Tonight on GeekNights, we review The Ancient Magus' Bride (Mahō Tsukai no Yome). You may recall we pre-reviewed it on Judge Anime by its Cover. In the news, Sony acquires Funimation, and we consider the state of physical media.
Things of the Day
Episode Links
Actually listened to this while doing chores, and y’all fucked up: Or, rather, you made the easy mistake of watching the miniseries first, which was a prequel for people who had already read the manga, hence the not actually introducing any of the characters.
If you want better plot with less atmospheric shots, just read the manga. The characters develop in some rather interesting ways.
P.S: how did you guys mistake the magus for a human?
He’s got a human body. The anime that we saw told us pretty much literally nothing about him. He covered his skull head at one point. Stories about people who get cursed or something and then have to cover their faces are pretty common, and this seemed like it was following the trope. The show provided no information to the contrary.
As for it being a prequel, Crunchyroll just says episode 1, episode 2, etc. There is no indication that this prequel for manga readers is somehow not just the beginning of the show.
There is a tip-off in that the episodes are numbered 1-2-3-1-2-3-4, but it is an easy miss. Just an explanation of the lack of characterization in those eps.
I suppose Elias being definitely not human is an early spoiler (episode 5-6 I guess).
I also got the booray drive when building my second HTPC because it was $0 more. Getting booray to play on a PC is a fucking pain in the ass, because the codec is expensive, and not worth it financially for MS to bake it into Windows. And every video app, even VLC, claims they can handle it, but they all don’t work for shit. You will wind up having to pay actual money for some awful “professional” DVD/bluray player software
I had a similar issue when buying an external drive when replacing my HDD with an SSD in my laptop. Why not upgrade from DVD burner to BlueRay burner?
Turns out the blueray decoder cost something like 100 dollars per year to license, so wasn’t included in the cost of the drive. The software that cane with it included a license for a year, so that was fine, until the year was up. In that time I only watched three blueray disks on my laptop, so wasn’t going to pay anything to keep doing it.
Thankfully it was still possible to rip a blueray when I needed to later, using handbrake or some other software, but of course the ease of use wasn’t low enough to throw in a disk any time I wanted to watch one.
We get blueray now and then, but we still use a blueray player as our surround sound amp attached to our TV. I wouldn’t want to rely on the external drive.
That is exactly why I never even considered blu-ray. My Internet is so fast, pirating a rip is faster than ripping.