In the last few days, two horrible historical mistakes were corrected: I played Valkyrie Profile, and I watched Evangelion.
Let me expand on the second item. Evangelion is composed of one series of 26 episodes, plus the movie "Death & Rebirth", plus another movie called "The End of Evangelion". It is not so simple, of course, but I will leave the many details aside.
I watched the 26 episodes, alright, "Death & Rebirth". So I am downloading EoE right now, only thing missing. Meanwhile, because my copy of D&R was so bad, barely watchable, I was also downloading it again, so I do not feel hurt when I put it in a CD. I found one version of very high bitrate from the Renewal of Evangelion DVDs, which feature remastered image; gigantic file. And, I was also downloading it in .ogm format, because this format has multiples dubbings and subtitles.
Both finished downloading on the same day. Today, I checked them. The gigantic file from the Renewal edition had its dubbings in Korean. Joy. It is in fact becoming common to find subtitles in Korean with not one single mark stating it is in Korean. It already happened with two different copies of the Inuyasha movie, "The Love That Transcends Time". Really, if I download a file named "Inuyasha - The Movie (subtitled).avi" I am to expect, given "subtitled" and "the movie" are English terms, that the subtitles will be in English; but no, they were in Korean.
One gigantic file less in my HD, I moved on to the .ogm file, with its multiple dubbings and subtitles, just like a DVD. In theory. If the rippers are kind and honest. As I checked the sound and subs, I realized it had no subtitles at all, and the only dubbing available was in Spanish. Why, for the sake of all gods, why use the OGM format to store one single dubbing, in Spanish, of all languages? Why not "Nuevo Genesis Evangelion - Muerte y Renascimiento.avi" instead of "Evangelion - Death and Rebirth.ogm"? Why not put a "dub" or "dub_spa" or "dub_esp" somewhere in it?
Why did they make me download over one gigabyte of data over five days just to delete it afterwards based solely on the incompetence of whoever named the files and those who did not delete it from their systems or rename them themselves?
And above all, why was the Renewal of Evangelion limited to so, so, so, so, so few boxes produced (it is so rare that it is not found on eBay, imagine that!), and without subtitles in English? In fact, why release a special, limited edition box of Evangelion, with full remastered image and sound, special casing, costing more money than I made the whole last year, in a dozen DVDs, with only the sound in Japanese, and not one single set of subtitles?
Back on topic. I truly wish this was a new tale, by the way, but it is not. My problem with things being in stupid languges without any indication of it comes from before, as can prove two CDs I have here, one containing Visual Basic 6.0 in German, another holding Suikoden 2, also in German.
It is very easy to spot something in Italian, French or Russian. They always, always, always have something to differentiate them. Fra, FR, Rus, Ita. But I never saw one single De, or Ger. I only came to know what things were when I was greeted with the Installationprogramme für Visual Basic 6.0. Each time I remember it my circulatory system loses thirty minutes of its lifespan.
Only Japanese girls should be allowed to speak in German.
Posted by Etienne at July 25, 2003 12:32 AM