And here we are after nearly a year with the first two episodes of the 2003 Guardian Hearts OVA. One night, ordinary high school student Kazuya encounters a mysterious girl from another world, and -- wait, does the plot even matter??? I think the line on the above screenshot (extended here for demonstration purposes) tells you all you need to know. When I originally watched this back in '07, it felt so by-the-numbers predictable that I felt I'd seen it before. But I'd only seen its tropes and elements in numerous ecchi/harem series already. But who knows, maybe it's got a certain retro charm to it now? Also, enjoy Rie Kugimiya in an early-career quasi-loli non-tsundere role.
Subtitles were of course from the only complete fansubbed version, by Miyuki-Fansubs. For most of their projects, M-F's subs tried to be as literal as possible (including unnecessary TL notes), but also tended to be completely wrong, at times having the exact opposite meaning as intended. So they have been extensively edited, but as usual, you still get honorifics and Eastern name order. I also preserved the character-based color-coding M-F used, although you can switch to the "plain" track if you want to change only two styles instead of 10+. Name spellings and terms were taken from the TokyoPop manga translations, where available. The raws I found for this were from Kamigami, whose encodes seem to be hit or miss. The video here is better than M-F, albeit maybe not by as much as you'd hope, given the specs. Watching with software deinterlacing active on VLC may help. Poor source, perhaps? While we like to think of Japanese discs as having great quality, even they were still figuring things out in the early 2000s.
Torrent
