Doukyuusei 2, or, One Thing Leads to Another

Orphan has just released a soft-core h-anime OVA series, Doukyuusei (Classmates) 2. This is not as far afield as it might seem: one of Orphan's very first projects was Kage (Shadow), a beautiful and very violent h-anime that was abandoned midway. However, Doukyuusei 2 is not technically an orphan project; no English fansub group ever started on it. So how come?

The best answer I can offer is that one thing leads to another. In this case, Orphan redid the subs for a three-episode OVA called Sotsugyusei, which is a sequel to Doukyuusei 2. The former made very little sense, because the episodes were interwoven with events and characters from the latter. So it seemed like a reasonable idea to translate the prequel and thus have the entire series in English. Raws were available, and notwithstanding the subject matter, the project got underway.

Doukyuusei 2 has an interesting history. Made initially as a set of hentai OVAs, in 1988 it was turned into a series for broadcast TV by the simple expedient of excising the sex scenes. This was easy to do, as there was no more than one scene per episode, typically at the end. According to Anime News Network, Doukyuusei 2 was the first eroge to be turned into a broadcast TV series. If it seems utterly generic today, that's because the eroge genre has been plundered repeatedly for harem and moe series over the last fifteen years.

Doukyuusei 2 features a single male protagonist, Kondou Makoto, and a bevy of females. One, Narusawa Yui, is Kondou's childhood friend and the main female character. There are a host of other girls, as well as several male sidekicks - the perverted photographer Yoshiki, the rich snob Aritomo, the tongue-tied athlete Ayako - who are there solely for comic relief. The story starts out in "girl of the week" mode, with Makoto providing help, consolation, and sexual healing to a different girl in each episode, but it eventually settles down into a semi-coherent plot about Makoto's pursuit of Izumi the archer and Yui's brokenhearted reaction. After the usual manufactured crises, and some flashback padding to stretch the series to twelve episodes, (spoiler alert) true love triumphs.

Technically, Doukyuusei 2 is uncensored because, as is typical of h-anime of that era, all of the "naughty bits" are concealed by blankets or obscured by careful angles. Not a single scene is pixellated or needs to be. Orgasms are shown symbolically, with a scattering of sakura petals, lightning flashes, breaking waves, or rain showers. If Yosuga no Sora is not considered hentai, then this isn't either.

There's one more set of OVAs in this series, Doukyuusei: Climax. We're in the process of finishing it up.

P.S. All the Internet raws for the Doukyuusei series are terrible. If you have better raws, please let me know.

Final Yawara! Bits and Bobs

FroZen-Evil had had a last Yawara! fling by subtitling the 15 minute extra that came with the R2J DVDs. It's a documentary/promotion, combining live action footage of the voice actors in the studio with a couple of commercials, an interview with the mangaka, an episode preview, and the wonderful first OP "Miracle Girl" and ED "Stand by Me."

I've also put up a torrent of the four original soundtrack albums from the TV series:

• Yawara! Original Soundtrack (1990)
• Yawara! Sound Selection (1991)
• Yawara! Songs (1992)
• Yawara! Memories (1992)

I want to thank my fellow fansubber doll_licca for obtaining and ripping these wonderful souvenirs of the show.

And that, I think, is it for Yawara! and me. There's more audio material out there - the soundtrack from the "Wimpy Kids" movie, for example - but I'll let others take up the chase at this point. It's been great fun, but now it's time to move on to other shows. Sayonara, Yawara-chan, and arigatou.

Nagasarete Airantou

I don't know why I (and many other fansubbers) feel such affection for Nagasarete Airantou, a 2007 comedy series. It's a harem show, and it conforms to almost every cliche of the genre, from the clueless hero to the wholesome female lead to the connivers and naifs who make up the rest of the cast. Its premise is as simple as can be. A teenage boy (Ikuto) is stranded on an island full of girls, from which he can't escape due to whirlpools, tornados, sea dragons, and other convenient topographic features. Said boy reacts like every harem lead, harboring no impure thoughts and getting nosebleeds whenever any of the girls shows an inch too much skin. Stir and repeat for 26 episodes. Still, I like it.

The show plays it straight. There are no knowing asides or winks to the audience. The fanservice is frequent, but there's no more skin on display in the DVDs than in the original TV broadcast. The comedy is character-driven, with each of the main female characters (Suzu, Ayane, Machi, Rin, Chikage, Mei Mei, and Shinobu) given at least one episode devoted to them. The Serious Development that all anime comedies must display in their last three episodes is kept fairly light-hearted. And although the show ends as it starts - with Ikuto being pursued by every nubile girl on the island - there has been some progress: Ikuto and Suzu (the wholesome one) realize that they have formed a bond. Now they'll have to defend it from a hundred other girls and the village elder, who is exceedingly keen to have lots of grandchildren.

The voice cast is stellar. Shimono Hiro first demonstrated as Ikuto the near-hysterical teen-aged boy voice he would bring to Baka to Test and The World God Only Knows, not to mention Momoo the masochistic dog-god in Binbougami ga. Horie Yui, as Suzu, played another of the numerous good girls who have dotted her career. I find Shiraishi Ryoko's turn as Rin very appealing; she's better known for her role as Kaede in the Negima series and a string of male roles, including Hayate the Combat Butler and Kyousuke in My Sister is an Osaka Mama. Takahashi Mikako, as the sinister Machi, Chiba Saeko as the hysterical Ayane, and many others contribute to making the tropes in the harem come to life.

Nagasarete Airantou has been on my list of shows to redo for a very simple reason: the original subtitles, by Ayako, are dismal. The original editor believed that every new line should start with a capital letter, even if the previous one ended in a comma or nothing at all. The DVD version by Polished Fansubs used the Ayako subtitles pretty much unchanged.  The cumulative impact of all the errors made the show unwatchable for me; I never got past episode 7 during the original TV run.

I started on the premise that I would just redo the editing, but when I started, I found that the timing was badly off as well. Timing is not my forte, so the project languished for three years. Then my heartfelt plea for a real timer brought archdeco, from FFF, onto the team. At the same time, laalg had returned to translating, and she agreed to translation check. Finally, CP and Saji from the Yawara! project signed up to do QC, and things really started to move.

The actual flow, starting from the Polished scripts, was as follows:

• Re-timing, including karaoke retiming (archdeco).
• Translation check (laalg).
• Re-editing and additional typesetting (Collectr)
• QC (CP, Saji)

The colored subtitles have been retained, mostly because the team thought of going over to a more modern scheme of Main, Overlap, Thought, Flashback too late in the process. They lend a distinctly 2007 feel to the result.

The translation changes have not been extensive, but some serious errors were found and corrected. For example, when Rin, the bashful and ultra-strong island carpenter, is introduced, there's an onscreen sign that Ayako translated as "bisexual type." Actually, it says, "Popular with girls." Rin is not attracted to other women. In fact, she's quite bothered by the attention she gets from the other girls on the island.

Another change has been the treatment of "danna," which is the word Rin uses to refer to Ikuto. This can mean mister, guest, or husband, but it doesn't mean "master," which is how Ayako translated it when it first appeared. (Carpenters would call their master 棟梁, touryou.) Because Ikuto doesn't react to the word until Rin explains what she means (at which point he has a nosebleed), it is translated as "mister" before that point, and "Hubby" thereafter.

Some other points:

• Ep4 - Ooshigearu is actually Ushigaeru, the great American bullfrog.
• Ep9 - "Is this a comedy sketch?" A classic comedy trope where a metal tub falls on the head of a comedian after he says or does something funny or stupid.
• Ep10 - Soumen are very thin wheat noodles. Hiyashi Udon is a type of cold udon noodles topped with various ingredients (mostly vegetables). Yakisoba are fried noodles. Onigiri are rice balls.
• Ep15 - "I've got a feeling I've seen this before." Mei Mei's title page is a parody of Toei Animation's standard opening screen.
• Ep17 - Shinobu's cow mascot is "Bifuteki," which is slang for beefsteak. Ayako had rendered it as Beef Jerky.
• Ep21 - A tanuki is a raccoon dog. In Japanese folklore, tanuki are believed to have shape-shifting abilities.
• Ep23 - Suiheiri etc. A mnemonic for memorizing chemcal elements: 水兵リーベ僕の船 (I'm a sailor, Libe is my ship.) Sui{hydrogen} hei{He} ri{Li} be{Be} bo {B} ku{C} n{N} o{O} fu{F} ne{Ne}.

The editing changes have been extensive. Aside from cleaning up the grammar and punctuation, I've attempted to remove the overuse of impersonals and passive voice. I also corrected a number of inconsistencies in the use of the colored styles, particularly for minor characters, and in names. Some of the episode titles have been changed, and the romanization has been made consistent. Most of Ayako's translation notes were removed by Polished, and I've only added a few back that make essential plot points or cultural references.

There's a fair amount of additional typesetting. Signs have been added in almost every episode, but the really difficult ones are done "Yawara" style with {\an8}Sign: typesetting. The main title screen has been typeset, and fansub credits have been added as well.

Nagasarete Airantou is the longest project Orphan Fansubs has ever attempted, and the time and effort it took makes me even more appreciative of the "one-man band" shops, like Polished, ReDone, and Jumonji-giri. I could not have done it without the help of archdeco, laalg, CP, and Saji. After this, Orphan has one more twelve episode series to finish, and then it's back to shorter shows. Life's too short, alas, to rescue every bad set of subtitles that are out there.

Dallos

Dallos is a four-part science-fiction show often called the first OVA (original video animation, or direct-to-DVD release) in history. Orphan Fansubs retranslated the show at the request of BakaBT's Al_Sleeper. His request was entirely justified; the existing subs are pretty inaccurate. The new translation is by laalg; I did the editing, retiming, and typesetting (not much); CP and Saji QC'd. The raws are by AFR. The aspect ratio is  712:480 anamorphic; on playback, it shows as 712:528 (4:3). (Thanks to Tyroz for pointing out that the aspect ratio is correct.)

Like most of the shows that Orphan works on, Dallos is no neglected masterpiece. Other reviewers have pointed out its faults - the low-budget animation, the cheesy background music, the stock characters, the derivative plot. Accordingly, I don't see any reason to re-iterate them. Instead, I'd like to focus on other aspects.

Japanese science fiction is often a commentary on contemporary Japanese society. Dallos posits not only a conflict between the oppressed settlers on the Moon and the Earth government, but also between the original generation of settlers, who came from Earth and still see it as their home, and the third generation, who were born on the Moon and know no other home. The "ojii-sans" (old-timers) worship the mysterious machine Dallos as a god; the youngsters consider it useless. While the old-timers will, if pushed hard enough, resist with traditional means (slowdowns, strikes), they will not resort to violence against "mother Earth" - their ties and their sense of indebtedness are too strong. On the other hand, the youngsters (called guerrillas in the show) see only the injustices in their lives and are determined to fight back. Is this, perhaps, a reflection of the conflict in Japanese society between the generation that fought and lost World War II in the name of a god-Emperor, and the post-war generation that knew nothing of it, regarded the Emperor as an irrelevant symbol, and began rebelling in the 60s?

This interesting dynamic is undermined by several major problems, though. The first is the title "character", the god-machine Dallos. As long as it remains inert, it works effectively as a means of contrasting the attitudes between the generations, and Dallos maintains a remarkably even-handed view of the generational conflict. However, when it begins to function as a deus-ex-machina, its value as a symbol is lost, and it becomes just a mechanical plot contrivance.

Second, the story stops just when it seems ready to start. Dallos only covers the first clash between the guerrillas and the government. It ends in a temporary truce forced by Dallos's nick-of-time intervention. The guerrillas intend to continue fighting. The Earth government concludes it must use greater force. And the show just stops. Perhaps Dallos was intended as a precursor of a TV series that would continue the storyline, but in its present state, the ending is a major letdown, and the final shot as much a nuisance as a mystery.

Dallos needs to be viewed in the context of early 1980s science-fiction, before the creative explosion started by Akira and other anime sci-fi masterpieces. As with Submarine 707R (another Orphan project), don't expect too much of it. It's intermittently entertaining. That's really the ultimate verdict.

Second-System Syndrome

Close to 40 years ago, Fred Brooks wrote one of the classic tomes about managing computer projects, The Mythical Man Month. His best-known observation was that communications cost in a project rises exponentially with the number of people, so that adding additional people to a project doesn't speed it up as much as one might expect, and that beyond a certain point, adding people will actually slow a project down. This is best summed up in his pithy saying, "Adding more people to a late project makes it later." It's the reason that startups can outperform big companies, and it's as true today as it was in the 1970s.

But Brooks had other telling observations, and one of my favorites is about "Second System Effect." Brooks noted that teams which had been successful with their first project often failed spectacularly at the second. He hypothesized that during the first project, a teams would proceed cautiously and put aside most suggestions for frills and enhancements. Then during the second project, all these stored-up geegaws got piled into the design, resulting in, as he put it, "a big pile."

I'm seeing this at work in an entirely different arena, namely anime fansubbing. As I've noted before, the FroZen-EviL team that did Yawara defied the odds (and the lackadaisical tendencies of all three parent groups) by finishing 66 episodes in little over a year. The team did this by keeping the staff constant and small, and by maintaining a ruthlessly simple workflow.

FroZen-EviL was supposed to be a one-and-done for Yawara, but the experience was so enjoyable that almost everyone wanted to try another project. After some debate, the team chose Miyuki, a slice-of-life show from a decade ago that had been dropped by several different groups. Yawara's translator had to bow out for real-life responsibilities, but the team found another translator, who ripped through all 37 episodes in under a month. Further, the original Miyuki Fansubs scripts were available as a reference for the first eight episodes. Everything seemed good to go... and then, dreaded second-system syndrome appeared.

It turned out that everyone on the team (except me) had been harboring deep thoughts about improvements in the process and the outcome. So many things in Yawara could have been done better: real karaokes instead of line-timing; real typesetting instead of "{\an8}Sign:"; more QCs to get every last nuance correct and error out. So more people were brought to implement all these improvements. The results were just what you might expect. Whereas a typical Yawara script went through three revisions (original edit, QC applied, RC applied) and required less than a week from translation to release, the first Miyuki script went through at least twenty revisions and required close to two months. A textbook example of Second System Effect.

I think everyone is a bit chastened by what happened on the first episode. I believe that the workflow for subsequent episodes will be more disciplined. After all, the purpose of life is to develop good judgment; and good judgment is a result of bad experiences. At least I hope so.

Goodbye, Yawara-chan (For Now)

FroZen-Evil has just released Yawara! The Atlanta Special. This actually wraps up the entire storyline, showing Yawara competing at the Atlanta Olympics in 1992. (Yes, the TV show said she was going to the Barcelona Olympics in 1988, but the TV show didn't finish until those Olympics were over.) It also brings conclusions, of sorts, for all the characters in the show.

This release has a complicated history. The previously available raw was just terrible - a VHS rip that had been brightened far too much and showed obvious signs of tape stretch. The team's attempts to find a better source turned up nothing for a long time, until finally a copy of the LaserDisc release was offered at an auction in Japan, at an incredibly exorbitant price. Despite the cost, one of the team members bought it. Getting it shipped required working through a third-party broker, which added further delays and costs. Finally, the disc was shipped from Japan via Europe to the US, where Suzaku from Live-Evil has a working LaserDisc setup based on an industrial-grade player. Then came further problems with ripping the disc. Most video capture cards these days apply compression in hardware, but Suzaku wanted a pure, uncompressed rip, so that filtering, if any, could be done in software. The rip looked rather dark, but any attempt to brighten it resulted in the sort of wash-out that plagues the VHS raw floating around the Internet. So the encode is, so to speak, sweet and unfiltered.

Our intrepid translator, kokujin-kun, translated the script. In addition, to honor the project's status as the final Yawara release, he fully typeset all the signs, with motion tracking. The results look very nice indeed.

All the usual suspects worked on this release; I won't repeat their names. I would like to thank the newest member of the team, Suzaku, for encoding. I also must thank CP for engineering the acquisition of the source material, which required coordinating buyers and shippers on three continents.

So that's it for now. Apparently there's an omake on the DVDs that's never been subbed before; perhaps it will get done at some point. The original soundtracks will show up one of these days, and we'll release them as well. Meanwhile, the team is moving on to another project, but that will have to wait for another blog post.

Coming "Soon" from Orphan Fansubs

Thanks to a lot of help from translator colleagues, notably laalg, my old friend from Yoroshiku Fansub days, convexity, from the Tezuka Osamu projects, archdeco, from FFF, and macros74, another fan of old and mistreated anime, Orphan Fansubs will be releasing some new, never before subtitled shows, as well as proper subtitles for several others. Shows in the queue include:

• Haruka Naru Toki no Naka de "Hachiyoushou" special, "Where the Heart Belongs." The DVD release of Haruka Naru included many specials: eight alternate endings or omake (one for each bishie in the show), two extra episodes (the so-called "Ten" OVA and this one), and a recap. The alternate endings and the "Ten" OVA were subtitled by Kuruizaki way back when, but this is the first English translation of "Where the Heart Belongs." The subtitles are from Orphan Fansubs; the raw is from ZaZa raws; the karaokes are from the original C1 Anime fansub of the TV series. I don't plan on subbing the recap. RELEASED.
• Haruka Naru Toki no Naka de 2 OVA. This three episode OVA is based on a later game in the Haruka Naru series and has a different set of characters from the TV show. However, both the heroine and the eight Hachiyou are interchangeable with the TV characters, and the plot premise is identical. The subtitles were translated from the AnimeFreakz German DVD rip by macros74 and then checked, retimed, edited, and styled by Orphan Fansubs. The raw is from AnimeFreakz and unfortunately has a single broken frame in both episodes 2 and 3. If anyone has access to a better source, please let me know. RELEASED.
• Urusei Yatsura OVA, "The Obstacle Course Swim Meet". This recent OVA, issued in honor of the 50th anniversary of Shounen Jump Sunday, has been translation checked, retimed, styled, and typeset. Raw from dmonhiro. RELEASED.
• Sotsugyousei. When this three episode OVA was released by ARR, it included unintelligible English subtitles that were apparently machine translated from Chinese as well as a Russian audio track. The Orphan version will include a new translation that has been retimed, edited, styled, and typeset. The raw is from DestroyKing. RELEASED.
• Dallos. A request from a colleague on BakaBT. The existing subtitles are inaccurate and badly timed. The Orphan version will include a new translation that has been retimed, edited, styled, and typeset. The raw is from the existing BakaBT torrent. RELEASED.
• Nagasarete Airantou. Probably the oldest project I have. Polished Subs put the Ayako subs to DVD raws, but the flaws in the original subtitles remain: bad timing and editing. The subs are being translation checked, retimed, and re-edited. This will be credited as Orphan-Polished. RELEASED.
• D4 Princess. This utterly forgettable short (8 minute episode) series has been abandoned several times, and the VHS(!) fansubs are not very accurate. The Orphan version will include a checked translation of the first six episodes, and new translations of the others. The raw is being encoded from R2J DVDs. Status: Translation: done; encoding: 1-6. We might use tipota's excellent raws for this.
• Usagi Drop Live Action. The existing subtitles are inaccurate in spots and badly timed and edited. The Orphan version will include a checked translation that has been retimed, edited, typeset, and styled. The raw is from the existing BakaBT torrrent. (If you have a better raw, please let me know.) ON HOLD: Commie says they're going to do it.

macros74 and I are dreaming of ways to finish out Borgman 2058 and Yamato 2520, both of which have one untranslated episode.

(Updated 16-Jun-2013)