Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Wind ~ A Breath of Heart 14 - I Invite You to Burn



This episode of Wind offers a look back into the dark, tragic past of Hikari and Kazune City alike, with a shocking conclusion. Maybe six feet ain't so far down. Astute viewers may note that this episode is nearly twice the size of any other episode of the series. Well, I hope you like extended flickering-light film-grainy flashbacks complete with artificial scanlines, weird flower overlays, and dark scenes punctuated by fire and sparks. In other words, it's a tremendous bitrate hog, perhaps on par with the sandstorm flashback in Iriya's Sky, Summer of UFOs ep 02. Fortunately, the GFE encoder wisely allowed this episode to break filesize consistency with the other eps. On the other hand, Static-Subs kept it at 99 MB (CD-R/7?), and the results were rather lacking, as can be sampled below. I don't even want to think about how this ep looked at 75 MB (CD-R/9??) in Anime-Keep's release.

Torrent



As with previous episodes, this has been renumbered; it's better known as episode 11, "Destiny from the Ancient Times."

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Wind ~ A Breath of Heart 13 - Resistance is Futile


After everything turned out for the best in the previous episode, Makoto finds Hikari up to her old tricks: making people disappear and doing vaguely violent things to them. Apparently the more interaction a girl's had with the male lead, the more danger she's in.

Torrent

Renumbering note: this is elsewhere considered ep 10.8/S3, "Uncertain Feelings".

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

My Wife is a High School Girl 13 - Twilight of the Cockroaches



Well, what better use for a 6-day weekend than to put the final QC touches on the final episode of My Wife is a High School Girl? No doubt the manga story continues on, but the current crisis of Iwasaki-sensei finding out about the secret marriage is resolved reasonably enough. And for as much flak as this show gets, from its original subbers and others, I still came to appreciate it in the end. A lot of romance anime end at the love confession, or maybe a first-kiss scene, so it's quite rare to see the ups and downs and the conflicts and reconciliations of a married couple. It's especially rare in the ecchi/harem genres; this show, Rizelmine, and Godannar are the only three examples I can think of off-hand, as most shows involving married life tend to be less otaku-oriented, like Human Crossing or Rumiko Takahashi Anthology. It's just a pity we never got a flashback showing how their relationship got started.

Torrent || Batch (Nyaa)

As usual, if you see subbing mistakes (as opposed to subjective editing/localization decisions) in these releases, please let me know so that I can correct them. In addition, credit also goes to xess, Riza|Hawkeye, and the rest of the crew at the now-defunct fansubbing/DVD-ripping group LIME-Anime for soldiering through this series back in 2005. While they weren't able to get me the original scripts due to FTP/HDD crashes, I still would've been hard-pressed to release this series without their contributions.