Fansub Review: [UTW] Kamisama no Memochou (Episode 02)

This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.

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“Good friends Eighth and Kusion worked on this, so I’m expecting sexalicious subs. (>_O)b” is what I told kusion I’d start out my review like. But after watching this release, my actual opening remark is:

Good friends Eighth and Kusion worked on this, so what the hell happened?

File size: 455 MB (MKV), 210 MB (AVI)

Japanesiness: Honorifics. Words like Aniki remain as Aniki.

Timing: Strobo-timing. My eyes ;_;

Karaoke.

Typesetting. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if what I was watching was done by UTW or by the people who made the anime. Great typesetting.

She wasn’t trying to pet you. The word is “touch”, and there’s a big difference between touching and petting as the police were kind enough to inform me.

“lady neighbor”? Who says that? The male equivalent is “gentleman neighbor”, which is obviously never used in English. If the gender of the neighbor is THAT important, then make it “female neighbor”, not “lady neighbor”. But I’d honestly rather cut that out and just say “Hiro-san used to live in my neighbor’s house”.

“You must be born in”? Good gods, are those tenses fucked up.

You must have been born in Thailand.

What’s the matter, Kusion? Forgot how to capitalize proper nouns?

lol. Let’s ignore the “amass so much money” part for a second to take a look at the overall logic of it.

Amass refers to collecting money. “Was your family wealthy” is asking about

This line therefore reads (assuming you’re not an idiot who thinks the English is right): “Did your family have enough wealth for them to make all that money?”

Now, assuming this was a crazy, obscurely-made reference to the idiom “You need money to make money”, I’d let it go. But it’s not. It’s just shitty editing.

“Is your family wealthy enough for you to have that much money?” is the actual question being proposed and that is what this line should be.

What the fuck is up with this line?

Words cannot express how thoroughly disappointed I am in my nakama. This is like the day when I graduated college and realized I’d never manifest super powers.

I don’t mind a TL note here. But the Sawadee line was not TL noted for some reason even thought this was. And this line implies that sake is only used as an initiation rite. How do you explain later in the episode where they’re talking about vowing lives to one another after drinking sake? There’s a clear disconnect and this TL note should have explained that.

Shit writing.

“Keep spouting that ignorant shit and I’ll rip your goddamn heads off!” <- See? That’s how you fucking write a threat. Goddamn.

But it was clearly edited by a child.

the Kishiwada Group

Yes, it’s necessary. Surprisingly, UTW has it right in the rest of the episode.

Huh? You don’t vow your life to someone. You can pledge your life to someone, which is what I think this line is supposed to say.

“change of clothes” is singular.

“Meo, where’s your change of clothes?”

Attack of the arbitrary ellipses!

 

Watchability: Watchable. If you suck at English, you won’t notice the errors. Great typesetting helps immerse the viewer into the experience.

Overall grade: C+

Kusion, you’re a good editor. Eighth, you’re a good TL. No clue what the fuck happened. Perhaps my expectations were set a bit high (I was thinking you’d get an A- at worst), but I was super disappointed.

I’ll be taking a look at EveTaku’s release next (in a re-review) and I’ll let you all know which group has the best release.

0 thoughts on “Fansub Review: [UTW] Kamisama no Memochou (Episode 02)”

  1. “She wasn’t trying to pet you. The word is “touch”, and there’s a big difference between touching and petting as the police were kind enough to inform me.”
    That line was literally why do they “treat me like an object cared for.” Since Alice is alive and the girl tried to touch her, “pet” was ingenious and you know it!

    “lady neighbor”?
    I actually wrote “onee-san” at first, but didn’t like it. I thought about “female neighbor” sounded too unnatural in a casual conversation, though “lady” was probably even worse now that I think of it, but well, it gets the meaning across.

    “amass so much money”
    You can be living a wealthy life and still not be able to come up with that much cash. 300 million yen is more than $3 million. A huge amount and not something your can withdraw in 1 day even if it was in your bank account. I wanted to emphasize they actually accumulated that much money in cash.

    TL note: “Sawadee” was explained in the subs later in conversation a greeting in Thai. No need for such TL note.
    As for what happened later with sharing of sake, drinking sake together doesn’t make them brothers. “Share” is technically drinking from the same cup, but I didn’t want to bore the viewer with excessive details.

    I’m still trying to adjust to UTW’s style of translating to maximum accuracy, but the translation front for this ep is solid as fuck because this is technically my first speedsub ep with UTW. Raze caught one major error during QC, and even after sleep + watching the other group’s TL earlier, I only noticed one unimportant word untranslated in the entire script (the other group had over 5 major errors and bunch of minor ones, which is normal for a show without CC).

    I’ll let Kusion handle the rest. Though this script went through a lot of modification after he was done with it.

    Reply
  2. Dark_Sage, I am now your fan. I’ve always appreciated your fansub reviews, but your line about lack of superpowers have elevated you in my esteem to reviewer god. Thank you for your good work!

    Reply
  3. I also noticed the huge size difference between the UTW release and EveTaku version. UTW- 466Mb, EveTaku- 293Mb. I was half-expecting the ET version to appear bit-starved, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. The Chihiro release is larger than the ET one, but even that is still more than 100Mb smaller than the UTW release.

    Reply
    • You have a problem with the size? I have a slow bandwich, and a relative bad PC, and I can play and download without problem the UTW releases. The quality of encode is purely great.

      In the case of this sub, the Typesetting is awosome, and the translation it’s very precise, I like that, but the grammar in some lines (almost pointed in the review), and the times fail. I don’t like the ED Style too XD, don’t fit. But in general terms I like this release. You can improve and fix few errror with the pass of episodes. =). – And I know, I have a poor gramar, I am not be a native english speaker, I am trying to improve that >//< –

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    • Well the UTW version was encoded by us, me to be precise, and I’m quite fussy with my encodes.

      Chihiro encodes their own stuff, but I won’t even bother commenting on theirs because, as soon as I saw the OP & ED as separate files (ordered chapters) I didn’t want to look any further.

      EveTaku didn’t encode the raw for their release, they just use whatever Share/PD raw is available at the time. At the very least, this episodes share encoder used the latest x264 build, but on the other hand also used x264 quality settings that most groups encoders use for encoding workraws for preparing a release with.

      So the size difference, well at least between ours (UTW) and Evetaku’s is because the UTW encode has almost no banding at all and looks better overall compared to the share raw which isn’t heavily bitrate starved, but it still shows in some of the darker scenes and especially where there is quite a bit of motion.

      There is also the issue of banding which is present is quite a lot of scenes on the share raw.

      Then there’s the issue of that japanese encoder encoding with something like this:

      x264.exe -o blah.mkv –crf 19 “blah.avs”

      which is equivalent to using the medium preset and crf 19. There are other flaws too but they are only something an encoder would care about, or probably even notice, and far fewer would even bother to do anything about them because loltv encodes.

      I’ve compared the two releases from the perspective of an encoder, nothing more. Squiggy (from Evetaku) is a cool guy and I’ve got no qualms with the group themselves. They’ve made a decent name for themselves in the short time they’ve been fansubbing and I hope to see more from them in the future.

      Reply
      • Yeah – I rewatched and I agree the banding is more noticeable on ET’s release, and on second view the quality drops on heavy motion segments. As you say, there may be other differences obvious only to an encoder but not to me. Having said all that, it still kind of surprises me that to fix these even partially requires almost double the bitrate, especially when, as you say ‘Loltv encodes’. That aside, thanks for the explanation – and I do like your group’s encodes by the way.

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          • I wish. As ar mentioned we just use shareraws. Squiggs apparently knows some encoding (hell to someone like me he sounds like an expert) but that’s only relevant when we have a capper or some other way to obtain the .ts… which we don’t.

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    • Don’t jump to conclusions (at this point, I’m not sure which group is better). Give me a couple hours to get their review up.

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      • Ok, but I’ve already downloaded their version, it was smaller and shit, though I haven’t watched it yet. Gonna wait then.

        Reply

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