Love Hina-Volume 2: Go West (2000)

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General		Extras
Category	Anime	Biographies-Character Lyrics-Keitaro's Songbook Trailer-Madman Propaganda DVD Credits
Rating
Year Of Production	2000
Running Time	86:30 (Case: 100)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Yoshiaki Iwasaki
Studio Distributor	TV Tokyo Madman Entertainment	Starring	None Given
Case	Click
RPI	$34.95	Music	Koichi Korenaga

    This is the second volume of Love Hina. You'll find my review of the first volume, complete with background on the series, here..

    The four episodes on this disc are:

5. Wow, a Trip to Kyoto: Exciting — Keitaro and Naru sit their exam, then take off independently for Kyoto
6. Keitaro's First Kiss is With...?: Journey — trying to get Otohime home to Okinawa, the long way...
7. First Date, Keitaro's True Feeling: Nowadays — a competition for a date with Naru
8. Kendo Girl and the Legend of the Dragon Palace: Is This a Dream? — a console game takes over their dreams

    Episode titles are getting longer, something I'd not have considered likely.

    One important extra character, Mitsumi Otohime, first appears in Episode 5. She appears in a number of episodes, and there are some interesting hints to her identity which flit past without acknowledgment. The pet turtle Tama joins them in Episode 6. Another peripheral character shows up in Episode 7: Kentaro Sakata. I don't think any new characters appear in Episode 8, though.

    Su is getting an interesting catchcry: any time someone mentions a word she doesn't understand, she asks if it tastes good. We'd already seen that she eats a lot, but this makes it clear that food is a major preoccupation.

    Episode 8 gives them an excuse to show off a variety of unusual costumes, and there's a cute send up of Sailor Moon's transformation sequence. Motoko gets the worst costume, but it looks rather good on her.

    I like the way that this series offers a variety of story arcs of varying lengths, not restricting all of them to a single episode. It's also unafraid to provide closure to an idea that's lasted several episodes — very cool.

    It's very easy to see why this series was a smash-hit when it was released in Japan, and again in the US.

Video

    This DVD transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. It is not 16x9 enhanced. That is the original aspect ratio.

    The image is rather sharper than the first disc — quite sharp on close-ups, and only a touch of softness on the long shots. Film grain never seems a problem,  and there's no low-level noise.

    Colour is excellent. There are no colour-related artefacts, but there seems to be some slight ringing, leading to faint haloing on characters on occasion.

    There are no film artefacts.

    There is far less aliasing on this disc, which is good, but we still have a reasonable amount of aliasing and dot-crawl on the black lines around characters. There's no significant moire, and no MPEG artefacts. There are interlacing artefacts, but they're hard to see when watching the anime — you really need to single-step through scenes with serious motion in them to see the interlacing.

    There are two subtitle tracks. The first subtitles only signs. The second provides full subtitles of the dialogue, plus the signs. The subtitles seem well-timed, accurate, and easy to read, in the traditional yellow.

    The disc is single-sided and single-layered. All the episodes together take less than 90 minutes, so they fit comfortably onto the single layer.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The soundtrack is provided in English and Japanese, as is appropriate for anime. Both soundtracks are Dolby Digital 2.0, not surround encoded, which is a reasonable presentation of a television track. I listened to both soundtracks in full. I'm pleased to report that the English soundtrack is recorded at the correct level this time — the two soundtracks sound fairly similar.

    The English dialogue is clear and easy to understand. The Japanese dialogue sounds equally clear. Kitsune's fake deep South US accent starts to grate somewhat — that's a good reason to listen to the Japanese.

    Koichi Korenaga's score is well-suited to the on-screen action. The theme songs are from Ritsuko Okazaki. Having listened to both themes many times now, I can testify that they don't pall too quickly.

    The surrounds and subwoofer are not called upon by this soundtrack.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The menu is animated with music. It offers the episodes (by number), setup, and extras — simple and functional.

Character Photo Gallery

    This gives us a short bio for a character, plus seven images of the character. This disc only has the bio for Shinobu Maehara.

Keitaro's Songbook

    This gives us the words (in English on one page, Japanese on another) for a single song: Legendary Hot Springs Turtle. This song appears in Episode 8. They point out that it is a send-up of the song used to awaken Mothra (as in Godzilla versus Mothra, for example). It actually reminded me more of Gappa, the Triphibian Monster.

Madman Propaganda

    This is an exact repeat of the trailers on Volume 1, unfortunately.

• Sailor Moon (1:34) — this is the opening theme from the show
• Orphen (1:28) — a different trailer from the usual one — this one has no speech
• Gundam Wing W (2:00) — the Toonami trailer
• Cardcaptors (0:51) — a musical trailer
• Love Hina (1:40) — the normal trailer for this series

    The Region 1 disc was released early in 2002. The Region 4 was released in September 2002. There are a number of differences between the discs. The R4 has different artwork for the cover — apparently the R1 has a redesigned logo that caused some uproar, but I think the R4 is the original. The two discs contain the same episodes.

    The Region 4 disc is missing:

• full cast and credit listing
• poster reverse to the cover slick

    The Region 1 disc is missing:

• Madman propaganda

    Judging by reviews, the R1 has a very good transfer. I suspect it may be slightly better than the R4, but I doubt the difference would be huge, because the R4 has quite a decent transfer too.

    A funny and charming series that goes in unpredictable directions (especially when going to Okinawa!), on a well-made DVD.

    The video quality is really good, but there is still a fair bit of aliasing.

    The audio quality is good.

    The extras are quite limited, but interesting.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall