Search - Lunar Legend Tsukihime: Complete Collection on DVD

A review of ADVision's DVD re-release, not the show itself

Porcupine | 04/21/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is ADVision's re-release of the original 3-disc release of Tsukihime by Geneon Entertainment. The packaging says Sentai Filmworks, which is a new business name of ADVision, after they had financial difficulties last year.

This is a 2-disc set but don't let that worry you. Although very rare for anime re-releases, here the DVD MPEG2 video quality has surprisingly been re-authored from scratch. It's a whole new encode and is noticeably better video quality than Geneon's version. The bitrate averages around 7 megabits/s which is the ADVision standard. Most of Geneon's titles averaged around 6 megabits/s, including Tsukihime. Furthermore, most of Geneon's titles suffer from after-image motion-blurring "ghosting" problems in the video encode, which are particularly severe on dark scenes and were very noticeable in all 3 original volumes of Tsukihime. Also, volumes 1 and 2 (not volume 3) of the original Tsukihime release suffered from improperly-encoded interlacing issues, which isn't common to Geneon releases in general.

None of those problems exist in ADVision's encode. ADVision video encodes have been consistent and among the best in the R1 anime industry since they started doing their encoding in-house (so my comments don't necessarily apply to their older DVD titles that were authored by M.O.F.C, etc).

Now, as to the video CONTENT, it's the exact same as the old Geneon release. Which is perfect. By this I mean that the English cast credits which are hardcoded into the video list the same Geneon voice actors, Japanese production crew, etc, and in the exact same font, as the old Geneon release. It is just the MPEG2 video quality that has been re-encoded.

The audio content is the exact same as the old Geneon release as well. Meaning that you get both the Japanese subtitled version and the exact same English dub using the Geneon/Bang Zoom voice actors. The subtitles are based on the Geneon subtitles as well but have been slightly edited in many places, mostly minor changes, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Certain misspellings were carried over though ("yakasoku" in the ending song lyrics) so that is how we can be sure.

The subtitle font has been changed to match ADVision's standard font, which some people might not prefer. I personally prefer their font to the Geneon font used in Tsukihime. However, the Geneon font matches up better with the Geneon cast credits which have been hardcoded into the OP/ED sequences.

The menus are changed completely, which should be of no surprise (the typical DVD collection re-release tends to change the menus and reduce the number of discs, but often keeps the exact same video encodes, which is usually possible because most R1 DVDs waste over a third of a DVD-9's disc space).

The price is pretty hefty for a collection re-release, but in my opinion it was well worth the money I spent even though I already owned the Geneon DVDs, due to the better video quality."