Hey, there seems to be something missing here…

That’s right – the lemons are gone! The limited edition covers for this second season of Haruhi seem to have thrown out the sour fruit in favour of a leaf motif, which would have been fine if the disks weren’t meant to slot in-between the other volumes of the show. Oh well, I guess things just get inconsistent from this point onwards.

Not that the lack of lemons is the only thing inconsistent with this release – they’ve changed the packaging a little as well. Rather than having the two disks sitting on the same chunk of plastic (as seen on the left below), they’ve implemented a weird sliding system where the layer of plastic the top disk sits upon slides downwards to reveal the second disk.

Rather curiously, it’s that bottom disk that’s the main feature, the disk on the top being the LE extras disk.

Speaking of LE extras, alas, I lost this round of buying Haruhi badly. To recap, Kadokawa’s Haruhi jackassery extends to the limited edition release of the series, where the precise extras that you get with it are rather random.

Come back Wies Schwarz cards! All is forgiven!
I came of it about as badly as I could. Everyone gets the postcards and a coaster. I got coaster number four (out of a selection of five), which features Haruhi from this shot in the ED sequence, but that’s just a crappy piece of card. I failed to get one of the super secret extra coasters, and more importantly, the Film Bookmark – I’m not sure if this is just a clear bookmark, or a bookmark featuring a chunk of this episode of Haruhi on film. I suspect the later, but in either case it sounds way cooler than a coaster.

That’s DiGiKerot 0, Kadokawa 1. I knew my comparatively good fortune from the first season couldn’t last. Keep tuning in to see if I fair any better in coming months.

As for the LE bonus DVD, the most significant thing is probably the ten minute featurette of Minoru Shiraishi reprising his Lucky Star bonus feature stick, though obviously they lack the wacky footage of them filming the crazy ED sequences LS had. That runs for about ten minutes.

Otherwise, you get the SOS-dan Music Album – seventeen minutes of shots of entirely inconsequential background details whilst music plays and composer comments pop-up – and the SOS-dan Memories Album, which is six minutes worth of Taniguchi (that’s Shiraishi again) reflecting on the episodes content. Probably amusing if you do moonspeak.

As for the actual content disk, they don’t appear to have made any of the comprehensive animation tweaks that they performed on the first series when it made it’s way to DVD – its just Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody as it appeared on TV. The English subtitles that have been plonked on the disk are mostly fine, though there are a couple of cases like this -

The conversation doesn’t quite flow properly there. That’s about the worst there is to complain about, though – it’s nothing unreadable, incomprehensible or wildly incorrect. It predominantly reads fine.

Extras on the main feature disk include the no-credit ED, two and a half minutes of a (live action) girl running up and down a hill (apparently it’s the advert for the DVD release, though it seems to have little to do with Haruhi), a making-of video for the Super Driver PV (strange, given that the episode on this DVD is OP-less, meaning that Super Driver wasn’t even used) and a ten-minute long look at production staff scouting locations.

The sight of this particular seating area may result in cold shivers for those who suffered Endless Eight.

Finally, they are up to their old tricks again, hiding an image directory on the main feature disk. The twist this time around is that they wind us up by using high definition screen caps rather than the sub-broadcast quality ones they used last time around. It just rubs it in that the show isn’t getting a Blu-ray release.