but this might be his finest contribution to the community yet.
Honoka is my waifu and for the first time in my life I get to see her in HD, the way she was really meant to look. It put a goofy smile on my face watching every second of the classic material.
Unfortunately Max Heart and Splash Star can still only be found in standard definition. Maybe someday DmonHiro will handle those too. If so I could also see my other waifu Mai in HD for the first time. (though to be fair Nagisa, Honoka, Saki and Mai have been shown in HD Precure movies, but all their most memorable scenes, the emotional ones, the ones you want to see in as good a form as possible, aren't in the movies)
It is with great trepidation I await Otona Precure coming out this fall, which hosts three of my waifus -- Mai, Urara and Nozomi. If I don't like the sequel I can just ignore it as filler, but with three waifus to work with it has so much potential. It could be a huge windfall or a huge disappointment, but I just don't know which until October.
College football season began in earnest today with a nice close Minnesota vs. Nebraska match. The NFL doesn't start until next week. There is absolutely nothing happening this September so I wish football would hurry up and fill in the gaping void.
I could always play more FF XVI but it isn't fun. I can't really explain it, there's nothing I hate about the game, but there's nothing likable about it either. It's hard to do something that isn't fun for hundreds of hours.
Out of my top ten anime, nine are receiving additional content at some point in the future. Only Clannad is done, and actually they could make more Clannad if they wanted to adapt Tomoyo After Story. (clearly they don't wish to.) You would think this is a pretty healthy state for the anime industry. But then you look at the details and it's not so rosy. The new Naruto anime is all filler, the same for the new Code Geass anime, which was announced ages ago but is clearly vaporware at this point. There hasn't been any good new Precure in years. The manga-ka behind Fate/Kaleid Liner is taking centuries to finish up his work, which means the anime can't proceed further either for lack of material, despite wanting to.
It's the same for SAO. There hasn't been a new SAO or SAO Progressive novel released in Japan all year. These are short novels so it should be easy to write at least one if he had the mind to. (The Full Dive anniversary event was super cool, reminding me why SAO is #3 in my rankings). Furthermore, his novels are structured such that a lot of the content is already known. He set up various problems for his characters, various mysteries, which he already knows the answers to (no author would be foolish enough to create dangers and mysteries to which there is no known solution). Since he already knows what is going to happen next, why doesn't he just write it down already so we can read it? It's all there inside his head, in his notes, in his outlines. So just write it down!
I could see an author suffering from writer's block if he's already solved all the hero's problems and the hero is currently living happily ever after. I cannot forgive an author with writer's block in the middle of a cliffhanger. Because the author is taking too long, the anime can't proceed, so it's stuck releasing original movies and Gun Gale Alternative spinoffs and the like, when what we really want to watch is the new arc, Unital Ring.
One Piece is mostly filler and thus unwatchable. This isn't the fault of the animators, but the manga-ka, who is only releasing a couple chapters a month. The anime has to crawl as slowly as the manga because it's adapting the manga, and there's no way to do that except to drag every scene out. There's a solution to this problem and that's watching One Pace instead of One Piece, but One Pace is ridiculously slow at releasing new episodes. One Pace has covered up to chapter 957 of the manga, while the manga is already at chapter 1091. The One Piece anime currently covers up to chapter 1057. So One Pace is 100 chapters behind One Piece, almost a tenth of the entire series could be adapted but for some reason isn't being adapted. Maybe One Pace is worried about getting sued if it releases edited episodes too close to when One Piece releases content, so they're holding back. Or maybe they're waiting for the blu-ray of the series to work with, or the English dub of the show to catch up, so their release can be dual-audio. It seems they're super-perfectionists over there, because they're constantly releasing new versions of old content instead of getting on with actual new content which would have much higher marginal return. Whatever the reason it's ruining the watching experience to release at such a low trickle like this.
Fairy Tail 100 Years Quest has been announced, but there's been no news on when it intends to actually start airing, so it's basically vaporware.
That leaves only Bleach and Kimetsu no Yaiba as top ten series receiving meaningful new content in 2024. But it's possible both of these series only intend to release 12 episodes or so of new content next year. Compare that to the golden age of anime when Pretty Cure, Fairy Tail, Bleach, Naruto and One Piece would release new episodes of great anime every week all year round. 12 episodes of Bleach just isn't the same as 48 episodes.
Who knows, maybe we'll be lucky and Bleach will have 24 episodes of content in 2024. I doubt it but there's always hope. But Kimetsu never releases more than 12 episodes of content per year. UFOtable likes to get things artistically supreme so this content can only be made painstakingly.
So of my top ten anime, Bleach figures to be half the new great content actually coming out in 2024. And this will be the last time Bleach can save us, because there isn't much of the manga left to adapt. So once the one bright note we have left, Bleach, is gone, what on Earth is going to happen in 2025?
Our only hope is that Fairy Tail gets an actual release date and Pretty Cure returns to its golden age of quality with its upcoming seasons, but it's hard to believe after so many disappointments in a row. It's like hoping Russia wins the war when all it does is lose ground.
No comments:
Post a Comment