[polished/Underwater-Ryuumaru] Otome Youkai Zakuro – 01 (TV/DVD)

This post was written by Calyrica. She is not Dark_Sage.


Let’s see how much of this I can get typed up while my 3-year-old niece finishes taking her nap…

After this, I think I only have one other requested review ([Tsundere] Toaru Kagaku no Railgun, which is an add-on to my previous Railgun comparison). I have two other random reviews planned, but please ask if there’s something specific you want to see. I don’t mind pulling random shit out of my ass. I watch so much anime that I can definitely find something to put up.

This was a very interesting comparison for many reasons. You’ll definitely see them below.

Also, if you haven’t watched this show, it’s a very pleasant twelve episodes. I found myself impressed. Not to mention that it reminds me a lot of Touhou! (Must be Zakuro resembling Reimu. Weren’t they both voiced by the amazing Nakahara Mai as well?)

Polished

Filesize: 569mb (576p DVD)
English: British, honorifics

Karaoke

shot0007

OP matches the credits. No complaints visually. Translation-wise, it’s extremely lacking, like in this line. What is “it”? The flower petals from the line before? Something else?

shot0019

ED.

shot0002

Insert. Both times it appeared, it was k-timed. The similarity of the border color to the fill color makes this extremely hard to read.

On an English note, “lipstick” is not a countable noun, at least not in this sense. You wouldn’t have the “a”.

shot0001

Example of “this is impossible to read”.

Typesetting

shot0003

I feel like this could have been done a lot better.

shot0004

Couldn’t typeset the title frame.

shot0009

Missing.

shot0012

Eyecatch.

shot0017

Missing.

shot0018

Missing.

Script

shot0005

The lyrics in this release are generally a mess. You can kind of form some sort of meaning, but it’s not very easy.

shot0006

This is probably the best line of the entire OP. And it’s ugly.

shot0008

This line makes no sense, and the TL note doesn’t fix it. The line following this is “Naru?” and then they go on about whether or not it’s related to the soldiers coming. I missed the meaning of this entire scene.

shot0010

British spelling all over the place!

shot0011

They also prefer to use “alright”.

shot0014

“everyday” is an adverb. I believe you’re looking for “every day”.

shot0015

Comma splice.

shot0016

Comma splice.

This release suffers a lot from poorly phrased lines. The “naru” bit is by far the worst, though.

Also, they keep “youkai” and “youjin” untranslated, which may be confusing at first.

 

Underwater-Ryuumaru

Filesize: 348mb (720p TV)
English: American, no honorifics

Karaoke

shot0004

Easy to read and it actually kind of makes sense.

shot0016

I’m not exactly sure where the blue came from. It doesn’t match at all.

shot0001

This is how the insert was treated.

Typesetting

shot0003

Thank you for translating this, guys. I can definitely see the effort. Couldn’t you have increased the bolding on “Zakuro”, though? And had a darker shadow on the diamonds?

shot0002

This looks much better than what Polished tried to do.

shot0006

Missing.

shot0014

Missing.

shot0010

They didn’t do the eyecatches either.

shot0015

But this was done.

Script

shot0005

Nothing wrong with this. In fact, quite the opposite. After Polished’s major blunder on this line, I was wondering how Underwater-Ryuumaru would fare. And the answer? Extremely well! This is absolutely perfect.

shot0007

My main problem with this script is that it doesn’t know what an em dash is.

shot0008

will –> would.

I see this happen all of the time, so let me explain.

Will implies that something is going to happen in the future. There’s no “if” about it; it’s pretty much guaranteed.

Would implies that if certain conditions are met, it will happen.

So we have to look at this sentence. I see a condition here: “if he discovers that I’m afraid of spirits”. Thus, it’s not guaranteed that this will happen. But it would, as long as the condition is met.

shot0009

Em dash.

shot0013

No comma needed.

This was a very nice script, em dash issues aside. I do want to make a note, though. They translated “youkai” to “demon” and “youjin” to “spirit”. Whether or not that’s 100% accurate is up to the Japanese-speakers in the audience. However, it gets the point of this show across: racism against a non-human race. People treat them as “youkai” when they are actually simply “youjin”. Replace those words with what Underwater-Ryuumaru used and it makes perfect sense.

 

tl;dr: Underwater-Ryuumaru is the way to go. Polished’s script is clunky as fuck, including the songs. Underwater-Ryuumaru’s script is mostly solid with only a few tiny mistakes.

52 thoughts on “[polished/Underwater-Ryuumaru] Otome Youkai Zakuro – 01 (TV/DVD)”

  1. Just a little remark:
    Polished is only a DVD/BD-ripping group, not a fansubber.
    The subtitles he (It actually is just 1 guy) used for this anime were taken from a group called Mango.

    Reply
  2. The kanji in the ED was hardsubbed in the TV broadcast, so color-wise there wasn’t much that could have been done.

    Beyond that, this release dates back to when I was doing CR rips completely by myself. While it’s an Underwater-Ryuumaru joint in name, it was pretty much just me doing my thing (with Ryuumaru providing the song translations). Underwater didn’t do any further script editing back then (since it was just me, and I don’t edit), so script-wise it’s pretty much exactly what CR had. Fortunately, as I mentioned earlier, Zakuro has basically one of the best scripts CR has ever done, so the lack of further editing isn’t much of an issue (and now that I think of it, all the CR shows I did by myself had great scripts – I wish I could say the same for the average CR translation today). Though you most certainly wouldn’t have that kind of em-dash issues in Underwater releases today!

    I still hope they’ll release BDs for this one day.

    Reply
  3. Calyrica, could you try to review an overlooked anime (by both fansubbers and watchers) : Mouryou no Hako?
    ep 1-4 : Norikumi (bluray)
    ep 1-9 : Aero (HDTV)
    ep 10-13 : AOI (HDTV)

    Reply
    • I LOVE Mouryou no Hako. I can’t remember if its a 10/10 or 9/10 for me. Anyway, I can review it, but how would you like me to handle it? A review of each group?

      Reply
  4. Oh, I remember watching this. But I never finished, it’s a shame to hear that it doesn’t have BDs. Even more so for a pixel counter nazi like me.

    Thanks for reviewing, I’ll download underwater then…

    Reply
  5. It’d be pretty interesting to see reviews for the various groups that did Detective Conan, if you’re willing to review something without watching the whole show.

    Reply
  6. >Who knows what my father will say if he discovers that I’m afraid of spirits.
    >> Will -> would
    Also, discovers -> discovered.
    Tense agreement and all that.

    Reply
  7. Hi Calyrica!

    Could you do BroCon review of Katanako? Just so that we can improve :) it would be very much appreciated. I haven’t released episode 7 though which is the latest.

    Reply
      • I don’t review shows not released on Tokyo-Tosho. It makes my job a bitch to do, and it hurts your promotion abilities. So fix that and it puts you on my radar (and automatically qualifies you for a review — I look at releases even if groups don’t want me to).

        Just do be aware that however confident you are in your base translation, it’s practically impossible to score high in my reviews without a native understanding of the English language. So just a heads up.

        Reply
    • I don’t do airing shows. You’ll have to ask D_S for that one. In the case that the show ends before he reviews it, i can pick it up then.

      Reply

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