Thinking you own something from Apple.
I've been pretty much looking at SPACE DANDY with a wary eye. I'm very much against dubs for television and film to begin with, and anime dubs even moreso. On the one hand it's a Watanabe series, and they've almost always done his stuff justice in the past. But on the other hand, that was a different world back before 2007. So I'm not gonna expect much out of it right now. I hope it's part of the movement that has started towards saving anime, but it's far too early to tell. Spoiler: For anyone who wants to know what I have against anime dubs Anime dubs are, usually but not categorically, bad. Why are they almost always bad, though? They are of a lower quality than you'd expect from a thing that is attempting to make money. Okay, what do you mean by quality? I mean, it sounds like the people doing the voices are bad at acting. I mean, it sounds like the director missed the point of the character and ruined the dynamics presented in the original as a result. I mean, you are guaranteed to lose meaning when you translate it completely into English. I mean, the industry is toxic and should collapse from their awful decisions. Alright, so I made a lot of assertions. Let me start explaining why they are all, to one extent or another, true. First up, the voices are bad. Anyone who has tried to watch a show like Genshiken or Raildex or Deadman Wonderland or Soul Eater or PMMM or just about anything released after the recession hit could probably sympathize with this point already. There is a very good reason for this very bad thing to happen. As always, it's money. Believe it or not, the anime watching community isn't a very good source of income here in the west. In fact, most studios over here try to get the dubbing done in one day if possible, because sound work costs money based on how many days you rent out the space. So we've got a lot of people rushing through their work and not getting paid a bunch. Kinda obvious where this is leading. Here's the next problem with that, they don't hire new people. There are a lot of capable voice actors who speak English. Yeah, you wouldn't think it from what they're peddling half the time, but they exist. They don't get jobs though. New people always have a hard time breaking into acting, because there aren't a lot of jobs and there are a lot of people. So why are the good people so frequently cut out? The way they do casting, of course. From what I can glean, you send in your voice reel, they look through a bunch until they find some people they know will show up on time for work and then they do callbacks. The reason for this is because studio space is expensive, you don't want a flake even if the alternatives are completely mediocre. Yeah, how good you are is usually secondary if it is at all considered. And that is all a matter of budgeting. So the voices are going to sound bad unless you get a company like Sunrise doing it. You ever noticed that most of the Gundam series, even now, are passable? Yeah, it's because they're willing to drop the cash on quality. My point here amounts to this, the industry is full of cheapskates who don't care about quality so it's completely random if it turns out sounding good at all. Next point is the direction. The reason why the direction is bad a lot of the time is time itself. Studio time. Yep, same reason why VAs don't get a fair shake. Direction isn't exactly an easy job, but when you've got limited takes, you're always gonna settle. Another reason is, guess what, it's a Japanese series. Whenever you're localizing a foreign show you're not gonna get it. You may think you get it, but a lot of the time there are many little things that pass you by when you're running through it the first few times. So when you try to localize it straight off with possibly no prior knowledge of it at all while trying to adapt it such that a western audience will get it, you just lose even more. Fact is, you can't really dub certain character types because of cultural boundaries. Certain shows do a lot better because they have more universal messages and characters. Gurren Lagaan has a lot of western fans because the show is trying to communicate freedom, manliness and never giving up. Really generic messages that all people are gonna get. Oddly enough the Gurren Lagaan dub was also passable and is only so overlooked because it was so overshadowed by the original, which probably had a higher budget. Go figure that one out. I started building into this earlier, but I'm gonna really get to it now. Language barriers will always exist. I like watching subs, personally, because I can understand tiny fragments of what's being said, and that enriches my understanding of the background. A really good example is honorifics. No translation, because it's a pure cultural difference. In the States we use Mister, which was short for master which connotes respect in a certain way. It is used for adult males. Then we have Miss, Missus, and Ms. Yep, three different words and three different meanings. Dubbing this into Japanese would have all four of these words combined in to the -san suffix. Yep. That's an accurate translation. The same goes the other direction. We don't have honorifics for children and we don't use the same word for uncle and random dude on the street. But in the end these examples are pretty tame and don't really take too much away. It's stuff like puns that really kill it. English is poor in puns compared to a lot of other languages to begin with, add the fact that you can't get equivalents anyways and you get a lot of dead jokes. Seto no Hanayome is a really go example. The main character's name was used as a pun in the first episode. In the dub they had no option but to drop the joke and the scene felt empty. A more current example, Shingeki no Kyojin. The title is a pun, oddly enough. It can either mean advance of the giants or advance against the giants. This actually tells you a lot about the series and the concepts it conveys, but the English title, Attack on Titan only gives you half of the literal meaning and none of the context you get from the opposing meanings. So, there's that. Final point, the industry is bad. We have Funimation buy of the rights to series that they have no intention of releasing or dubbing at all. Yep. Go check their site. They've got Detective Milky Holmes LICENSED. That's the worst part, we've got larger companies buying stuff up like patent trolls just to prevent their competition from getting their hands on them. This is throwing money away and taking it away from real projects. It's completely stupid and I hate them for it.
Yeah, the film is better than the live version because they added one or two numbers from another Rodgers and Hammerstein play that really fit. I say this as a person who has seen both recently. You probably won't agree because, I thought the King and I was pretty much garbage when I saw it as a child.
I KNOW! RIGHT?
Go die.
I can.
Yeah, but I had to put up with my friends playing this unfun bullshit for hours at a time instead of going out and mugging preschoolers with me.
Don't buy Civ 5. I don't know anything about Mafia 2, but Civ 5 is a huge, pointless waste of time. You can't even get Metal Gears until the last few hours of a game. It's awful.
Not mentioning Jason Alexander. Not mentioning Whoopi Goldberg. Not mentioning Bernadette Peters. You are a bad person.
Live or film?
Tellin' it like it is.
Don't.
True, but I kind of feel like even you, to a lesser extent than some of the others in this thread I'll admit, were kind of treating it like redemption for the SERIES as a WHOLE. That was the issue I had with people going nuts over the episodes, other than them not being good enough to go nuts over. But, I digress, it was fun watching the episodes, but the context they were created in could have been worlds better, ie, Legend of Korra could have never been made and this could have been introduced as a short made for television movie.
Match, as in the fire starter, comes from French.
Mimes scare me.
Am I the only one weirded out that no one is responding to these the way they usually do?
I watched the Game Theory that Sfor-chan recommended. It pretty much tells you that it, like pretty much all other pokemon, is based in Japanese folklore. Specifically, Yama uba. You can look up the rest of it yourself. I originally was just saying it was ugly because it looked like a blackfaced minstrel show character, regardless of whether it was intended to be or not. Yes, the implication here is that blackface looks hideous.
I think it suffered from that ambition. I really didn't like the lack of a true hub. Like, I basically hated Darkses for the first 10 or so hours because it lacked The Nexus. I still think it was a blunder, but for much different reasons and in a much different way. That's a totally different story, though. The main thing about the lack of a hub world is that they had to connect a bunch of places that shouldn't reasonably be next to each other and try to make it compact enough to fit together and fluid enough to create some continuity. I feel like that was too tall an order. I don't think a forest, a swamp, a volcano, a city, a valley and an inland sea fit together all that well and I feel like you really can see it. Each of these places strives to have it's own unique feel, but is in the end held back by the fact that it shouldn't because it's in the same place as all the rest of the other stuff and there should be a continuity. It's really hard for me to explain that feeling of total incongruity I get whenever I move from one area to the next. Anyhow, it was a good idea, but they should have made the map more sprawling and open when traveling between areas like in Shadow of the Colossus rather than into a series of branches as if they stapled a bunch of Demonses worlds together in a far less than optimal fashion. AI exploits will always happen for these types of games, I just want them to be less cheese than they have been for both of these games.
He sarcasmed me, so I smarmed him, then you derped both of us. You seeeeeeeeee? It still applies. hehehe Anyways, I just found the time to watch the shits. I, luckily, get to stand by everything I said. The episodes were good. Better than the combined quality of the show thus far, a very low bar, I'll admit. Main thing is, it doesn't actually give me hope that the series will improve. It just shows that to make a good episode all they had to do was toss out the setting, characters and plot they were working with thus far. That also makes these episodes work as standalones so those who, rightfully, don't want to watch the new series can still see these if they wish without getting invested in the rest of it.
The thing about the hellkite is, it's caused by the same thing that makes folk disappear when you activate elevators and the same thing that causes you to be outside of an enemy's "reach". If it flew away on its own, I'd understand your point, but it just poofs instead so it's obviously a flaw. I feel like it was just something they either noticed, then decided, "Whatever" or didn't notice and that seems slovenly. I also heard from my roommate that one day he just randomly picked up souls while he was headed to Darkroot and found the drop lying on the bridge. To this day, there's been no explanation. So there's that. I've heard that in the past, but honestly, I can't really say for sure given how consistent it is and how there is no visible reason why it would do that. I feel like the Souls games usually show you a cue. In Demonses you can always see every ambush if you are patient and careful and smart. In both games, they usually create things that make sense, physically, but in this case there is no physical mechanism which would make the change so it feels just like the hellkite poofing instead of flying away. Still, it's really only for them to know and us to not. I was talking about things I thought were flawed in general and that ranks really high, given I run a lot. I also forgot to mention that they took out the best helmet in the game. I've played more Demonses and I've seen fewer problems with pathfinding and no enemies glitch to death. There are a couple of boss exploits like with Maneater and Storm King, but they've got more of a discovery feeling to them and in the case of Maneater, it doesn't reward you. I don't like it when I can see the programming. It's like when you find typos in novels or continuity errors in television. So, you can see it your way and I'm going to understand you and let you count it in your plus column without argument, but I'm going to keep being annoyed by these things.
