First Date: Tower of DRUAGA ~the Aegis of URUK~
Anime, Commentary, New Series, News, Spring '08 Series, Western News April 4th, 2008Tags: crunchyroll, first-dates, legal downloads, piracy, spring08, tower-of-druaga
Sum-up of my findings on the various downloads (prices, resolutions, etc) are after the review!
- Title: Tower of DRUAGA ~the Aegis of Uruk~
- Studio: GONZO
- Genre: Fantasy/Comedy
Ratings (out of 5):
- Story: ♥♥½
- Animation: ♥♥♥
- Characters: ♥♥
- OP/ED Themes: ♥♥½
- Overall: ♥♥½ (Warning: This date may or may not be representative of future dates.)
Thoughts:
Secondary warning: this review will, of necessity, contain spoilers for the first episode. Read with caution! I’m also including full details on how to get the different versions of the episode at each of the three sites hosting it. They’ll be after a jump at the end.
Right, then, on with the show. As promised: the high-quality version that Crunchyroll is selling for a minimum donation of $0.01 (NOT for free as previously reported– sorry guys) is both DRM-free and reasonably high resolution (854×480). It’s not HD, but it’s perfectly acceptable. The subs are good-quality, simple white text tucked at the very bottom of the video, virtually never in the way of the action. It is at least as good quality-wise as your average fansub.
The show’s visuals are as expected from GONZO: pretty decent-looking both in terms of art and animation. It’s generally a little bit softer and rounder than Romeo x Juliet, but otherwise similar. The art styles change when they’re parodying something specific, which brings me to the plot.
With the exception of a brief bit at the beginning, the entire first episode is a particularly glorious dream-version of what might happen, imagined by the main character, Jil. It’s actually all pretty amusing, especially the references to Gurren Lagann, Evangelion, and tentacle porn. I really enjoyed the episode as its own thing.
However, it made things really unclear in terms of where the series is going. It introduced the main character to us, and a few side characters, but it’s hard to get a grip on those side characters based on Jil’s imagination-versions of them. Also, I couldn’t help but notice that the group of character you see Jil with during the ending credits is not the group you see him with for the episode (although the episode-group appears in the clever opening video).
So, while I found the episode pretty fun, I have no clue what’s going to happen from here on out. Will it be a bit more serious? Stay a comedy? Continue parodying other shows? Noooo idea. So, sorry folks, I can’t really recommend whether to watch the series or not based on this episode! I’m definitely going to pick up the second one to see where this goes, though.
Now, as promised: I actually went through the process of all three sites’ Druaga episodes and have full instructions and details after the jump. I also included an image from each so you can compare the quality. I hope they don’t screw up the layout.
1. YouTube
Very simple process: go here and watch it as you would any YouTube video. No high quality version is available, but you can put the YouTube video in full-screen mode…but it’ll be all blurry. It also has its own YouTube account so you can subscribe to the videos.
2. Crunchyroll
Low-Res Streaming
Also fairly simple, to see the streaming video, just go here. That’ll actually automatically bring up the higher-res of the two streaming resolutions (the higher res is pictured here), but they’re both much smaller than the high-quality download, natch. The resolution is also higher than YouTube’s, in large part thanks to the widescreen video player. However, I couldn’t help but notice that the video playback was pretty choppy.
High-Res Download
Okay. In order to download the episode you have to go to the same url as above (here it is again) and click the “Download This Video!” button on the right. You can then input the amount you want to donate, which apparently has to be a minimum of $0.01. You then have to plug in credit card info (I could not figure out how to have it let me pay with PayPal for the life of me) and submit the order. It’ll then send you a PM to your Crunchyroll account with a link to the download. You WILL need an account to buy the episode, but it will give you a chance to make one and accounts are free.
Now, when I bought the video and got the PM, the download link in the message didn’t work. It would only download like 95k of the file (or else the file was only 95k). There was also a link to my downloads list in the PM, and from that page I was able to download the file successfully. You will also get links to PSP and iPod downloads at about 63mb each; 320×180 resolution.
BOSTTV
Now, I signed up for BOST in time to get a free promo code to watch the streaming first episode of Druaga for free. If you did this, you’ll need to get the code from your e-mail, go to “My Account,” and redeem the code. Otherwise you’ll have to add points to your account; I created a second account for this purpose. The smallest number of points you can purchase is 500 for $9.95; the first episode of Druaga is 100 points.
Once you redeem your points or rent the episode, you get what appears to be a 15-day rental period. Regardless of whether you got the episode for free or paid for it, you can download it for PSP or iPod under the “download” tab under the streaming video. However, you can only download them until the end of the rental period. Reader Josh noted that the PSP version is 97mb and 480×272; the iPod version is 102mb, 320×240 resolution (but the bottom ~55px are just black, where the subs go).
EDIT 4/07/08: BOST is now giving away the first episode of Druaga and BLASSREITER for free; those who paid will have their points refunded. The free version does include the PSP and iPod versions.
Whew. I hope that’s enough info for y’all, seeing as I downloaded five different copies, streamed three, and paid $19.97 (I made two one-cent purchases when confirming stuff on CR)…♥;; Feel free to add any additional info you might have noticed in the comments!
EDITED: Here’s a quick sum-up.
| YouTube: | Streaming free 478×270px. |
| Crunchyroll: | Streaming free 578×325; HQ $0.01+ 854×480; PSP/iPod (w/HQ) 320×180. |
| BOSTTV: | Streaming ~$1.99 636×359; PSP (w/streaming) 480×272; iPod (w/Streaming) 320×240. |
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April 4th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Heh, in my review post I also described Crunchyroll’s stream as “better quality, but choppier” than you tube.
Whew, I’m not sure when the last time I watched a single episode of anime like 4 or 5 times in one day lol. But I have to say that this experiment is going pretty well so far. I just with BOST had at least a 704xwhatever resolution copy for download as well. That’s the only thing stopping me from doing a season pass there right now, in case I want to end up downloading it too.
I just really, really hope this works, because I really think this is how anime is going to have to end up heading in the future. *Dreams about a simultaneous Haruhi 2 release…lol*
April 4th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Thanks for the breakdown.
I viewed the free Crunchyroll stream and found it amusing enough in spite of the low quality that I might pay for better quality, even if it’s just a penny. Gonzo/Crunchyroll might just be onto something here.
The question is whether we’ll be willing to continue paying if the show turns out badly. And is there a certain time period we have for downloading? I can’t find anything about that on the Crunchroll site.
April 4th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Just paid $0.50 for it w/o reading your impressions, just based it off your 2 and 1/2 overall rating. My d/l speed from crunchy is 350-475kbps which is about half my bandwidth.
I hope this little experiment turns out well even if the show is bad.
April 5th, 2008 at 12:25 am
Actually, YouTube’s quality can be a bit better if you add the &fmt=18 tag to the end of the base video URL.
This would be the same frame of the above YouTube snapshot:
http://shrani.si/f/F/At/2rcye9Yt/snapshot20080405102320jp.png
April 5th, 2008 at 12:35 am
Oh, I forgot to mention that the &fmt=18 YouTube video is in H.264/AAC and 480×360 resolution. Regular YouTube clip is actually not “478×270″, but 320×240 and encoded in H.263/MP3 (the H.263 is not a typo, different video standard).
As for the HQ CR encode… I had lots of problems downloading it (meaning I couldn’t), I couldn’t download it with Firefox, IE did the trick. I agree it’s of passable quality, but its picture has serious noise issues for such a large file. It feels like a 1-pass Xvid encode (most fansubbers do 2-pass encodes). It could be better.
April 5th, 2008 at 8:42 am
There are better scenes for comparison, namely anything with motion. I haven’t seen such a bad encode (blocks up the wazoo) in years like the Crunchyroll has. Frankly it was unwatchable to me. I certainly wouldn’t pay for that kind of quality.
I’ll be sticking with the youtube hack (mentioned by Miha) for future episodes. Am I the only one that thinks they should be offering this on itunes for download (with proper quality) in addition to the streaming?
April 5th, 2008 at 11:37 am
[...] be accessible at YouTube, Crunchyroll, and BOSTTV with the same specs as Druaga (which you can see here), so there you go. I expect to get to a first date of it today (it’s currently downloading; I [...]
April 5th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
[...] For details on the different resolutions and stuff for these GONZO online releases, check here. [...]
April 10th, 2008 at 9:51 am
[...] Without saying anything about why the downtime happened, Crunchyroll has announced that Tower of Druaga episode 1 is back on their site, both the streaming and downloadable versions. Once again, you can see details on Druaga and BLASSREITER’s availability online at the bottom of my first date with Druaga. [...]