Fansub Review: [Anxious-Domo] Jormungand (Episode 01)

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This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.

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More Jormungand. gg’s wasn’t great, but I’d rather watch their release. :/

Release format: MKV (871 MB, 10-bit) <- No, I’m not joking.

Japanesiness: Honorifics and Mr./Ms. Don’t ask why. I’m not so sure myself.

English style: American English.

Group website: http://anxious-he.com/ http://ahodomo.net/ 

Encoding details: http://pastebin.com/F5yyeBB6

8thsin’s translation critique: http://8ths.in/spring-2012-fansub-comparison-reviews#Jormungand

Ji-hi’s screenshot comparisons: N/A

 

Table of Contents

Visual Quality

Script Quality

Timing

Results

Visual Quality

Karaoke.

 

Opening. Not really good. It matches the credits, I guess, but I found myself wishing for something… better.

Ending. It was all right. I did like the fade at the end.

 

Typesetting.

The only sign, but I liked what I saw.

 

Other.

900 MB and it’s still grainier than your mother’s vagina.

Script Quality

Karaoke.

The last moments of what? Your life? This is way too fucking vague to mean anything at all.

A-D: On this wingless back of mine that I want to protect, I carried you

gg: I want to protect you even if there are no wings on my back

I think you can tell which of those makes more sense.

I… can’t say I really understood the ED with this script. Where gg had “This world, filled with contradictions reminds me of a bead of garnet”, A-D had “This tower of contradictions that impregnates this world. reminds me of a garnet bead.”

I don’t understand A-D’s fetish for ending every line in a period. A comma is sensible, but a period? What? And then there’s the whole line comparison. gg’s makes sense because the world is round, and the contradictions in this world make it resemble a garnet bead. A-D’s gives us that a tower of contradictions fucked the world and… it reminds the singer of a garnet bead? I’m calling bullshit on that one.

Main Script.

…

I devoured the five lands

I swallowed the three seas

But I could not reach the sky

In this body with no wings

No arms and no legs

I am the world serpent

I am Jormungand

That’s the “eh” translation from the official manga. You could spice it up a bit to make it cooler — like gg did — but nowhere in that poem does it state Jormungand is living in the sea. A simple google search would have revealed this to you. That you didn’t even bother checking to see what the consensus was for this poem makes it clear I should have 0 faith in the rest of this release.

What
the
fuck?

No, really. Why would you ever capitalize “child soldier”? You can’t just fucking randomly capitalize words whenever you fucking feel like it.

Jesus fuck, what else do you guys have in store for me?

You don’t run from a comma onto a new sentence. This is grade school grammar, guys.

Whilst? Really? I’m glad you guys have such a strong vocabulary, but you can’t just shoehorn that shit into whatever line you want. “Whilst” contains a meaning and tone that is not at all suited to its placement in this part of the show. Choose your words more carefully, kthx.

In modern-day English, this phrase would be “Do you also hate talking?” because it sounds like shit right now.

…

Don’t you know any synonyms for “yet” or ways to rephrase it? It’s bad enough that you use it in the same context in each sentence. That you actually tossed the sentences on top of each other and thought it’d work just boggles my mind.

She finishes her sentence here, and you ended it with a comma… Wow,

Though pop culture references usually suck, I accept this line.

You can’t just throw generic shit around like “our country’s air strike command” and expect people to buy into it because it sounds all “technical” and “militaristic”. This makes no fucking sense.

Like this line, a lot of the phrasing in this release was pretty cool. It’s a damn shame they fucked up so much that I have to focus on the mistakes.

I’m not sure what this means. I won’t count it as an error since I can’t find any evidence that it’s wrong, but I strongly suspect that “getting scissored” is not an actual thing (well, it’s a sex act, but let’s not go there).

“You can bet on it.”

I have no fucking clue why these fucking retards added “even”.

Not “want to”. have to. Yes, there is a big difference.

You goddamn fucktards.

then -> than

“Stay here and help me” implies that she will be there too, trying to gather information. But she leaves, so that’s not exactly true.

She goes on to list what he’s done. You know what precedes lists? A colon, you dumbfucks.

This is basically what you’ve done:

“To us who use these murderous weapons of steel, deals are but a gamble of lives.”

Assuming the TL is correct there, there’s no need to have “gambling game” in the line. It makes it needlessly wordy and kills the effect.

 

Timing Review

Character limits have been reached. Timing review in another thread if desired.

Results.

Watchability: Watchable.

Timing: 

Presentation: B-

Script: D-

Overall grade: D

gg’s release is better.

And speaking as an average viewer, even though A-D’s is 900 MB, I did not find enough value in the encode to justify a release double the size of an ordinary episode.

51 thoughts on “Fansub Review: [Anxious-Domo] Jormungand (Episode 01)”

  1. “Even though A-D’s is 900 MB, there is still a lot of grain.”

    I think that was actually the point. You need a ton of bitrate to bring that kind of grain across without just smoothing it out most of the time.

    Whether you actually want to do this is another matter, of course.

    Reply

    • Mm, could you tell me what’s so much better about their encode then? I was under the impression that the 900 MB was to improve the visuals by lessening the grain to a noticeable degree. As a regular viewer, when it came to the encode I didn’t see enough value in theirs to justify 500 more MB for the improved visual quality.

      Reply

      • I can’t really tell you much since I’m not an encoder myself, but my understanding is that the anime itself basically has a grain filter over the whole thing and the only way to bring that across is to use a ton of bitrate.

        Reply

      • From the torrent description:

        “It’s huge! WTF?! Since all you’re going to do in the comments is complain about the filesize I will address that now. This show has a constant layer of moving grain on top of being about people who blow things /other people up non stop at night. Any group who manages filesizes much smaller than this did so by sacrificing substantial amounts of detail and will look like shit, see here. Next week we may switch to using ordered chapters, which would save roughly 200mb per episode. ”

        (The ‘here’ comparison from the post: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/118609)

        Reply

    • Yeah, any DCT codec (right back to jpeg) needs a significant extra bits when it’s desirable to preserve grain/noise. If their goal really was to preserve that then the extra size may well be necessary.

      That said I don’t think it’s worth it regardless here. This is still just broadcast stuff, the source material itself is not archival no matter how high they pump the bitrate. Given that people who really care will just be downloading it all again with the Blu-ray release down the road, might as well save the crazy sizes and quality-at-any-cost encodes for that. Although maybe that’s just because I live in crappy America with nothing but DSL or lolsatellite. No doubt if I had fiber not a fuck would be given.

      Reply

  2. What nuances does whilst have that while doesn’t? I know Americans don’t use the word, but it doesn’t seem unnatural here. Probably best for fansub groups to stick to words universally used, though. Also, I can’t help but put that poem to “I am Australian”, lol.

    Reply

    • I have no clue which is right. Both are pop culture references, though.

      Edit: Hmm, I should probably avoid talking about that line. It doesn’t really add much value to the review. Deleted.

      Reply

  5. It was definitely granier, but it looked to me like their release kept a lot more detail. color retention, and crisper lines than gg’s release. So I much preferred their video quality to gg’s.

    Even if the English does need quite a bit of work `3`

    Reply

  7. :< i like how over half of these goddamn problems were pointed out and asked to fix while QCing, yet the errors are _still_ there.

    Also, from what I can tell, the studio animation actually _placed_ another layer of movinh grain on purpose to that certain effect. I'm not the encoder, but considering it's the same encoder for Hayaku's Ano Natsu release, which was notably vastly superior to other encodes, I'm trusting his words on this one.

    As far translations for the OP/ED go, I had to BS together half the damn lines. Translating the OP, eg electro-voice engrish, is _not_ fun. ED? Couldn't make out half the damn words. I went with context and shit to try to make sense of it. I can't say much on the trnslations' grammar, though. I'd provided the translation as a general "TL script needing editing," but i guess I should have clarified on that.

    I'll talk to everyone about this. Most of these are extremely easily avoidablr mistakes. Hell, for all j know whoever muxed used the wrong script *shrug*

    An excuse my horrible spelling and typos. Typing on a dying iPhone is rather difficult.

    Reply

  8. Oh, also…

    Could someone explain why the air force strike command or whatever it is doesn’t make sense? Maybe I just engrish very, but the line sounds fine to me.

    Also the “do you hate replying” line, I’m not really sure why that’s a problem. She asks a question right before hand along the line of, “Do you not like-something-?”(can’t remember it at thetop of my head) Taking that into consideration, i personally thought “Do you hate replying?” worked fine. Again, maybe I just engrish.

    The “you can even bet on it” line, I placed the “even” to try and add emphasis so as to somethig along the lines of, “You can even go as far as to bet on it.” Maybe shortening the line like i did doesn’t work that way?

    Oh right. As far as mixing Mrs and -san, they use both in the show itself. Eg, “Misu Hekmatyar, anata wa blabla” and “Sounandesuka, Hekmatyar-san?” (I just made that line up) Point being, I simply used whatever was physically being said in the audio.

    Reply

    • I haven’t watched the show, so I might be missing some context for some of these, but:
      -“Air strike command” is gibberish and doesn’t really mean anything; try “air force”.
      -“Replying” just doesn’t sound natural here. If you really want to keep that general meaning, you could go with something like, “Do you also hate answering questions?”
      -“You can bet on it” is an idiom and is already an emphasized statement. Adding in “even” screws up the idiom and is redundant.

      Reply

  9. I wasn’t even aware that “You can bet on it” was an idiom ._. (Yay engrish)

    Also, we debated about the air strike line. We kept switching words up like “air strike wing,” “air force,” “fighter wing,” “the air force fighter squadron wing unit”(Okay the last one was intentionally said as a joke)(by me)

    Guess we should have just stuck with the simple ones >.>

    Reply

  11. I think it’s interesting that no one pointed out that she did in fact say he was acting like Rambo. I forget what gg put, but their pop culture reference went completely over my head.

    Reply

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