This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.
Six groups, all editing the same goddamn Viz script for [K]. Is it even possible for there to be a “best” group when they’re all practically the same thing? Let’s find out! Part 1 gets the boring shit like visuals out of the way. Part 2 will deal with scripts. And that’s less boring because English is fun! ^_^
Release Information
External links.
SubCompare screenshot comparisons: http://www.subcompare.com/k/
Commie’s fansub reviews: http://notredreviews.wordpress.com/autumn-2012-reviews/ [No k-specific posts as of this review]
Episode details.
Anime-Koi
Release format: MKV (490 MB, 8-bit)
Script: American English.
Speed: Quick – 1 day, 1.5 hours to release
Asenshi
Release format: MKV (531 MB, 10-bit)
Script: American English.
Speed: Quick – 22 hours to release
Commie
Release format: MKV (414 MB, 10-bit)
Script: American English.
Speed: Quickest – 16 hours to release
Doki
Release format: MKV (535 MB, 10-bit), LQ MKV (287 MB, 8-bit)
Script: British English.
Speed: Slowest – 6 days, 3.5 hours to release
Hatsuyuki
Release format: MKV (628 MB, 10-bit), MKV (655 MB, 8-bit)
Script: American English.
Speed: Slow – 4 days, .5 hours to release
Shini-subs
Release format: MKV (293 MB, 10-bit), MKV (308 MB, 8-bit), LQ MKV (208 MB, 8-bit)
Script: British English.
Speed: Slow – 4 days, 22.5 hours to release
Visual Review
Opening Karaoke.
Anime-Koi
I’ve said my piece on this before. It’s pretty meh, but it fits… enough. For 500 MB, it looks like shit though.
But at least the logo’s cool.
Asenshi
This is a difficult show to do karaoke for. I liked what they did here better than Anime-Koi’s version, but they were both pretty similar in concept.
Commie
I wonder who thought this one up.
“So our karaoke has to compete with a really fucking bright background and incredibly large, bold credits. So in order to do that, we should make the karaoke hard to see and very small.”
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Doki
This karaoke would be pretty good if it didn’t fuck with the credits. But it does. A lot.
Hatsuyuki
You can’t just toss your generic karaoke into every fucking opening you can find. This really did not fit at all. (I liked the logo though.)
Shini-subs
Shini-subs was unable to sub the OP karaoke. But they somehow managed to figure out a way to, in the five days it took to release this episode, shove their shitty logo over the opening screen instead.
Thanks for that, Shitty-Subs.
Typesetting/Font.
Anime-Koi
Well that was a phoned-in font.
I can’t read runes, but I’m going to assume this is an advertisement for a hospital. The reason why I felt this should have been considered for typesetting is that Yashiro is making up a story to get himself out of the mess he’s in, and to get the bits and pieces he needs, he’s improvising from anything and everything he sees. So letting viewers know this is a hospital would be a great segue into his next line.
However, not one group bothered with this. Shame. :(
Not bad.
I’m including this screen along for review because I think encoding deserves to be put on display. And what better display than a perky kitty’s titties? (For some reason she doesn’t appear to have any, but let’s ignore that for now.)
Didn’t even bother, huh?
Asenshi
Suitable.
Phoned in. At least A-Koi tried.
Asenshi’s kitty titties were the best. This is my supreme judgment.
Some effort, finally? Now we’re talking.
Commie
Bonus points to Commie for not putting subs over this scene. How’d you guys know? This is like Christmas in October.
I thought the point of typesetting was to let people read what the Japanese says…
Doki
Off to a great start already, Doki. I’m sure it would have been impossible to miss running into the episode title. You may have needed to spend all of 10 seconds shifting the subs over a few pixels!
UNACCEPTABLE
Good gods, what is this monster masquerading as a sign?
Holo, what the fuck is your group doing here? This is pathetic.
Hatsuyuki
Except y’all got the tense wrong. It’s “I lied.”
lol.
There we go.
Shini-subs
Well that font is hideous.
Untypeset, as expected.
…at least they tried?
That is… something.
They can’t even work inside the box they made for themselves. Laughable.
The encode could be improved.
No effort, no let-down.
I’d like to say this is good, but I’m not that far gone yet.
Ending Karaoke.
Anime-Koi
The positions changed as did the colors and it all worked out pretty fucking well. I really dug what they did here. Good job.
Asenshi
Plain white font on a slow song. Could you get any fucking lazier?
Commie
White text, slow song. It’s the easiest way to kara anything, ever. Lame as fuck.
Doki
<odinigh> On K
<odinigh> We didn’t translate the ED for ep 2 because I had the translator doing other things. We did it for ep 3
Other things for 6 days, eh? Busiest TL in fansubbing.
Hatsuyuki
That ending effect really made it work. I enjoyed this ED a lot better than Commie’s/Asenshi’s, but not quite as much as Anime-Koi’s. Pretty good job here.
Shini-subs
And Shini fails to deliver again. No ED translation.
Results
Ranked, from best to worst:
1. Anime-Koi
2. Asenshi
3/4. Hatsuyuki = Commie
5. Doki
6. Shini-subs
Anime-Koi had surprising results. I was not going into this expecting that I’d like their visuals the best, but I did. Here’s hoping their main script hold up to what I saw here.
Doki and Shini-subs just fell flat on their face here. I’m not holding my breath for anything good in their scripts because what I saw here was a hack job.
Onto part 2, where the real test of quality is! (Tomorrow)
I approve of all them boobs.
Can you call a marrow provider a hospital?
What about the signs at 04:38 and 05:37? They don’t count or what?
Aww fuck, signs that I missed? Hmm… Fuck, I guess I’ll have to add them.
Actually, never mind. The time that I was going to spend on that was lost in HostGator’s shitty “support”. So you’ll just have to deal with the horrible unfairness of two random signs being excluded from the review.
WRT “2345”, that /is/ actually a (somewhat common) way time is written down in the military. So it is technically correct (probably, I don’t pretend to know the standard in Japan). But it’s still kinda stupid.
Also, anyone who thinks 23:45 PM and 11:45 PM are the same time: Go learn a clock.
“Military time” as it’s called in the USA is a common way of writing the time in a lot of countries – actually, most non-English-speaking countries.
Since it matches the sign and should be understood by pretty much everyone, it’s probably the best way to go here.
Just in case someone is confused – I’m talking about “23:45”. “23:45 PM” is just plain stupid.
That’s a good point.
Maybe I shouldn’t be writing this comment with my broken non-native English in your blog about mocking broken English, but I’ll do.
No, Hatsuyuki didn’t got the tense wrong. Just because most of the groups translated “Uso desu” as past tense, doesn’t change the fact that the tense in Japanese is present tense. “Just kidding” sounds like the best translation to me but “I’m lying” isn’t wrong because literally it says “It’s a lie”. I don’t speak English natively, so I don’t know about which one sounds better and more natural (a very important issue to you, and as English learner I thank you for that) but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. In fact, “I lied” seems to me like the worst option they could choose. Again, non-native English speaker here, I usually translate Japanese to Spanish so maybe I’m wrong.
BTW the advertisement says “Marrow bank”.
PS. Yesterday I just found this site. I missed you.
The issue with the tense is that “I’m lying.” is present-tense, meaning as samurai-kun reads the letter, the joke would make more sense if Silver was lying at that very moment. But because Silver intended for samurai-kun to read the letter AFTER he had finished the story, the tense should be in the past. So “I lied.” is still the best option.
You’re right, I didn’t think in that. Ok, from now on I’ll let you do your job.
Nothing wrong with trying to help out. I’m often wrong, so I’m sure there’ll be a good opportunity to call me out on something one of these days~
I was going to bring it up as well. “I lied” is the best option, but your comment says that they got the tense wrong.
Awful lot of groups working on a show that isn’t even very good. Not really sure what to make of that unless it’s that fansubbers have bad taste.
That’s exactly what you should make of it.
>We are looking for the young male who shot our member
Sounds painful :(
They only had the one to share, too.
So u dont know how to read japanese ? It says bone narrow bank