Nine: Kantetsuhen HD

Orphan's HD releases of the Nine saga reaches its end with the third installment, 1984's Nine: Kanketsuhen (Nine: Final). Niimi Katsuya, Karasawa Susumu, and Kurahashi Eiji are all third-years, as are Nakao Yuri and Yasuda Yukimi. The principal romantic relationships are set. Katsuya is paired off with Yuri, and Jirou-kun (a second-year) with Yasuda Yukimi. Katsuya's former romantic rival, Jirou's older brother Kentarou, has gone on to college or pro baseball and is out of the picture. Thus, Nine: Kanketsuhen focuses on some of the side characters, as well as the climax of Coach Nakao's decades-long quest to get to the holy of holies, the high school baseball championships at Koushien.

In the first vignette, Coach Nakao (Yuri's father) uses a minor hospital stay to motivate the happy-go-lucky third-years to buckle down and try for Koushien. In the second, Susumu, who has mostly been a comic wingman to Katsuya, takes center stage, as a prolonged batting slump draws the attention (and eventually, the affection) of budding manga artist Takagi Youko. In the third, a mixup about a bottle of shampoo causes the ever-doubting Katsuya to wonder if Eiji is a romantic rival for Yuri's affections. And finally, the team reaches the hallowed halls of Koushien, fulfilling the coach's dream and providing an appropriate climax to the series. For more information, see my blog post on the standard-definition release.

 

The Orphan staff is the same as the standard-definition release. Moho translated; laalg checked the dialog and signs; and Sunachan checked the songs. ninjacloud timed. I edited and typeset; the typesetting had to be completely redone for the different color balance in the high-definition raw. BeeBee, Topper3000, and VigorousJammer QCed the original release; getfresh and Uchuu QCed this one. bananadoyouwanna downscaled a 1080p webrip to 720p and removed the pillar-box black borders.

Some translation notes:

• Takagi Youko pokes fun at Karasawa's weight by calling him Karabuta literally, "Kara-pig." I've localized the insult as a pun with "Kawa-sow-a," even though a "sow" is actually a female pig, because she caricatured him as a pig in Nine 2.
• Omaeda, the monster pitcher on Seishuu's Koushien rivals, mistakes "Seishuu" for "Seishu," a brand of sake. That's the key reason I added the "u" for long Japanese vowels (Seishuu, Kentarou, Jirou) throughout the show, even though Seishuu's team uniforms say "Seishu" in Roman letters. 
• Many of the signs at Koushien are parodies of real Japanese brands and companies. For example, KDY 電話 (KDY Telephone) is a joke on a real telecommunications company, Kddi.
  

For this release, I've typeset a few more of the Koushien signs, because laalg bothered to translate them all; I want to honor her contribution.

Looking back on all three episodes, it's clear that Nine is not a typical sports shounen; rather, it's a romcom with a baseball foreground. Nine lacks the typical shounen hero's determined rise to the top in the face of adversity, and the humorless focus on building the team and achieving victory. Here, getting to Koushien is just another incident in high school life, and the boys are much more interested in having a good time, and in girls, than in becoming champions. For Niimi, Karasawa, and Eiji, baseball is fun; it's not an obsession.

Unless actual Blu-rays are released, this concludes Orphan's work on Nine. It's a charming series, invoking the innocence of high school sports and romance in simpler times.You can get Nine: Kanketsuhen HD  (and the other two HD episodes) from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.

Nine 2: Koibito Sengen HD

 Here's a high definition version of the second installment in the Nine trilogy, Nine 2: Koibito Sengen (Nine 2: Declaring Love). Once again, the raw is a 1080p web rip, downscaled to 720p with the black bars removed.

When we last saw our main characters, Niimi Katsuya and Nakao Yuri were beginning to see themselves as a couple, but Katsuya was being pursued by a rising track star, Yasuda Yukimi, and Yuri by rival Bunan's third-year pitching phenom, Yamanaka Kentarou. New complications arise in this episode, as Kentarou's younger brother Jirou joins the Seishuu baseball team and promptly falls for Yukimi.

 Except for Katsuya, most of the characters are fairly clear about their feelings. However, out of diffidence or immaturity, Niimi doesn't want to disappoint Yukimi by saying he likes someone else or to be forthright with Yuri about his feelings. This causes problems for everyone else, particularly Yukimi, who nurtures hopes that cannot be realized. Even Katsuya's wingmen see what's going on and tell him, fairly forcefully, to get his act together. Meanwhile, the team must once again face arch-rival Bunan in a pivotal game.

For more information, see my blog post on the standard definition release.

The credits are the same as for the HD release of Nine: Original-ban. Moho translated; laalg checked the dialog and signs, and Sunachan checked the songs. ninjacloud timed the original release and this one. I edited and typeset; all the signs had to be redone because of the changed color balance. BeeBee, Topper3000, and VigorousJammer QCed the original version; getfresh and Uchuu QCed this release. bananadoyouwanna encoded. I like this HD episode better than the first, because the original 4:3 aspect ratio is unchanged.

You can get Nine 2: Koibito Sengen HD at the usual torrent site, or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.

Nine: Original-ban HD

HD raws of Nine have been floating around the web for a while now. They were streaming rips, and they were letter-boxed or pillar-boxed. I wasn't prepared to transplant Orphan's Nine subs to these raws without a re-encode to strip off the black borders. It took a while to find a willing encoder, and even longer to move the copious typesetting to the new raws. But at last it's done. Here is the first of the three Nine OVAs, Nine: Original-ban.

Nine: Original-ban tells the story of two friends who are just entering Seishuu High School: record-setting middle school sprinter Niimi Katsuya and prefectural middle school judo champion Karasawa Susumu. Dropping by the school's baseball field, they see a beautiful girl staring forlornly at the school team's miserable performance. On impulse, they decide to join the baseball club, in order to cheer her up. She turns out to be Nakao Yuri, the baseball coach's daughter and soon to be team manager. They also meet Kurahashi Eiji, a middle school baseball phenom, and persuade him to join the team as well. Thus begins their athletic and romantic odyssey, which will take them from the agony of defeat to the hallowed grounds of Koushien, Japan's high school baseball championships.

 

Of course, there are complications. Niimi's running skills attract the attention of Yasuda Yumiki from the track club. She thinks Niimi would make a great coach for her and an even better boyfriend. Yuri is being courted by Yamanaka Kentarou, a slightly older rock-star pitcher for rival Bunan High School. And Karasawa would also like to court Yuri, although Niimi, as the designated hero, has the inside track. You can get more details, including notes on the cast and staff, in the original blog post.

 

So what's different in this release, besides the higher resolution? For one, the color balance, which tends more towards blues and greens than browns and purples. As a result, the stylistic choices - featureless backgrounds, limited color palette, lack of detail - are more obvious. For another, the audio track sounds different. But most importantly, this release of Original-ban is the widescreen movie version, 1.85:1, instead of the classic TV version, which was 1.33:1. Was Original-ban made as Open Matte, to be viewable in both ratios? It's hard to tell, but I think not. In some shots, the cropping is obvious and damaging to the scene. The three Nine OVAs were made for TV viewing in the pre-digital era. The movie was cobbled together to exploit the popularity of Adachi Mitsuru.

 
The credits for the HD release are mostly the same as the original. Moho Kareshi translated the dialog and songs. laalg checked the dialog translation and added many additional signs. Sunachan checked the song translations. ninjacloud timed the original version and this one. I edited and typeset. The typesetting had to be redone completely, because of the change in aspect ratio and color balance. BeeBee, Topper3000, and VigorousJammer did the original QC. getfresh and Uchuu did a release check on this version. bananadoyouwanna encoded the 1080p raws down to 720p, stripping the letterbox bars in the process. He felt, and I concur, that the artwork doesn't justify 1080p.

 
So baseball may be hobbled until after the pandemic, but we'll always have Koushien. You can too, by getting Nine: Original-ban in HD from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.

Hiatari Ryoukou! Kasumi: You Were In My Dream

Often, an anime movie that follows a successful TV series is a summary compilation, like the movies made from World Masterpiece Theater series or Blue Gender: the Warrior. Sometimes, it actually provides a conclusion for a series that ended with unresolved plot lines, like End of Evangelion. Sometimes, it's a side story to the main TV series plot, like Yawara! Sore Yuke Koshinuke Kids!. And sometimes, it's an alternative version of the events in the main TV series. That's the case with the Hiatari Ryoukou movie, Kasumi: Yume no Naka ni Kimi ga Ita (Kasumi: You Were in My Dream), which came out just as the TV series was ending in early 1988.

Kasumi: Yume no Naka ni Kimi ga Ita starts at the point where Kasumi's boyfriend Katsuhiko departs for the U.S. to go to college (about midway in the TV series). Fast forward two years, and Katsuhiko suddenly returns to Japan. In the interim, he's become a star motorcycle racer and is rumored to be involved with another celebrity named Tadona. In fact, he's still in love with Kasumi and has come back to Japan to propose to her. Meanwhile, the boarding house gang have reached the last year of high school and are all preparing for graduation. Keiko-chan intends to go to a music university and become a teacher. Kasumi herself wants to study classical Japanese literature. Shin and Ariyama have plans too. Only Yuusaku is drifting, trying to see if professional photography might suit him. Katsuhiko's determination to get an answer from Kasumi runs up against her ambivalent feelings about choosing between him and Yuusaku. He decides to force the issue by winning a big race regardless of the risks involved, and then...

Because Kasumi is an alternative version, it's pretty clear from the outset that the events in the movie won't be conclusive, because we already know how the TV series turns out. This structural difficulty is compounded by weak writing. One of the joys of the TV series was the side characters, Shin, Ariyama, and Keiko, who figured prominently in the story and the comedy. Here, they have at best walk-on parts.The focus is relentlessly on the central trio of Kasumi, Katsuhiko, and Yuusaku, and their interactions have already been done to death. In addition, the previously invisible Makoto gets many more lines, most of them expository to advance or clarify the story. Another issue is that the TV series is a rom-com with baseball trimmings. The movie is a rom-com with... motorcycle racing? While this change allows Katsuhiko to have his do-or-die moment, it both defies belief and walks away from one of the core strengths of Adachi Mitsuri's writing. The movie feels not only irrelevant to the core story but unrelated.

The TV cast was mostly unchanged, except for Ariyama, who was played by Suzuki Kyonobu, a journeyman seiyuu with many featured roles. The TV director, the talented Sugii Gisaburou, was replaced by Oguma Kimiharu, who had only a few credits to his name. Kasumi: Yume no Naka ni Kimi ga Ita played on a twin bill with the first Kimagure Orange Road movie and used some if its songs as background music.

The original script for the movie came from the defunct ray=out Hiatari Ryoukou project. tenkenX6 checked the dialog, songs, and signs and revised them extensively. M74 timed. I edited and typeset. BeeBee and Nemesis QCed. The raw is a full HD web stream. I don't think it deserves such high resolution - I prefer watching it at 720p or 540p - but it's easier to downscale in a player than to upscale.

If I sound disappointed in Kasumi: Yume no Naka ni Kimi ga Ita, that's because I am. I would have liked a real continuation of the main story, carrying forward Meijou High's baseball quest in true Adachi Mitsuru fashion. Instead, it uses the trite "it was all a dream" trope to spin a yarn and then throw the whole concoction away. Still, if you'd like one last visit with Kasumi, Katsuhiko, and Yuusaku, then Kasumi: Yume no Naka ni Kimi ga Ita is your cup of tea. You can find Kasumi at the usual torrent sites or download it from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news in irc.rizon.net

Hiatari Ryoukou

Every now and then, I remember that Orphan Fansubs was started to complete series  abandoned (orphaned) by other groups. Simultaneous streaming has reduced the likelihood of abandoned series, so the original mission has been complemented, or perhaps overtaken, by a focus on shows stranded on the wrong side of the analog-digital divide. However, I do keep an eye on my "orphan series list," and occasionally an opportunity arises to check one off. Here, without further ado, is Hiatari Ryoukou. 

Hiatari Ryoukou (48 episodes, 1987-1988) was the fourth of Adachi Mitsuru's manga to be adapted for anime, and his fourth baseball rom-com, following Miyuki, the much shorter Nine, and the much longer Touch. It took over Touch's TV slot, thereby providing Japanese audiences with three continuous years of Adachi Mitsuru.  It bears more of a resemblance to Nine than to Touch, but it has many of the same stock Adachi character types and plot situations.

The Hiatari Ryoukou project began in ray=out in 2012. I was asked to edit on a freelance basis. The project struggled to maintain a consistent release cadence: an initial set of releases in 2012, almost nothing in 2013, a burst up to episode 24 in 2014, and since then, nothing, even though the basic script work - translation, timing, editing, encoding - was finished in early 2014. (I documented my frustrations with the project in this blog post.) Well, the wait is now over. Starting just after Labor Day, I went back to the Hiatari Ryoukou scripts, revisited the editing, typeset where necessary, and asked the Orphan team to help with additional translation and QC. It took just about three months to get everything in reasonable shape. So here, at long last, are the final 24 episodes of Hiatari Ryoukou. I have not revisited the first 24 episodes, nor do I intend to, but they are included in the batch for convenience.

Hiatari Ryoukou is as standard an Adachi Mitsuru story as you can imagine. Kishimoto Kasumi lives in her aunt's boarding house with four (male) students from Meijou, her high school: Takasugi Yuusaku (the good-natured one), Ariyama Takashi (the heavy one), Mikimoto Shin (the conceited one), and Aido Makoto (the invisible one). She has an older boyfriend, Muraki Katsuhiko, who is often off the scene, in college in America. Yuusaku, Ariyama, and Shin all end up playing for Meijou's fairly pathetic high-school baseball team, which is managed by Kasumi's friend Seki Keiko. Shin and Ariyama have a yen for Keiko. Yuusaku, although attracted to Kasumi, believes that he should defer to Katsuhiko, particularly when the latter returns to coach the Meijou team. The messy romantic relationships overlap with the baseball team's quest to become contenders and reach Koshien. Stir and repeat for 48 episodes. It's lighthearted fun. However, the ending is very rushed and abrupt, and the baseball side of the story is never resolved.

The voice cast includes many veterans of Adachi Mitsuru world, as well as some newcomers.

• Morio Yumi (Kasumi) played Akimoto Reiko in the long-running Kochikame franchise.
• Mitsuya Yuuji (Yuusaku) played Tatsuya (the lead, a Yuusaku clone) in Touch, Pen Pen in Mr. Penpen, Kouji in Kiteretsu Daihyakka, Irabu in Kuuchuu Buranko, Jecy in Hi-Speed Jecy, Seki in Majo demo Steady, and Daisuke in Stop!! Hibari-kun. The last three are Orphan releases.
• Shiozawa Kaneto (Shin) played Iason in Ai no Kusabi, Rock Holmes in Fumoon, Shiina in Chameleon, Sanzou in I am Son Goku, and Kurahashi Eiji, the ace pitcher, in Nine, all Orphan releases. He also played Joe in Tokimeki Tonight, Yoshio in Miyuki, Takeshi in Touch, D in Vampire Hunter D, Narsus in Arslan Senki OVA, Rosario in Dragon Half, and Abriel senior in Crest of the Stars.
• Hayashiya Kobuhei (Ariyama) is a Humanities professor and rakugo artist. His anime credits include Koutarou (the Ariyama clone) in Touch and Yoichi in the Kochikame franchise.
• Tsuru Hiromi (Keiko) debuted as Perrine in Perrine Monogatari. She went on to play Kashima Miyuki in Miyuki, Madoka in Kimagure Orange Road, Barge in Blue Sonnet, and Mikami Reiko in Ghost Sweeper Mikami. She also played Nozomi in Nozomi Witches, Jill in A Penguin's Memories, UFO-chan in Dokushin Apartment Dokudami-sou, and big sister Shizuka in Tomoe's Run!, all Orphan releases.

The chief director, Sugii Gisaburou, needs no introduction to readers of this blog. His many credits include other Adachi Mitsuru series (Touch and Nine); Nozomi Witches and Hidamari no Ki (both Orphan projects); and several recent movies. The songs are by various artists, including Serizawa Hiraoki, who did many of the songs for Nine. Just to emphasize the continuity, the last insert song in Hiatari Ryoukou is a variation on Midsummer Runner, the ending song for Nine.

This completion of Hiatari Ryoukou retains the styling decisions (dialog and song styles, the use of honorifics, the inconsistent romanization of long vowels) from the ray=out episodes. Compared to the state of the scripts in 2014, the main changes are:

• Translation of missing lines and more signs.
• Translation checking on the insert songs.
• An additional editing pass.
• Timing cleanup.
• Additional QC. 
• Wider horizontal margins and more frequent line breaks.
• Typesetting with motion capture to compensate for image instability.

The credits for these 24 episodes are a bit complicated. Athanor provided the DVD raws. For ray=out, AgitoAkito encoded, tacokichi translated, nollarg timed, alchemist11 styled, and first Saji and then Samika did QC through episode 38. For Orphan, I edited, checked, and typeset, Nemesis did QC, and Skr, Iri, and convexity translated missing lines and signs. convexity translation checked the insert songs.

With the success of Mix, Adachi Mitsuru is experiencing another revival, and several of his properties have shown up in high-definition on Japanese streaming sites. Mostly, they look like upscales - sometimes laserdisc upscales - but we can always hope for remastered versions done from original sources. In the meantime, here's Hiatari Ryoukou. You can get the episodes from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.

Nine: Kanketsuhen

The Nine saga comes to a close with the third installment, 1984's Nine: Kanketsuhen (Nine: Final). Niimi Katsuya, Karasawa Susumu, and Kurahashi Eiji are all third-years, as are Nakao Yuri and Yasuda Yukimi. The principal romantic relationships are set. Katsuya is paired off with Yuri, and Jirou-kun (a second-year) with Yasuda Yukimi. Katsuya's former romantic rival, Jirou's older brother Kentarou, has gone on to college or pro baseball and is out of the picture. Thus, Nine: Kanketsuhen focuses on some of the side characters, as well as the climax of Coach Nakao's decades-long quest to get to the holy of holies, the high school baseball championships at Koushien.

In the first vignette, Coach Nakao (Yuri's father) uses a minor hospital stay to motivate the happy-go-lucky third-years to buckle down and try for Koushien. In the second, Susumu, who has mostly been a comic wingman to Katsuya, takes center stage, as a prolonged batting slump draws the attention (and eventually, the affection) of budding manga artist Takagi Youko. In the third, a mixup about a bottle of shampoo causes the ever-doubting Katsuya to wonder if Eiji is a romantic rival for Yuri's affections. And finally, the team reaches the hallowed halls of Koushien, fulfilling the coach's dream and providing an appropriate climax to the series.

There was two major changes in the voice cast for this episode. Kurata Mariko dropped out of the project, so the role of Nakao Yuri was recast with another singer, Narumi Yasuda. She was best known for the songs in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. She had no other voice-acting credits. In addition, the late Hiromi Tsuru played Takagi Youko. She debuted as Perrine in Perrine Monogatari and went on to play Kashima Miyuki in Miyuki, Madoka in Kimagure Orange Road, Barge in Blue Sonnet, and Mikami Reiko in Ghost Sweeper Mikami. She also played Iyo in Izumi, Nozomi in Nozomi Witches, Jill in A Penguin's Memories, and UFO-chan in Dokushin Apartment Dokudami-sou, all Orphan releases.

As a consequence of Kurata Mariko's departure, Serizawa Hiraoki did all the songs in Nine: Kanketsuhen himself. Perhaps for that reason, this episode has the fewest number of songs of the three episodes.

The Orphan staff is unchanged. Moho translated; laalg checked the dialog and signs; and Sunachan checked the songs. ninjacloud timed. I edited and typeset. BeeBee, Topper3000, and VigorousJammer did QC. The raw is a laserdisc encode from Piyo Piyo Productions.

Two translation notes:

• Takagi Youko pokes fun at Karasawa's weight by calling him Karabuta literally, "Kara-pig." I've localized the insult as a pun with "Kawa-sow-a," even though a "sow" is actually a female pig, because she caricatured him as a pig in Nine 2.
• Omaeda, the monster pitcher on Seishuu's Koushien rivals, mistakes "Seishuu" for "Seishu," a brand of sake. That's the key reason I added the "u" for long Japanese vowels (Seishuu, Kentarou, Jirou) throughout the show, even though Seishuu's team uniforms say "Seishu" in Roman letters.

Typesetting this episode was a PITA. All three episodes of Nine are rather sign-heavy, but this one was ridiculous, with background signs (advertisements) in practically every long-shot at Koushien. Many of the signs are parodies of real Japanese brands and companies. For example, KDY 電話 (KDY Telephone) is a joke on a real telecommunications company, Kddi. These signs don't add much, but laalg took the trouble to translate them, so I've set as many as I could.

Looking back, it seems clear that Nine is not a traditional sports shounen; rather, it's a romcom with a baseball foreground. Nine lacks the typical shounen hero's determined rise to the top in the face of adversity and the humorless focus on building the team and achieving victory. Here, getting to Koushien is just another incident in high school life, and the boys are much more interested in having a good time, and in girls, than in becoming champions. For Niimi, Karasawa, and Eiji, baseball is fun; it's not an obsession.

Nine set the pattern for Adachi Mitsuru's baseball manga series, and he continues to ring changes on the theme even today. (His current manga, Mix, is getting an anime adaptation in the spring of 2019.) Now English-speaking viewers can see where it all began. Except for Hiatari Ryouko, which remains incomplete, all of Adachi-sensei's anime series are available in English. As for Hiatari Ryouko... one never knows, do one? It's an orphan series, after all.

You can get Nine: Kanketsuhen (and the other two episodes) from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.

Nine: Original-ban

Adachi Mitsuru and baseball romcoms go together like ice cream and chocolate sprinkles. For more than three decades, he has written hit manga series focusing on baseball and teenage romantic comedy, and many of them have been adapted into successful television anime. But the granddaddy of them all - Adachi's very first baseball series - was Nine, published from 1978 to 1980 in Monthly Shounen Sunday and collected in five tankoban volumes. In 1983, Nine was adapted into three hour-long TV specials. The first special was also released theatrically, under the title Nine: Original-ban (Nine: Original Version), with some changes: a different voice actor played Coach Nakao, the insert songs were replaced, and the background music was redone.

Nine: Original-ban tells the story of two friends who are just entering Seishuu High School: record-setting middle school sprinter Niimi Katsuya and prefectural middle school judo champion Karasawa Susumu. Dropping by the school's baseball field, they see a beautiful girl staring forlornly at the school team's miserable performance. On impulse, they decide to join the baseball club, in order to cheer her up. She turns out to be Nakao Yuri, the baseball coach's daughter and soon to be team manager. 

They also meet Kurahashi Eiji, a middle school baseball phenom, and persuade him to join the team as well. Thus begins their athletic and romantic odyssey, which will take them from the agony of defeat to the hallowed grounds of Koushien, Japan's high school baseball championships.

Of course, there are complications. Niimi's running skills attract the attention of Yasuda Yumiki from the track club. She thinks Niimi would make a great coach for her and an even better boyfriend. Yuri is being courted by Yamanaka Kentarou, a slightly older rock-star pitcher for rival Bunan High School. And Karasawa would also like to court Yuri, although Niimi, as the designated hero, has the inside track.

If you've read the somewhat later Hiatari Ryouko, this may all sound somewhat familiar. And if you've watched the Hiatari Ryouko anime, this will all look really familiar. That's because Nine and Hiatari Ryouko have a significant number of major staff members in common, including producer, director, character designer, music composer, and planning.

The voice cast includes:

• Furuya Tohru (Niimi Katsuya) played the lead male roles in Kimagure Orange Road and Sailor Moon, the title roles in Casshern Sins, Utsunomiko, and Kyojin no Hoshi, and recurrent roles in the Dr. Slump, Dragon Ball, and Mobile Suit Gundam franchises. He also starred as Kosaku in Stop!! Hibari-kun and Bavi Stock in Bavi Stock, both Orphan releases.
• Kurata Mariko (Nakao Yuri) was better known as a singer. Nine is her only anime role.
• The late Tomiyama Kei (Karasawa Susumu) played Kongming in the Sangokushi OVAs, Subaru in Ginga Tansa 2100-nen: Border Planet, Largo the Donkey in Bremen 4, the witch in Grimm Douwa: Kin no Tori, and Cú Chulainn in Yousei Ou, all Orphan releases
• The late Shiozawa Kaneto (Kurahashi Eiji) played Iason in Ai no Kusabi, Rock Holmes in Fumoon, and Shiina in Chameleon (all Orphan releases), as well as the egotistic comic relief Shin in Hiatari Ryouko and numerous other roles.
• Sakamoto Chika (Yasuda Yumiki) played Campanella in Night on the Galactic Railway, the title role in Tsuruhime, Nonoko in Tobira wo Akete, Tendonman in the Soreike! Anpanman franchise, and Agumon in the Digimon franchise. She appeared as Suzume's erstwhile love interest, Katagiri-kun, in Stop!! Hibari-kun, an Orphan release.
• Kamiya Akira (Yamanaka Kentarou) is best known for the title roles in the City Hunter properties and the Kinnikuman franchise, as well as the Sayaka's ambivalent boyfriend, Kazamatsuri, in Yawara! He played Sergeant Zim in Starship Troopers and stole the show as the lecherous robot Chiraku in Hoshi Neko Full House, both Orphan releases.
• The late Kitamura Kouichi (Coach Nakao) played Paolon, the intelligent spaceship in Hi-Speed Jecy, Professor, the wise old cat in the Ultra Nyan OVAs, and appeared in Hidamari no Ki and Dokushin Apartment Dokudami-sou, all Orphan releases.

The director, Sugii Gisaburou, has done many outstanding shows, including other Mitsuru Adachi series (Touch and Hiatari Ryouko); Nozomi Witches and Hidamari no Ki (both Orphan projects); and several recent movies.

Moho Kareshi translated the dialog and songs. laalg checked the dialog translation and added many additional signs. Sunachan checked the song translations. ninjacloud timed. I edited and typeset. BeeBee, Topper3000, and VigorousJammer did QC. Erik of Piyo Piyo productions encoded from his Japanese laserdisc box set. Because of all the chain link fences, filtering the show proved unusually difficult and time-consuming; you can read all about it in Erik's torrent. Erik also pointed out the strange art style - featureless backgrounds, limited color palette, lack of detail. Budget limitations? Stylistic choice? Hard to say.

So the World Series may be over for now, but we'll always have Koushien. You can too, by getting Nine: Original Ban from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.

Miyuki, Complete (with Spoilers)

'Twas the night before Christmas...

FroZen(-Evil) has released the 37th and final episode of Miyuki. It's taken close to two years to do 37 episodes, or roughly an episode every three weeks. The team has stayed remarkably constant from start to finish:

• Translation: laalg
• Translation check: Tsubasa (1-30), kokujin-kun (30-37)
• Timing: Juggen (mostly), limpakos, Skr
• Karaokes: Juggen
• Editing: Collectr
• Typesetting: kokujin-kun
• QC: CP (all), Saji, sangofe, getfresh, limpakos, konnakude
• RC: Juggen
• Encoding: Skr
• Raw provider: CP (R2J DVDs)

Special thanks to getfresh for providing the original Miyuki no Tamari fansub scripts as a starting point for episodes 1-8, and to laalg for translating all 37 episodes in less than two months in the winter of 2013. The name change from FroZen-EviL to FroZen was due to some unimportant "dorama" in the team; Live-Evil staffers participated throughout. I've already discussed why Miyuki proceeded more slowly than Yawara! Given that the show aired in 1983, I don't think the delay matters all that much.

Perhaps of greater concern to viewers is that the series simply stops, with everything up in the air. The protagonist, Wakamatsu Masato, is still torn between the two Miyukis, although there's a hint about his ultimate direction. His sister is still being pursued by a host of inappropriate suitors. At least Kashima Miyuki is no longer slapping him every episode.

It's not surprising that Miyuki seemed to peter out. The anime didn't have a linear story line and adapted chapters from the manga sort of randomly. By the end of its third season, the TV series had plundered the first nine volumes more or less completely and run out of material. Rather than tack on an "anime-original" ending, the TV series just stopped. Perhaps the creators hoped to do a fourth season when the manga completed its run. It didn't happen.

So as a public service, I hereby present some Official Miyuki Spoilers! Yes, dear viewer, you don't have to be left in suspense any longer. In volume 11, an old friend of Masato, a talented soccer player named Sawada Yuuichi, returns to Japan and ends up staying in the Wakamatsu household. He falls in love with Wakamatsu Miyuki and proposes to her. She agrees to marry him, and her brother gives his consent. However, at the wedding ceremony, Kashima Miyuki learns that the Wakamatsu siblings are not related by blood and goes to Hokkaido to sort out her feelings. Then Masato breaks down and confesses his love for his stepsister. They run off together, eventually getting married in the Philippines, where his father is living. In Hokkaido, Kashima Miyuki encounters Sawada Yuuichi. The implication is that Kashima and Sawada will eventually pair up. And everyone lives happily ever after, I guess. Your mileage may vary.

In a previous blog entry, I was rather hard on the show, because I was suffering from "Adachi Mitsuri overload" as well as frustration about how long both Miyuki and Hiatari Ryoukou were taking to get done. In retrospect, Miyuki turns out to be a fun slice-of-life comedy, typical of the more innocent era in which it aired. The characters are engaging, the comedy is broad and straightforward, and the Serious Development is confined to the very last episode. There are are certainly elements I find questionable - such as the various adult men who lust after Wakamatsu Miyuki - but I can chalk that up to the times and to Japanese culture. I'm glad that Miyuki is available to an English-speaking audience at last.

FroZen-EviL isn't done (we're not quite dead yet). We're slowly gearing up for the Yawara! BluRays. We'll keep the joint venture name, even though Frostii is moribund, and the boundaries between Saizen, Orphan, Live-eviL, Soldado, and several other "back catalog" groups are becoming increasingly difficult to find. Whatever their official homes, this team is a great crew to work with, and I hope we can keep our winning streak going.

Adachi Mitsuru Overload

I've been working on Adachi Mitsuru series for a long time, seemingly forever. Hiatari Ryoukou started up more than two-and-a-half years ago; Miyuki, more than 18 months ago. Frankly, I didn't expect them to take all that long, based on Yawara, but for "reasons," the projects have stalled out repeatedly. Working on them in parallel has introduced a sense of perpetual deja vu, because one Adachi series looks very much like another, and nowhere is this more true than Hiatari Ryoukou and Miyuki.

Both shows are slice-of-life comedies, at the center of which is a love triangle. In Hiatari Ryoukou, the heroine, Kishimoto Kasumi, is torn between her long-term boyfriend, Muraki Katsuhiko, now a college student, and a boy who lives at her boarding house and attends her high school, Takasugi Yuusaku. In Miyuki, the hero, Wakamatsu Masoto, is torn between his high-school crush, Kashima Miyuki, and his newly returned step-sister, Wakamatsu Miyuki, to whom he is conveniently not related by blood. The character designs are interchangeable, with Yuusaku a dead ringer for Masoto, and Kasumi a dead ringer for Wakamatsu Miyuki. (That's a big spoiler for who will end up with whom, by the way.) Both shows feature some amount of high-school baseball, Hiatari Ryoukou fairly seriously, Miyuki just as incidental color. In both shows, the comic sidekick (Mikimoto Shin in Hiatari, Muraki Yoshio in Miyuki) is played by the same seiryuu, Shiozata Kaneto. Hiatari even makes a cameo appearance on a TV screen in episode 30 of Miyuki. See why I'm confused? By the way, so is the mangaka: in a recent interview, Adachi was unable to tell his own heroes apart.

One difference is that Hiatari Ryoukou is actually a complete version of the manga (when the movie is thrown in), but Miyuki stops about two-thirds of the way through. (The manga is completely scanlated, if you want to find out how it all ends.) Perhaps the 1983 audience wouldn't support five cours of Adachi Mitsuri, but after the smashing success of Touch in 1985, there was enough interest to see Hiatari Ryoukou through until the end. Besides, the characters in Hiatari are indistinguishable visually from the characters in Touch, so perhaps the audience thought they were watching the same show. Adachi would revisit the themes of baseball and a love triangle in Slow Step and H2, before moving on to other patterns.

I'd like to move on as well; I've had enough of Adachi for a while. (No, I'm not going to marathon Touch any time soon.) For one thing, Yawara! is out on BluRay, an event which cries out for a pristine new version. If I have to spend close to three years on a series, I'd rather spend it with Yawara-chan and Jigoro, Sayaka and Shinnosuke, Jody, Fujiko, Matsuda and the rest than a cast of characters neither I nor the author can tell apart. I'm sure both Hiatari and Miyuki are enjoyable in their own way, but long acquaintance has stamped out all the fun for me.