Review for Samurai Girls (Review)

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Introduction
The first major new anime release from Manga Entertainment in 2012 isn’t actually a Manga release at all. Last year, they began distributing titles in the UK for European publisher Kazé Entertainment. Basically Kazé author the discs, set the price, and use Manga Entertainment’s infrastructure to get them onto UK retail and e-tail shelves, rather than starting up their own network from scratch. Kazé made a big splash with their entry into the UK market with Professor Layton, which proved to be one of the biggest sellers with a Manga logo for that year. After that came the Vampire Knight series, which Kazé gave a budget treatment to with low priced single volume discs offering barebones content. While I enjoyed the Vampire Knight series, I found the quality of the discs lacking, so I was interested to see just what treatment Samurai Girls would get from Kazé Entertainment, which going against the recent announcements from Manga Entertainment is coming out on DVD and Blu-ray. To sustain that Blu-ray release, Kazé have set the retail prices of both DVD and Blu-ray £10 apiece higher than the usual equivalent Manga Entertainment releases, but you can draw some comfort from this as Kazé have stated on their Twitter feed that “So the £34.99 [price] after discount guarantees that no release from Kazé announced for BD will be cancelled.”. You can also see the economy of scale become apparent for the first time with this release from Kazé, as for the first time it is a multilingual release. Shifting a minimum Blu-ray print run across Europe is easier than trying to sell it to UK audiences alone. I only received the DVD check discs for review.

I have to admit to a certain trepidation about Samurai Girls, as it occupies an anime niche that may have been a little oversubscribed last year, and also a niche that isn’t one of my favourites. It’s the sexy girls combat anime genre, one which caters to a common denominator of anime fans, with a combination of action and fan service, and the more exploitative the fan service, the more that its fans appreciate it. Last year we saw the absolutely dire Master of Martial Hearts, the dull and predictable Ikki Tousen: Dragon Destiny, the surprisingly entertaining Sekirei, while it was only Strike Witches that managed to transcend its genre. In fact this genre is so over-subscribed that Samurai Girls has to timeshare its name. This is Hyakka Ryoran: Samurai Girls, not to be confused with the completely unrelated Majikoi - Oh! Samurai Girls!, which is currently streaming on Crunchyroll (although not to the UK), and I believe is actually licensed for physical release in the US.

In this Samurai Girls, the world has followed an alternate course of history, one where the nation of Great Japan stands proudly in the world, where the Tokugawa Shogunate remained resolute and strong against all challengers, and where in the 21st Century, the Samurai still protect the nation against all its foes. Actually, in the 21st Century, the Samurai lay down the Togugawa law in all of the high schools, and they inherit the names of famous Samurai warriors of the past. All that is about to change when Muneakira Yagyu returns to Edo’s Buou Academic School to be reunited with his childhood friend Princess Sen (sister of the next heir to the Tokugawa Shogunate). Only he gets sidetracked first by a couple of young ‘rebel’ samurai, Yukimura Sanada, and Matabei Goto, who are currently wanted by the state for an ominous prediction that Yukimura made. She saw in a vision that a darkness was coming that would smother Great Japan. That prediction appears to come true when Muneakira is drawn into fleeing with Sanada and Goto from Princess Sen’s ninja assassins led by Hatori Hanzo. For Muneakira is being watched, judged, and is found worthy. There is a flash of light, and a cute, vulnerable, naked, red-haired girl literally falls into his arms. Except when she kisses him, all hell breaks loose as Master Samurai Jubei Yagyu is unleashed.

All twelve episodes of Samurai Girls are presented across 3 discs for Kazé Entertainment by Manga, along with some intriguing extra features.

Disc 1

1. The First Kiss
2. Naked Body Incarnation
3. The Identity of the Master Samurai
4. Hey, Give Me a Kiss

Disc 2

5. Here Comes the Warrior of Love!
6. The Sea Monster Attacks!
7. The Shadow Over Great Japan
8. The Slave of the Kiss

Disc 3

9. The Return of the General
10. The Prison of the Evil Eye
11. The Samurai From France
12. The Goodbye Kiss

Picture
Samurai Girls gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer onto DVD. It’s a native PAL transfer, with the 4% speedup that implies. It also means that the animation is smooth, of good, high resolution, and free of any ghosting or blended frames that the old NTSC-PAL conversions were so often plagued with, or the judder that made last year’s Vampire Knight Guilty discs so awkward to watch. There is a bit of the usual digital banding, but the one annoying issue is with aliasing and shimmer, which is more prevalent here than on the usual anime releases. It results is a slight wavering effect to fine edges that manifests strongly when the image pans or scrolls. It’s not a crippling issue, but it can be irritating at times.

Samurai Girls has a somewhat peculiar visual style that makes it stand out against the countless similar combat girl fan service offerings. Its conceit is that it’s presented as an artwork, an animated painting. There’s very much a 2D look to it, scenes and backgrounds will be presented minus perspective, often as parallax layered planes, or just a simple single 2D plane, and the pale pastels of the palette, the bold outlines of the characters call to mind ink and watercolours. It looks a little like Blade of the Immortal in tone, but the style is made all the more obvious with touches like ink blots staining the surface of the animation, with the drops flying during the action sequences, and the whole screen filling up with black ink stain during the scene transitions. It’s an arresting way of doing things, and it certainly grabs the attention.

Hopefully the Blu-ray will lack that odd shimmer, and will bring out the subdued shades to more striking effect.

Sound
Samurai Girls gets the usual options of English and Japanese, but this time joined by a French audio track as well, all three offerings in DD 2.0 Surround format, with player forced subtitles and signs in English and French depending on which audio track you pick, and from which menu. You get English or French subtitles with the Japanese audio, or English and French signs only tracks with the English and French audio. If you are hard of hearing, and want the subtitles to accompany your native language track, then these discs are of no use to you on a regular DVD or Blu-ray player. I chose the Japanese audio as always. The dialogue is clear throughout, the action comes across well enough, and the show’s catchy themes are here in their glory. I sampled the English dub and found it pretty run of the mill for English dubs, certainly there isn’t anything immediately iffy about it. A couple of subtitles, one line in episode 10, and a text caption in one of the early episodes only stay on screen for one frame, which is annoying, but not an immediately fatal flaw.

Dubtitles? The thing about UPOPs locking up a disc is that it makes it harder to check for dubtitles, or subtitles that follow the English dub. But usually I can spot dubtitles within a few minutes of watching a show, just because they vary wildly in terms of dialogue or timing compared to the Japanese audio. It was just curiosity that got me to stick a disc of Samurai Girls into my laptop and test it on VLC, which defeats the idiotic lockouts. And Samurai Girls has pseudo-dubtitles, or subtitles that seem to follow an early version of the English dub script. Fortunately the English dub from Sentai seems to be a pretty close translation of the original Japanese, so the resulting subtitles never had me quizzically scratching my head.

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