This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.
Better script than Underwater, but the karaoke is far worse. I hope my bias against Commie doesn’t rear its ugly head.
Release format: MKV (364 MB, 10-bit)
Japanesiness: No honorifics.
Group website: http://commiesubs.com/
8thsin’s translation critique: http://8ths.in/winter-2011-anime-subtitle-comparison/#Rinne
Ji-hi’s screenshot comparisons: http://www.ji-hi.net/wi11/lagrange/
Karaoke.
Opening. Straight from the Middle School Guidebook to Shitty Karaoke, it’s Commie’s entry in the rainbow category. They’ve used this before, but never used it well and this time is no exception.
Insert. They deserve credit for putting it in italics, right?
Ending. Because who needs to think about karaoke when you can just toss a rainbow on a random font? Give yourself a hand, Commie Karaoke Guy. Now take that hand and choke yourself to death. You deserve it.
Of course, the truth is that I’m only saying this because I hate Commie. I hate them so much that I designed the stroma of the human iris to specifically hate on karaoke like this.
I’m sorry, Commie. That was mean of me to do and I apologize. In the future, I will make sure to not factor in quality when rendering my judgment. Hopefully this will allow you to bask in those glorious Dark_Sage recommendations (which I must note you totally don’t care about all because that would lend validity to any negative feedback I may give), without any of the bias attached.
Typesetting.
You guys only had to typeset one sign apart from the episode titles. Is that really so hard to do? But perhaps asking that is also biased against your group. I apologize. Once again, I have forced your hand. I intentionally created articles on my site for your typesetter to read instead of doing his/her fucking job. Because of this, they didn’t have enough time before the release to typeset that scene. My cruelty knows no bounds, Commie. Once again, I must humbly apologize.
Script.
As part of my conspiracy against Commie’s editors, I decided to invent a rule against shitty, punctuation-lacking sentences. Under my newly imposed law, they have to add a comma to the first line so it properly links to the second. Because I’m a terrible, biased man, I didn’t let Commie know about this change to the English language until after they released this episode.
Continuing with my disgusting bias, I had “self-select” stricken from the Holy Tomes of English. In Bizarro Biased World, “self-select” is no longer a valid word and should instead be replaced with something like “manual”. “manual” indicates that the pilot put the Vox into its launch mode (against the orders of the AI), which is biased against its warrior mode. For that, I am terribly sorry.
Oh god, is my bias showing? I hope not, because that would be embarrassing. Okay, I admit it! You caught me! My bias against sentences which have capital letters after commas can’t be hidden anymore. What I would have liked to see would be:
“When the voice that moves your heart reaches you,
put on your sweats and get ready!”
However, that would be biased against Commie’s fantastic editing style of “Fuck it, a comma is pretty much a period anyway.”
I hope that if I say something like “‘joint form’ should be ‘joint-form'” that Commie won’t realize I’m clearly just biased against them and that line is totally fine as-is.
Oh fuck, I knew it. Here, I’m biased against Commie’s timers. How dare I? How fucking dare I? I’m disgusted with myself for expecting this to be readable in the time allotted and maybe rephrased as “No other enemy units detected.”
Even daring to hope for these lines to have any semblance of flow would be indicative of my deep, unnatural bias against Commie.
Bias levels: High
Watchability: Watchable.
Overall grade: B-
I did not give Commie this grade because they deserve it, but because I’m jealous of them. In fact, they deserve an A+ here for their perfect work, but I’m withholding it because, again, I’m biased.
I’m going to recommend Commie for Lagrange over Underwater’s release for slightly better scripts (while noting that the karaoke is far worse) because I’m biased against Commie, but this is a trick to make it seem like I’m not (all part of my dastardly scheme to ruin the reputation of their staff and group). I will also mention one last time the QUALITY of the karaoke, because I’m biased against people who don’t care about karaoke at all, such as Commie’s staff.
A+++ review would read again.
You’re pretty mad, bro.
Also there’s nowhere to put that sign and it’s not important. Stop being retarded.
>You’re pretty biased, bro.
I know. Sorry.
If the typesetter of this show couldn’t do that sign, the why didn’t you do it, herkz? Aren’t you the God of Typesetting? It shouldn’t be that hard for an eminence like you. What’s more, you should strive for perfection by typesetting /everything/ even if it’s not important. Please don’t let us down.
/me not being sarcastic.
Actually I did typeset this episode and I didn’t do it because it wasn’t TLed in the script and I didn’t watch the episode. Nice try, though!
Dammit!
Good excuse. A fansubber who doesn’t bother to watch that which sheit (he/she/it) subs.
“Also there’s nowhere to put that sign and it’s not important.”
Ignoring the “importance” of the sign, couldn’t you have at least used your imagination a little (or do you lack such) to insert an additional sign? There is more then plenty enough space to add typeset translation into this scene.
Nice try, though!
I’s not important, there’s nowhere to put it and clearly Underwater thought so as well because they didn’t typeset it either. As hilarious as your raging hate-boner for Commie is, you’re really just making yourself look like the idiot here.
I got a good laugh out of this, well played.
I haven’t watched this show though, is it any good?
The plot’s shit, but it’s nice to have the main character of a mech anime be a female who doesn’t burst into tears every second in an emotionally-charged, pity-me moment. Basically, she’s the exact opposite of Shinji Ikari, and the show’s better for it. There are some supporting characters that are okay, but really it’s all about the main character — a plucky young female with a strong desire to help others.
There’s not much going on this season, so if you’re in the mood for laid-back show that doesn’t break conventions, but is still genuinely enjoyable to watch, go for it.
Goddamn, I sound like a shitty advert on the back of a cereal box.
tl;dr: Yes, watch it.
I ended up watching episode 5 because I was filling in for the usual editor. It seems alright, I’ll have to check the rest out when I get a chance.
Editing without having proper contextual understanding of the series prior to date. You sound like a pro.
I did actually read the scripts for all four prior episodes as well as confirming the important consistency points in the staff channel beforehand, I love how mad you are about it though.
Ｎｅｖｅｒ ｃｈａｎｇｅ．
＞ＫＫＲａｉｓ
fags.
Conspiracy.
Can you review Commie’s Black Rock Shooter next!!
Beautiful review. I choose Underwater because I like my karaoke readable. With romaji. Especially when opening and ending are so good.
Madoka = the best character of this season. Maru~!
>Recommending one troll subgroup over other, slightly less trollish group that has the best encoder known the man
And if you’ll notice, their overall grades are extremely similar. I expect my readers are smart enough to actually read the reviews instead of skipping down to the final score and treating it like the WORD OF GOD. It’s not, and never can be, a proper substitute for actual thought and personal decision making.
Underwater’s script errors were way more severe than Commie’s. There were basically random words thrown into sentences, which is very fucking annoying. Commie’s errors were relatively minor in comparison. Oh no, a missing comma! Is it wrong? Yes, and I certainly take groups to task for fucking up punctuation. But is it as wrong as using the wrong word in a sentence? No.
When it comes to the final score, I prioritize script over everything. Other factors do contribute (and the karaoke definitely made Commie take a hit), but I tend toward recommending the group with the best script. It’s unfortunate that Underwater couldn’t live up to your praise, or you’d be sitting here going “Hah, I knew Underwater was best.”
In the end, I found Commie to have the best release. But it’s a personal decision which group to go with, so don’t get too mad (even I don’t follow my recommendations 100%). I’m sure your choice will be suitable to your needs.
I can feel your butthurt all the way over here, Seiji-kun.
Dark_Sage, you should make a list of winter 2012 fansub reviews that you still have left to do this season. I’m interested in seeing what remains.
Made it earlier this morning.
http://www.crymore.net/review_queue-2/
That Review_Queue page had been removed for so long that I did not think about looking for it lol.
Commie’s official response to this review can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/LKAcn.png
Here’s a comparison of Viz/Underwater/Commie for ep2 & ep3 on the lines you highlighted in the individual reviews: http://privatepaste.com/9cc3433a7b
Also, the “lull” in our ep2 was completely intentional.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lull&tbs=dfn:1
See the second definition. She lulled her into piloting the Vox -> She caused her to feel deceptively secure or confident about piloting the Vox (by pretending to be her comrade). Counting that out, all three versions have about the same amount of derps, albeit in different places. Anyway, this certainly will result in us paying more attention to things in the future (starting from ep5 which we just released)…
Also, the sign that wasn’t typeset in our ep2 would have taken literally hours of work to do, and it would have just been a single name over and over again. I decided to skip it due to the tremendous effort involved and because the meaning of it can be inferred perfectly from the dialogue, provided that the person watching has ever used a phone in their life.
As for typesetting in general, ep4 was really the first one to involve a decent amount of signs, and the difference in typesetting amount and quality really shows in it. Link related:
http://blisswater.info/comparison/lagrange/
No, they look about the same quality. The difference seems to be is you wasted 8th’s time and had him translate a bunch of pointless signs.
Sign 1 was translated in the Viz subs, and the dialogue line in shot 2 is a direct reaction to it. Not typesetting this was just bad and lazy.
Sign 2 was not originally translated in Viz subs. Sure, call it “pointless”, but it was pretty clearly onscreen for a while, so having it typeset is still better than not having it typeset.
Sign 3 has bad typesetting on Commie’s part since the sign text gets covered with dialogue for the majority of the sign’s duration. You’d have to pause the video during the few frames of no overlapping at the beginning to read it properly. The sign movement was also handed worse.
Sign 4 was not originally translated in Viz subs, but is pretty clearly something meant for the viewers to see, what with it standing out from the rest of the board by not being blurred out.
In shot 5, the “Corn” wasn’t originally translated, but the banner was. I can understand leaving it out since this scene is instantly followed by the next shot, but…
Sign 6 really looks “about the same quality” to you? Really? This looks plain and simply terrible. Arial with improperly matched colors and terrible placement, oh boy.
Sign 7 is pretty much the only one where I could say that they’re “about the same quality”, though I’m not so hot about Commie’s font choice here.
All in all the typesetting is most certainly not “about the same quality” overall – it’s pretty shameful that you go all defensive about typesetting the moment it’s about your own group. And worse of all, going about typesetting (even if only some of it) being “pointless” really makes you look like a certain other fansubber who is (in)famous for claiming how “typesetting doesn’t matter”…
Beyond that there’s also the fact that Commie’s video quality looks terrible compared to Underwater’s due to the lack of proper filtering (though admittedly it’s not a script-related thing).
RE: Comparisons.
I’ll try and take into account these were speedsubs and I also have no idea who typeset this for commie.
Sign 1.
Commie > not typeset, plain lazy.
Underwater > typeset, and other than a little bit of blur which would have smoothed the aliasing, looks fine.
Sign 2.
Commie > again lazy.
Underwater > Effort applied, the full school name (鴨川処女高等学校 / Kamogawa Girls’ High School) sign appeared in episode 1 (I checked with Daiz) and also is translated on the no trespassing sign, so that’s acceptable.
Sign 3.
Commie > I’m not a fan of eastern name order for signs but w/e. Looks like it’s probably using Arial, but since it’s pretty much your typical run of the mill Gothic typeface for the whole sign, it gets the job done. Text placement at the bottom underlapping the dialogue when there is plenty of room to place it either above or below the respective kanji, seriously? Take these things into consideration if possible.
Underwater > Font choice works. Placement is good as the text at the top is readable. Could be aligned a little better, but w/e it’s readable and that’s the key here.
Sign 4.
Commie > we don’t care about typesetting if it’s not in a streams script and we will be mad if you typeset it and we don’t.
Underwater > Did the right thing here. It’s not a case of whether it’s important or not, it’s a case of that the whole sign besides the heading is out of focus. So the heading being in focus, which is what the animators intended for the viewers to read.
Sign 5.
Commie > Failure at consistency.
Underwater > Points for consistency. The placement of corn could have been handled differently, but I can see the reason for doing so. My approach would have made it less readable as a trade off for neatness, they traded off some neatness for readability.
Sign 6.
Commie > Arial works. But the text going off the side of the banner? Sure lets just run the text off into the sky when it clearly could have been fit properly instead of using those pointless spaces. Colours are so far off I don’t even know where to begin.
Underwater > This is how you typeset a banner, by keeping the text ON the banner, especially when it’s this wide. Colour isn’t perfect, but at least it matches the text where the sun glare isn’t a factor. Gradients are effort I know, so I won’t complain.
Sign 7.
Commie > Font choice: What are you thinking? Typesetting is only about creativity when there is a need to be creative, but this is just bad choice. It’s a run of the mill Maru Gothic (and even if you choose to use a latin font there are plenty that will be a near match), use your eyes and learn your fonts. Rotation is passable.
Underwater > Font choice: not 100% but the font used is a near match for the latin glyphs. Rotation follows the perspective of the phone screen much better.
End result is the job done by Underwater is miles better overall, and the typesetters experience shows. Sure it could have been better, but for a speedsub it’s good enough.
Technically no signs are important, hell neither is dialogue, if you are fluent. But for an English sub, while some signs may be seen as more important than others, if time permits typesetting the less important ones is still good form. And if you typeset half a screen, you might as well finish off typesetting the rest, important or not.
That’s a damn good typeset review.
Do you typeset for some group?
Apparently Sign 6 didn’t run off the banner on the typesetter’s computer, but because there are a ton of different versions of Arial floating around… Basically, it’s a case for why you should never use Arial.
I could have sworn the last time I looked at the Sign 7 comparison that Underwater’s actually had incorrect rotation, but now they look the same. Odd.
@Nekumata
Yes, I typeset for UTW but I am not doing much ts’ing this season other than a few things I’ve done helping out with Amagami SS+.
http://www.crymore.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Commie-Rinne-no-Lagrange-03-0239204F.mkv_snapshot_23.33_2012.02.05_03.17.04.jpg
Is it really that hard to center an episode title to the moon runes? wwwwww