Animephile - Iketeru Futari

Iketeru Futari

Created/Updated 2001-06-10

Catalog Number : PIBA-1110
Manufacturer : Pioneer
Series : Iketeru Futari
Printing Date : 2000-03-24
Region : 2
Price : Y6,800
Play Time : 90 minutes
Number of Discs : 1
Number of Sides per Disc : 1
Number of Layers (side1) : 1
Number of Layers (side2) : N/A
Audio1 : Japanese Dolby Digital 2ch
Audio2 : N/A
Audio3 : N/A
Audio4 : N/A
Audio5 : N/A
Subtitle1 : N/A
Subtitle2 : N/A
Subtitle3 : N/A
Subtitle4 : N/A
Subtitle5 : N/A

Animephile Rating: D (6.5)

Video Scan Type : interlaced-TV (-2.5) - dScaler is good. What more do I need to say?
Aspect Handling : standard (-0.0)
Compression : -0.5 - Just little issues. It's probably because they crammed in 90 minutes worth of stuff into one layer. It's good though.
Video Separation : -0.0 - I don't see any problems.
Scene Transition : -0.5 - Sometimes, there are distortions on the bottom of the screen for ONE frame per transition only. Not bad.
Calibration : -0.0 - Well, I should really be taking some point off because it appears to be from LD master. However, it's done so well! It reminds me of Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou (R2, of course) transfer except better.

Comments:

Within the last shipment of almost $1,000 worth of stuff, this is the ONLY one I fell in love with. How good? Hmm, let me say it this way. CD Japan lists the LD of this series as having 112 minutes of stuff compared to 90 minutes on the DVD, so I'm going to ask around and if it has anything more, I'm going to buy the LD. How's that for an answer.
Animation appears to be by the same team that did Magical Project S (Pretty Sammy variant). It's only a guess, of course. The style is somewhat simple and yet artistically lovable. Even though much of the action scenes -- by action scenes, I mean Saji getting beaten up -- are not realistic, in general, characters and story are believable, unlike... say, Love Hina. Yeah, I've been bashing Love Hina a lot lately, but you know what? It deserves all the flame I throw at it especially because I thought I could really like it at first. I liked the first DVD. Really I did. Oops, I'm getting off topic here. So, back to the wonderful "Iketeru Futari." One of the neat things about it, although it might not matter to too many other people, is that the voice for Koizumi was done by Araki Kae. That's the same person who did Miyaka (Fushigi Yuugi) and Chibi-Usa (Sailor Moon). We all know how annoying that voice can get. BUT, her voice was absolutely positively wonderful as Koizumi. I think she should do this kind of more natural and not forced-cute voices more often.

Since this DVD made me feel better after wasting so much money on stupid anime recently, it gets a lot of images.

Image1: It's from the opening sequence. Very nice contrast and color. Unfortunately, there are horizontal noise lines with slight color bleeding due to composite handling. Stupid composite video! Bakayarou!!!
Image2: hehehe. hehe.... kawaii....
Image3: Saji and Koizumi in SD form. kawaii.... hehe....
Image4: She's cute even when she's angry.
Image5: Okay, this one.... She carries her pokebell (a.k.a. pager) in her, umm... bra. Ahem. In vibration mode. And, each time it goes off, that's her reaction. Don't forget Saji's reaction of standard nose-bleeding.
Image6: This is Saji and her girl friends' reactions to Koizumi's pokebell reaction. "Kawaii!!!"
Image7: Koizumi looking at her pokebell. SD (Semi-Deformed)
Image8: This is what happens when you take an unwilling girl into one of those photo-boxes and take a picture together.
Image9: Just a closeup of Koizumi. Notice how simple the drawing is and yet it is so nice.
Image10: We end the non-technical image show with just a nice strange image of the couple.
Image11: One and only technical capture showing transition distortion on the bottom. Well, I cropped away the rest of the image to save space.

By the way, all but the first and the last images are shrunk to 320x240 because, as much as I don't want to, I have to save space.

As usual, please excuse the jpeg artifacts.