Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Fate Unlimited Blade Works Blu-ray

I didn't had the time to see the Fate/stay night Unlimited Blade Works movie yet, but I'll review the limited Blu-ray contents:

The limited edition contains (in order from the photo):

- A box drawn by Takeuchi Takashi.
- A folder containing a bromide and two film cuts.
- A color 20 pages mini-artbook.
- The blu-ray.
- A 160 pages mini genga artbook.
-Two alternate jackets drawn by Ishihara Megumi (the Rin one) and Yamanaka Kotetsu (the Saber one).

The folder containing a bromide of Saber & Rin and the two film cuts. The film cuts are two non-consecutive film frames. I got two pretty cool ones:

Rin in the rooftop...

...and a close up of Archer.

The color mini artbook is a collection of pictures that appeared in several media (mostly magazines) to promote the movie.

Pictures that appeared at Animedia, Hobby Japan and Megami Magazine.


I find Archer pose in the bottom left picture kinda disturbing...

The genga artbook contains key animation drawings for the movie.

Despite the small format (is the same size of a blu-ray case), is considerably thick being 160 pages long.

EDIT:
Finally I watched the movie.

As extras it includes several variations of the trailers, and as expected no subtitles.
Maybe is because the first blu-ray that I watched was the gorgeous Evangelion 2.22, but I found the quality of the image average most of the time...

Except for some key scenes, the animation is only one step above a regular anime quality, and the the pace is so fast and leaves so much information behind that makes me think that this movie is incompressible as a stand alone without the background info from the VN.

The fighting scenes are fast paced and visually appealing, but if you watch closely most of the animation is sub-par... if you compare the picture above of Rin fighting (that is not by any means the worst quality) with the scene of Saber above, they seem like completely different movies.

8 comments:

Climbatize said...

You are a lucky person :)

I wanted to buy it, but I had no job, don't understand Japanese fluently ans don't even have Blue Ray reader ^^

I hope finding a good fansub, if only japanese DVD had english subtitles :)

Soth said...

I don't think "lucky" is the best word to say... while I was in Japan I lost my job and just recently got a new (shitty) one, I'm still paying debts and I can't buy stuff at the same rate I was used to. And the PS3 that I use for watching blu-ray is actually property of my brother.

Archerwannabe said...

Finally saw the movie, much better than what I was expecting. Not too much to complain about.

Now I really want this too.
But 8800 yen for what would essentially be a takeuchi illustrated box and the film frames (as I don't have a blu-ray player nor do I have plans on ever getting one, damn dvd for not having at least the Takeuchi drawn box D: ) is kinda a lot. Not to mention I can't afford one ...without drawing more loan that is :p
Need to get a job myself soon.

If I do, what are the chances of me getting a film frame you'd trade the Archer one for me?

Kypper said...

No 3D CGI Dragon ? \O/

Soth said...

@Archerwannabe: I feel you pain... and I don't really mind Archer, so I'm willing to trade it for a decent frame featuring any of the girls.

@Kypper: No, but this time we got a 3D CGI dolphin!

Archerwannabe said...

I think I'll try my luck after all :p

@Kypper: Wrong route -> wrong animal (as far as a dragon can be considered an animal).

darktruth said...

You might've seen my post on the beast's lair forum where I got two copies of the limited edition blu-ray lol. Also, I felt like the audio on the blu-ray wasn't really taken advantage of. Even though the specs states it's in Japanese Dolby 5.1 Surround TrueHD, it sounded like everything was crammed into a 2 channel stereo filter even when I set my HDTV to decode Dolby TrueHD sounds.

I dunno, maybe I need a real surround sound speaker system to get the full experience but other blu-rays I've played that have Dolby TrueHD audios sounded pretty distinct and very noticeable on my HDTV compared to the one on Fate/Stay Night's UBW blu-ray.

The two film cuts I got in my package are Rin & Saber. The Rin one is particularly beautiful as it's a cut of a frame where she's leaning against Shirou's back. Links to the two frames are below. I don't know whether I should open the 2nd copy of the le blu-ray to see what frames are enclosed though as I may sell it off someday.

Rin
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v399/darktruth/DSCN0972.jpg

Saber
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v399/darktruth/DSCN0978.jpg

Soth said...

@darktruth:

Pretty nice cuts! Both are great close-ups from key scenes.

I didn't mentioned the audio quality because the sound specs of my HDTV are pretty average and I don't have any more blu-ray disc to compare besides the Evangelion one, but is true that it doesn't sounds very remarkably.