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I've been waiting to watch Silent Möbius ever since I
downloaded a 60Mb mpeg of the opening. The music was
cool, the characters seemed interesting, and there was
a lot of action going on. For some reason, I believe
there was some big drama about the licensing of the
show, but Bandai has thankfully gotten everything
sorted out.
Overall the series is pretty cool so far, mind you
I’ve only watched the first 9 episodes. Most of the
beginning is standard fare for sci-fi mystic anime
types (Blue Seed) and honestly, none of the characters
really start developing until the aptly named episode
four, “Break In”. After the initial bump of the
series introduction, the story starts to become more
into view and the characters start to become more
loveable. Personally, I can relate to Kiddy’s sleeping
habits. Unfortunately, not many of my sleep mates
have the intuition and reflexes that Katsumi does (I’m
sorry Liz!). Once all the main players start
interacting and show more of their lives, the show
takes on some charm that it needs to get through the
somewhat... bland plot-lines.
For people concerned with video quality, this series
seems to be a bit of a mixed bag. Some parts are
really well done with crisp and smooth animation that
was obviously done with computer colouring and such.
But then there are parts that look very very dated,
particularly in episodes three and four, including
quite a bit of screen jitter when scenes change.
Thankfully the jitters go away after episode 4,
otherwise I would be telling all of you to stay away
from the series. I am wondering if maybe there were
three or four development groups working on this
series and they were all working on different cuts on
the same scenes and that’s the explanation of the
inconsistent animation styles. Or maybe everyone is
supposed to look different every few seconds. I don’t
know.
The main menu for the first disc is annoying. The
music that plays during the main menu is the opening
song which is alright (if not a bit jarring when you
first put the disc in) but it's only about 30 seconds
of it and it just cuts out mid-verse. Annoying. The
2nd disc isn’t as bad and plays for about
40 seconds and then fades out.
All the bad stuff aside, this is a pretty enjoyable
series thus far. There will be 3 volumes with Vol. 1
& 2 containing 9 episodes each, and the 3rd
volume will hold the remaining 8 episodes. Each one
is retailing for about $45 so about $135 for a whole
series isn’t bad when you consider most 6 volume sets
cost about $180. Plus Bandai is boosting its
production values and including a reversible cover, a
5 page foldout poster, and a mini comic of Silent
Möbius. So, kudos to Bandai for finally bringing this
series to DVD and for making it worthwhile. Just make
sure you keep the jitters out of the rest of the
series, please! |
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1.
North-America
Mancer
gets to put his bit here.