Forum - View topicREVIEW: To Love Ru DVD part 1
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CCSYueh
 Posts: 2707 Location: San Diego, CA |
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Thanks. I was thinking of waiting until they boxed it into larger sets, but sounds like I should go for it. Done right & these titles are a lot of fun. |
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Loganator456
 Posts: 52 Location: Oklahoma |
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Yes! I forgot that To-Love Ru was licensed, and now seeing the cover makes me excited!
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CBongo
 Posts: 43 Location: Minneapolis, MN |
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After watching the first episode, I was ready to declare this the Worst Anime Ever Made. But I ended up sticking with it, and came away with much the same reaction: fun guilty pleasure. Personally I thought it was due to a fun supporting cast and decent comedic execution. The OP is one of my all time favorites as well, though I didn't care for the first ED (the second one, which should be in the next set, is better but still not as strong as the OP). |
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Veers
 Posts: 1197 Location: Texas |
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Considering I saw like five minutes of the(/an?) OVA (gaaaaahhhhh I can't unsee it!!) and decided to never watch anything related to this franchise ever again, this review is a lot more positive than I expected it to be, heh.
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Kalessin
 Posts: 931 |
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I definitely enjoyed this show, but I think that it suffers from the transition from manga to anime. The characters tend to be flanderized, their characteristic traits made more extreme, which can make things far more ridiculous at times (e.g. while Rito definitely had trouble confessing to Haruna in the manga, he wasn't run over by elephants while trying). Whether that's for better or worse probably depends on your tastes and the scene in question, but for me, I certainly think that it harmed the series.
The real problem, however, is the episode length makes the stories too long, and the jokes get old fast. The manga, being a weekly publication, had fairly short chapters, and the gags avoided getting old because they didn't last very long. When trying to make an entire episode of anime out of one of those chapters, it can get old fast. I think that a lot of the episodes start out great and just run themselves into the ground by the time they end. Overall, I enjoyed this series, and I'm definitely going to pick up the DVDs, but it gets old fast. An episode is just too long for the material, so the gags get old fast, and when you bring them back in later episodes, it gets that much worse. I do have to say though, that the opening animation for this series is quite cool. It looks great and definitely does some original stuff with the credits. In any case, it's an enjoyable show, but it's not all that great. Key's review is fairly spot on I think, though I definitely think that it gets old fast, so I'd be hard pressed to give it quite as good a rating as he did. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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A dual layer disc is perfectly capable of holding 6 or 7 episodes of a 25 minute show, even with two languages, and still allow for competent encoding and good video quality. 6 episodes of an anime would only be equivalent to a 2 1/2 hour movie. There are several movies that fall into that length, and I have never seen any movies under three hours broken up onto multiple discs. Most Hollywood releases of TV series have 4 hour long episodes on a disc, and can usually put out competent, if not good video quality. There is no reason the same cannot be done with an anime series. Sentai's discs have been very well encoded so far, and with only one or two exceptions, have not featured any of the errors or flaws that seem permanently attached to discs from Bandai or Funimation. And unlike Funimation, they can put 6 or 7 episodes on a disc and have it look good, and not resemble that of a bootleg, like Ouran, Ghost Hound, or Kenichi. Also, I somehow doubt you've actually watched to Love Ru. If you're going to criticize something, your arguments would hold more water if you were reviewing something you had actually seen. I own To Love Ru, and got for it around $20 on sale. I've only watched a few snippets from it, but the video quality has been quite good so far. So save your frisbee throwing for discs that deserve it, like the defects from Bandai or bootleg quality ones from Funimation. |
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asimpson2006
 Posts: 3151 Location: USA |
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I never noticed any problem with any of the 6 or 7 episode discs that Funimation brings out. They all look fine to me when I watch them. I've never had problems with Bandai as well, so I don't know where people keep getting the assumption that their quality is horrible. |
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Kalessin
Posts: 931 |
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I haven't really noticed any issues myself, but there are plenty of videophiles who seem to at least think that they notice problems with them. R2 discs supposedly tend to have better video quality, but I think that you'd have to compare them to see the difference. I think that the quality certainly tends to be good enough that unless you're insanely picky, you're not likely to notice anything. Whether there's really a difference in quality, I don't know, but it seems like videophiles will always think the quality is not up to snuff pretty much regardless of the release. They're looking for a level of perfection which probably more or less never happens. |
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PMDR
Posts: 142 |
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Puzzling that they didn't use the uncensored Japanese market DVD version. Guess it would limit the market.
It's a harmless homage to Urusei Yatsura. Many of the more recent anime fans have never seen UY and probably never would "because it looks old" (which is truly their loss) but at least this is somewhat similar. My main issue with the series is what happened in the personal life of the creator, which ultimately ended the To Lover Ru manga. Sure the manga never had much to do with the anime but still, it's very hard to forget about it and just enjoy the show. |
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SXAniMedia
 Posts: 139 |
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It's common discussion at AOD. It was brought it up in one of the recent ANNCast's - Justin said something about it improving around 2008 and forward. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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It seems to really depend on the series, as well as your set up, the quality of the TV etc. If you have an SD set, you probably won't notice any difference. I started watching Gunslinger Girl on my old SD set, but between Volumes 2 and 3, I switched to an HD set. The first two volumes on my SD set looked fine, not the best, but perfectly acceptable. But when I popped in Volume 3, it looked absolutely horrible. It was so bad, that I thought maybe the disc was bad. I rechecked the first two, and realized they were just as bad. But I have watched Funi discs that were fine, like Hell Girl and Mushishi. Though it seems their best video quality was found on their later singles releases. Once they switched to box sets, and 6 or 7 episodes per disc, the quality went back down. Ghost Hunt was probably the worst. I received a bootleg from an Amazon Market Place seller once that had 8 episodes on a disc, and it even looked better than Ghost Hunt. Though when I watched it a year later with my PS3, it seemed to do a slightly better job upconverting the disc. The digital artifacts and flaws were a lot less noticeable then on my Pioneer Upconvert. I actually found this rather odd, as my Pioneer usually does a much better job upconverting DVDs than my PS3. But other than the FMP sets, that had issues with the masters, I can't really think of any ADV sets that had any significant visual problems. Even my oldest DVDs from them, like Doomed Megalopolis and Princess Nine look amazing upconverted. The only issues I can even think of is some jaggedness during fast action scenes in a few of the Sojitz series, like Utawarerumono. But unlike the problems with Ghost Hunt, Ouran, and Kenichi, it wasn't enough to distract me from the show. I've also never had any problems with Bandai discs, though their quality problems until recently are well known. They've had to issue several recalls, and many people have had to return multiple discs to them to get working replacements. Robert from Anime Corner even acknowledged it in one of his angry blog posts about the Kannagi release. But the main point of my post was that 5 or 6 episodes can easily fit on a dual layer disc, and that Sentai and ADV haven't had as many issues as either Funimation or Bandai. And like I said, the video quality you notice will depend a great deal on what your HD setup is like, whether it's properly callibrated, the DVD upconverter quality, receiver, etc. Not everyone will get the same results. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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One more thing...lol I didn't mean to offend anybody with my comments on video quality. I just get tired of the people who jump on and say "6 episodes per disc, it will look horrible." It especially bothers me, as half these people don't even take the time to watch the shows or judge the video quality for themselves.
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GWOtaku
 Posts: 678 |
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Can't agree with the conclusion. It felt very odd to read the negative points about the show and then be told that it can be given a pass since it's intentional, rather than accidental or coincidental. But what's worse, a series fails to be as good as it should have been or a series where cheap, occasional thrills are compensating for glaring inadequacies? I guess the humor must have hit the right note, but unless it tickles one just right it sounds like a C or even a D-level show pretty easily. But since a show like Hayate, cited in the review, means that there are other places to go for that kind of referential humor, it wouldn't salvage it for me even if the humor were successful. That said, the review was very useful. It clearly described exactly what the show is and made me 100% certain that I didn't want it. I'm at the point where I don't want to overlook a slew of things in order to enjoy the 30%, 40% of the show that isn't wasting my time. |
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zebbox
 Posts: 14 |
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here i was looking forward to english dub
was to love ru really thats bad who didn't deserv a dub ? 
sorry my bad english |
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Kalessin
Posts: 931 |
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1. It really a question of whether a show "deserves" dub so much as whether the company which licensed it expects it to sell well enough for it to be profitable for them to dub it. 2. Sentai Filmworks licensed To-Love Ru. They have yet to dub anything. Since they're basically the licensing arm of "Neo-ADV," and I'd expect Neo-ADV to want to dub stuff like ADV did, I'd expect them to start dubbing stuff eventually. But I expect that they're too new and the economy is doing too poorly for them to yet be able to afford to risk making dubs. 3. While I enjoyed To-Love Ru, it really isn't all that good, and it's probably at least somewhat niche, so while it may sell decently, I'd be stunned if it were a major success. Dubbing a mediocre title really isn't smart at this point. They'd likely lose money. Now maybe I'm wrong and it'll sell really well, but if it's not a relatively sure thing, then it's probably better for the company licensing it to avoid the risk. |
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