Video:

The video for this series is surprisingly good! The opening menu is cool with animated scene selections, has all of the opening and ending scenes/songs (although it does get annoyingly addictive, but rather skip than endure). The picture quality is really clear and sharp, except disc 2 which seems to be only slightly blurry, but that's only because disk 1 & 3 are so good! There is a problem with some scenes when it is dark, especially when it is the battle between 2 mechas (at last) but these dark scenes are rare, although resulting in me increasing of brightness on my TV and closing of the curtains. Did not notice any pixelations.

Audio:

The audio is very good too! I listened to the Dub throughout and I must say is a very good effort, the voices were well selected, reflecting the characters very well. Did not listen to the Japanese dub so can't comment. The producers made some real effort in this, with the unique music which fits in with the story really well. Sound is all loud and clear, did not notice any inteference. Didn't give the full 5 because I found a minor lip sync (english dub) problem on the last disk on the penultimate chapter, but fortunately it had very little dialog anyway.

Subtitle:

The grammar and all were very good, didn't notice any mistakes. And I agree that the subs can fill half the screen sometimes which is a bit odd but it had to be dont this way to keep the whole story, otherwise you can miss some important storyline, which is what the show is all about.

Comment:

Overall the film was very good, but not excellent as it seems to be more aimed at the plot audience rather than action. There is action but not a lot. I wouldn't recommend this for younger viewer, not because it has "mature" contents (it has virtually none in that sense) but it has a lot of interesting political plots and mixing old ideas into modern scenarios. If you like a good plot, some mystery, some surprises not much major action, good characters and supporting charaters then you should really give this a go. The ending is not brilliant, it's like a huge build-up and then it pretty summarises in the last chapter. Not a big bang but does make you think on the idea it was trying to express although it seems a bit incohesive with the whole story. I don't think I'll be rushing to watch this again in the near future as it relies heavily on the plot, and take some perserverence to complete.

Video:

The quality of the Video is almost perfect. You will notice some small pixel's later in the serie, but this is viewed on a 19 CRT monitor at the time, so video error's are more visable on a CRT pc monitor then on a TV.

Audio:

The audio is clean, with no pop's or any other distorcience. I have only watched it with the Japanse Audio, so i dont have any firm data on the English track (skiped over it here and there a bit, and seemed to be inorder).

Subtitle:

They seem to be R1 rips, with only 1 BIG problem. On Disk 3 you will have a scene in a Command & Control Center, with 2 people talking. Normaly you get to see 2 line's or maybe 3 at the same time on screen when 2 people talk. Some idiot also translated the background voice's with market info, so you have up to 6!! line's running up your screen. Let me put it this way, nobody can read that widout pressing the pause button. The good thing is, it only heapon's a few minute's, but does frustrated the hell out of me. And it looses 0.5 points for that. It's not realy a rip flaw, but can frustrate you a lot, sinds this serie has a heavy political plot, and this mix of subs, frustrated a lot. Also, i seems that they switched sub color in from Disk 1 & Disk 3. With White at first & Yellow later.

Comment:

This review is based on DVD 1 & 3 from this set. There seems to be a bad production run of this set, where DVD 2 of the set, can't be played (0 bits file's). A not uncommen problem on some Import DVD's. For the rest seems this to be a rip from the AV set.