Sunday is upon us once again. Well, actually, it’s almost past here, but whatever. I guess I’ll make this “random stuff not worth it’s own post” post a weekly thing for the time being.

Which leads us to Utawarerumono. I can’t really say that I made many mental note whilst watching the series – just about the only ones I made about the actual show was “Damn, for someone with the mental age of a twelve year old, Camus has insanely oversized babs” (I should really insert an image here, but being Blu-Ray I can’t capture it and I can’t be bothered to scan the relevant postcard right now), and wondering why a country which supposedly had ten times the military might only appeared to have three Hero units. Other than that, my main thoughts were “Dang, that background art looks good in HD” and “They should make all remotes Bluetooth” – that later one inspired by the fact that I can control the PS3s blu-ray playback without having to remove my arms from the bedsheets in order to point the damn thing at it. This is in sharp contrast to my TV remote, which is the most unreliable and unresponsive remote I’ve ever had the misfortune to use (a shame, as otherwise it’s a really nice set).

Anyway, back to Utawarerumono. Great first half, but the second half, well, let’s just say I spotted a hammerhead, a great white, a basking and many, many other kinds of shark being deftly leaped over. This isn’t to say it’s bad, as such, but even for someone who likes his entertainment pulpy it all gets just a little too random and bizarre and not at all like the first part of the series.

Still, it’s a fun show. You don’t see many shows with battles on that kind of scale which actually have some degree of animation, even if they have used some occasionally slightly flaky CG to achieve it. There’s some nicely dynamic animation running through the series up until the end as well. I’m willing to overlook some of the slightly ropey storytelling due to the general amusement value of it all. It ADV ever picks the license back up, it’s probably worth waiting for a thin-pack release – I’m not really sure it’s worth the single prices though. Almost certainly not worth the Blu-Ray prices.

I’m planning on making a longer post on the subject once I’ve watched the My-ZHiME Zwei movie, but having watched the TV series movie I have to wonder who exactly it’s supposed to be aimed at. It’s not a very good as a recap of the TV series, and it’s too insanely disjointed to watch on its own. Given they’ve mixed the audio in 5.1 for this release, they should really have just left the action sequences in their entirety – or at least those last two episodes – and let the fans enjoy it with better audio. Need to go through and check some of the animation against the TV series disks – I don’t think there’s anything new of any significance, but there were a couple of cuts which I was a little unsure of.

At this point, I note that I don’t really have anything else to talk about (I thought about posting at length about the ADV situation several times during the week, only to come to the conclusion that we actually know sod all about what’s actually going on, so it’d be largely pointless), and that I probably churned enough words out in the subject of Underwater Ray Romano for it to have been worth a post on it’s own. Oh well.