JELEINEN

I've been watching Fam, but it seems like some of the backstory's lost to me. Not much is being explained so far; hell, I don't even know what an Exile is.

Do I necessarily have to watch Last Exile in order to understand Fam?

I wouldn't think it'd be required, but hard for me to say since I have seen it. I definitely recommend watching it, if you get the chance though.

Blu-ray does have region coding. But the regions are split into 3 groups.

http://en.wikipedia....sc#Region_codes

US and Japan share the same region coding. My comment were regards to people buying import DVDs/Blu-rays with subs. The local price of Gundam Unicorn Blu-rays are already $50-60. Come with subs and dubs. The MSRP of a Frontier Blu-ray is 7350 Yen (or ~96.00 USD). Like I said, no one is going to be buying at that price. And that's without subs or dubs.

I have no data at all on how well say Tiger and Bunny Blu-rays are selling due to having an English sub track (those are about the same price). It seems to me though that they probably wouldn't have bothered to include it if they didn't think they could make money off of it. Then there's always the Kara no Kyoukai route of just releasing a big, expensive boxed set. They apparently didn't have any problems selling out of those.

With Blu-ray, you don't need to worry about region coding. As for the DVDs, the $70-$90 price range is high, but I've seen that for the Frontier Blu-rays, not for the DVDs. I don't know any company manufacturing the region 0 DVDs, but if they are becoming available, I'd like to know what company is doing that. So far, all I've known of region zero is what fansubbers and personal movie makers use.

Ah, I wasn't aware that BD didn't have region encoding. I haven't adopted the format myself and really don't have plans to.

From a marketing standpoint, no one is going to buy a single $50-90 DVD/Blu-ray in North America. And at 3-4 episodes/disc or even a 2-hour movie, that won't even make it out the door. Bandai Entertainment did that once and it flopped.

It's actually becoming a more common practice. I guess the idea is the few extra sales it generates is worth the minor cost of adding an extra subtitle track or two and choosing to use region 0 isntead of 2.

tried watching last exile fam. didn't quite like the first episode.

Watch at least the next couple more. It's like they had to get the fanservice out of their system in the first one, so if that's what turned you off, you needn't worry. In terms of story and visuals, I think it's doing quite well. Plus, if you're a fan of the original, then seeing the returning characters is pretty awesome.

Finally got to watch some Hetalia Axis Powers. At first I was quite amused but after a while it gets a bit repetitive. I have to give it to the producers though, they were not afraid to pull any punches when it comes to be politically 'incorrect'.

I think Hetalia was wasted potential. There's so much good political satire you could do with concept, but instead we get fangirl pandering slapstick.

You should check out Legend of Koizumi if you want something that isn't politically correct and is completely awesome.

HG l iquidating their assets would do one very important thing for Macros fans. No one would be left to upkeep the fraudulent copyrights they filed for "Macross." Without that, there's nothing stopping other companies from licensing Frontier & the rest.

One would assume that whoever bought the property would maintain the trademarks.

If they were just after energy, there's a hell of a lot better places to get it than Earth. It's almost as bad as the invading us for our water trope.

Too bad the anime didn't finish the mangas....

Too bad the manga hasn't finished itself.

I've already mentioned this a few pages back and it got buried, but figured it's worth another bump: Has anyone watched "Toradora!"?

I enjoyed it. The characters had depth and it was well plotted. If you're into more romance-oriented stuff, then it's well worth checking out.

When did they confirm that?

It's been stated outright in both episodes 2 and 3.

http://www.hlj.com/product/kyd00010

How cute, also the scaling going on here is hilarious to me.

Cute? That face is about ready to give me nightmares. Serious uncanny valley territory here.

Definately check out the original Last Exile, though Fam seems to either take place before it. Theorizing aside from that would only go into spoiler territory, suffice it to say there aren't any hard links between the shows aside from style and the type of setting so far.

As for me, I'm just about done watching Rayearth, then I'll probably go into Oreimo and Clannad.

Fam takes place about two years after the end of the original series.

I love LEGO and probably spend way too much money on it, but I find that I don't have much time to build anything and when I do, it's really hard to get what's in my head to come out right.

$39.99 per bluray for each individual volume, 74.99 for each individual LE version (BD/DVD+external extra's & box for each).

Well, that's a skip for me. Love the show, but I refuse to pay those prices.

Madoka Magica has been announced for an R1 bluray release for this interested.

Was a price anounced?

First episode of the new Last Exile was pretty good. Also, somehow Manwaru Penguindrum managed to become even more F'd up than it already was.

Well, Un-Go and Guilty Crown are definitely the highlights of the new season and I'm really looking forward to watching more of both if they keep up the quality of their first episodes.

I loved those bits. Too bad they could never release it on home video. I was thrilled to find them again on YouTube a few years ago.

... Excite still exists?

I think Excite remained fairly popular in Japan. At the very least, for a long time they had the best Japanese machine translation software of any of the search engines (I think Google's is probably better now).

The Song that Pities an Evil Spirit.

Fate Zero's 1st episode completely lived up to my expectations. Glad it was 1 hour to properly flesh out the backgrounds of all the masters. Definitely a darker and bloodier story than FSN. Can't wait to see Saber in a suit .

Unfortunately, it wasn't made for those of us who aren't familiar with the previous Fate works. The plot was simple enough to follow, but they made no effort to try and make it engaging to newcomers. Reading blog posts and the like, it seems to have worked well enough on existing fans though.

Sucker Punch

I'm sure they'll try to squeeze in Shampoo, but leave out the part of her turning into a cat. Ryoga may or may not be in the movie, as he was vital to Akane's character development in the manga and anime.

It's been so long that I don't remember exactly, but I think Ryoga didn't get introduced until a few episodes in and Shampoo even later. Looking at the cast list, I'm guessing they're just adapting the initial story.

With just two hours, then they probably won't include Shampoo or Ryouga, which would let them skip having to do the (likely bad) CGI for a pig and a cat transformation. That still leaves them a panda, but one human-sized critter will probably be easier to deal with than a bunch of them.

Started to get back to Fang of the Sun Dougram. It has a surprisingly complex political set-up for the story which really could have been played up for a no hero/villain divide and just multiple points of view. Unfortunately, they choose to go with the main character's naive and simplistic point of view as being essentially right. Now it's very realistic for the main character to think and act like he does, being a teenager, but it's hard for me as an adult to accept (yeah, I'm not the target audience). Still enjoying it so far (I'm at about a dozen eps in).

I got behind on the Summer season, so need to do some marathoning to catch up. I also want to finish watching the original Harlock series.

Started Steins; Gate, enjoying it thus far!

... but how can they villanize the lovable particle physicists at ©SERN ???

Just finished Steins;Gate this weekend and thought it was a pretty good show. It had one of the best Chekov's Guns I've seen in a long time. I don't know how well the time travel stands up under too much thinking and the harem bits got to be a bit too much in a couple of episodes, but overall, the flaws were easily overlooked.

Also are the Patlabor movies worth picking up on blu-ray?

I don't know about Blu-Ray (not a format I support), but the movies themselves are definitely worth owning.