7.4 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Fifteen-year-old Kenshi Masaki has been taken from his home planet, transported to a galaxy far, far away, and captured by a gorgeous princess! This royal beauty quickly claims Kenshi as her personal servant - and lends him out to all the lecherous ladies at her prestigious boarding school. On the rare occasion Kenshi doesn't have his hands full with a curvaceous coed, he can be found training for the intergalactic mecha battle royale looming on the horizon. Helping the princess save her planet is Kenshi's ticket home, but losing means he'll be stuck scrubbing backs in the interstellar sauna for the rest of his life!
Starring: Hiro Shimono, Madoka Yonezawa, Natsuko Kuwatani, Ayumi Tsunematsu, Junko NodaAnime | 100% |
Foreign | 90% |
Comedy | 25% |
Action | 24% |
Romance | 19% |
Sci-Fi | 17% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1
English: Dolby TrueHD 5.1
Japanese: Dolby TrueHD 5.1
English
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Five-disc set (2 BDs, 3 DVDs)
DVD copy
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 3.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
You might want to call it “Bewitched Syndrome”, namely the sudden change of a major character in a long
running series with absolutely no explanation given to the audience, which is left to simply accept this "new world
order". Bewitched had its share of these changes, most notably Dick Sargent replacing Dick York as
Samantha Stephens’ husband in the final three years of the long running series, though a number of other supporting
characters had seen two (or more) actors playing the same role over the course of the show. But anime fans tuning
into Tenchi Muyo!: The War on Geminar without foreknowledge of the series may be surprised to find out there
isn’t a different actor playing the same character (this being animated fare, after all), but a whole new character
in the lead position, despite the perhaps misleading title. The Tenchi Muyo! universe is one of the most
sprawling in the entire history of anime, so much so that even longtime fans can sometimes have a hard time keeping
track of the various series, OVAs and feature films. The past year has seen a number of released of Tenchi Muyo!
product on both DVD and Blu-ray, including:
Tenchi Muyo!: OVA Series
and
Tenchi Muyo!: Movie
Collection
which includes these three titles:
Tenchi Muyo!: Movie
Collection
Tenchi Muyo!
Daughter of Darkness
Tenchi Muyo in Love 2
(Part of the confusion that attends the movie releases at least is the weird numbering system that seems to defy logic.)
And so the first thing to know about Tenchi Muyo!: War on Geminar is that there is in fact no Tenchi.
The lead character in this amusing if somewhat repetitive series is Tenchi’s half brother Kenshi Masaki, a teenaged kid
who is spirited away to another world where he finds himself involved in both some quasi-harem shenanigans as well
as a mecha fueled internecine battle scenario. The series is often silly in the traditional Tenchi Muyo!
manner, but which attempts at least to develop its own unique identity and, as the series progresses, introduce a
distinctive mythology that adds to the ever burgeioning Tenchi Muyo! universe.
Tenchi Muyo!: War on Geminar is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of FUNimation Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Though this bears the typical FUNimation imprimatur of being an HD native source, I personally have to wonder if perhaps this is another case of a pre-upconverted source being labeled as HD simply because it was provided to FUNimation in that format. While there's nothing horrible here in terms of outright stair stepping or similar "SD give aways", the overall image is really peculiarly soft, even fuzzy, something that detracts from some winning animation. There's good use of distinctive character designs and some good, if minor, CGI elements which frequently are utilized to add some dimensional depth to the otherwise fairly flat presentation. Colors are nicely robust and well saturated, which helps to at least minimally offset the omnipresent softness of this presentation.
Tenchi Muyo!: War on Geminar features Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mixes in English and Japanese. The mixes here are quite similar, though the English dub sounds at least relatively more aggressively mixed, especially during the noisy mecha sequences. There's good surround activity in most episodes, though those with a heavier action element tend to fare best in this regard. Dialogue and the nice score are very cleanly presented and are well prioritized. Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is quite wide.
I have a fairly soft spot in my heart for the original Tenchi Muyo! and that probably means I've given more slack to this newest outing than I might have otherwise. Similarly, my hunch is those who have the same fondness for Tenchi will find enough in Kenshi's story to warrant checking out this series, despite its flaws, while those who haven't yet been initiated to the wild and wooly Tenchi universe will probably find this outing one big yawn. Even longtime Tenchi fans will have to have a certain amount of patience, as Tenchi Muyo!: War on Geminar is awfully slow going at the start, with too many characters introduced too randomly and too much of a bifurcated approach that never quite settles on being a harem show or a mecha show.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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デート・ア・ライブIV / Season Four
2022
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Suzumiya Haruhi no shôshitsu / 涼宮ハルヒの消失
2010
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2010
Limited Edition: The Complete Series
1992-1995
To LOVEる -とらぶる-
2008-2015