All right, Tsuki up now.

Release format: MKV (352 MB, 8-bit)

Japanesiness: Honorifics.

English style: American English.

Group website: http://tsuki-subs.info/ (FYI guys, mentioning the number of hits you get on each article is a surefire way to make yourself look small-time unless you’re hitting at least 1000 per post. No one sees “50 hits” and thinks “Wow, this is a popular group. I should get their release because everybody likes them.”)

Encoding details: http://pastebin.com/xK6GQpFA

Note: May include commentary on other groups. I switched between releases pretty frequently while reviewing them.

8thsin’s translation critique: N/A

Ji-hi’s screenshot comparisons: N/A

 

Visual Quality

Karaoke.

 

Opening. I liked this more than I should have. The whole thing screams “old subs” to me, and this is an old show. My main problem is that it’s a bit… bouncy. I don’t mind the syllable bouncing when it’s sung, but having every letter bounce for the entirety of the opening is… annoying. The whole thing sets up a fun pace for the OP, but the bounciness can really get to ya.

 

Ending. The colors and positioning are fine. The only problem is that the Japanese is unreadable due to that fucking shine effect. Goddamn, it’s literally impossible to tell what syllable the singer is on because it’s all obfuscated by Tsuki’s need to be kawaii no desu. Also, the transition into each line is incredibly stupid. It pops up like you’re flipping up a note card. No thanks.

 

Typesetting.

Suitable, except for their inability to typeset the title.

 

Other.

N/a.

 

Script Quality

Karaoke.

Not nearly as good as SFW’s/Underwater’s. You have terrible lines like

“Like bitter sand bitten with the back teeth”

I mean, what the fuck? Try to make sense, please.

I wouldn’t mind “Wow wow wow, no matter where tomorrow’s door goes” if they used “Whoa” instead of “Wow”, because that would rhyme. Instead, it just looks bad. More fun with busted English comes with

“I will not avert again from those eyes that gaze far”. lol

If you don’t pay attention to the English translation of karaoke you’ll be fine though.

 

Script.

 

Trials don’t just “happen”. These things aren’t random. Better word choice is needed.

“These trials, which have been put into place many times since the creation of the Earth,”

I prefer “formed” over “born” here. A birth implies parents of some sort, and based on the phrasing in the previous line, it seems that the sand seas were not formed by something, but rather by the lack of something (namely, water).

I went over why this should be fixed in the previous review, but let me just go over it again. Translation is more than just a 1:1 switching of Japanese words into their English counterparts. You have to understand intent and how the translation fits into the new language. I’m simplifying all this, but the point is that you can’t just bring out your Japanese dictionary, claim “nani = what” and then just paste that in for every “nani” you see.

Native speakers can tell when something’s off and having someone repeat “what” four times in a row is not natural discourse. When someone’s confused, you expect more variable word choice. That’s why I’m disappointed with this translation by Tsuki.

Tsuki handled this right when they turned “Masaka… masaka!” into “No way… it can’t be!” but this line wasn’t handled properly. That’s not to say repetition is bad, though. Take a look at this line:

See, this is totally fine because you would expect a pissed off guy to just keep repeating “Damn it!”. This is natural, so I don’t have a single problem with it.

Good call on the mermaid line.

 

These two lines are problematic because they take Japanese lines with multiple lines and pare them down… a lot. What results is lines that don’t really fit with the voices… at all. The Japanese line in the second screenshot is 8 syllables, compared with… 2 in the English one? No. Fuck that.

“Get outta my way!”

“You’re hurt, aren’t you?”

These both make the lines read better because you read them at the pace the production company set instead of reading the line and waiting for the next one to come. Yes, this is important and the problem came up other times in the show too.

Adding stutters where they don’t exist… Way to go, guys. Then at times where there are stutters, they’re noticeably not reflected in the subs.

To you, this may not matter, but to me, this is like fat people fucking. BRB, throwing up.

“Sheesh” doesn’t really combo well with “Doc”. Reason being, “sheesh” is like the Catholic Church’s version of slang. It’s very… lame. You don’t drop lame shit alongside an abbreviation like “Doc”. ‘specially not for a desert-bred female.

“Come on, Doc.”

If you’re gonna quote the guy, maybe you should use, y’know, quotation marks.

“My brother used to say this a lot:”

“‘If a man sees somebody who needs help, he should help them.'”

If all you call someone is “the Captain” then it’s legit to have “captain” capitalized. However, this is a military dude asking the captain of a ship if she’s the captain of that ship. You don’t need to capitalize it. It’s like asking someone at Taco Bell “Are you the gourmet chef of this residence?” You shouldn’t be capitalizing that. But you should be capitalizing on Taco Bell’s delicious food and ghetto-poor prices. Goddamn, they should really get a delivery service. I’m too lazy to go there.

You don’t need to capitalize Boundary here. LS just means “large-scale”; it’s nothing special.

 

Timing Review

Listing on Entire Changes: http://pastebin.com/5F7PXU3R

Scene Bleeds: 1x 3 Frame Bleed [1]

Key-frame Snap Errors: 1 Major error.

Linking Errors: 9 Errors total; 6 major, 2 preferential line breaks, 1 minor.

Extended Lead-out: 2 Extended Lead-outs.

Total Errors: 13

Overall Grade: 3/5

I felt this was done much much better than Underwater as it felt like I watched 1 person time the entire show. Timing didn’t feel all over the place and was fairly consistent. Aside from the 1 3 Frame bleed, it was fairly well done. Tsuki had similar linking errors as Underwater, and the same line break errors as well. There just is one issue I had with the overall feel of it. Lead-ins were too short, and more often than not, lead-outs were excessively long. While I only noted the excessively long lead-outs, it just felt really awkward sometimes to see the lines linger on so long (especially when there were NO scene changes nearby). You can cut them a lot shorter than 400-ms when you’re not snapping to a key-frame. Overall, timing wise, Tsuki did a better job than Underwater. They snapped to pretty much all the key-frame errors I found in Underwater’s script. However, if you care about the script quality, as pointed out by D_S already, Underwater’s script is miles better. If Underwater got Tsuki’s timer to do the job, it’d be a good overall mix I’d say.

Results.

Watchability: Watchable.

Timing Grade: 3/5

Visual grade: B-

Script grade: C

Overall grade(timing results not factored in): C+

If you’re going to rip Crunchyroll’s scripts, at least put some effort into it. I can’t recommend these subs with their poor phrasing and simple errors over Underwater’s release.