Video:

Beyond perfect. A straight R2 rip with no compression apparent whatsoever. I tried zooming in on the video 6x, and instead of making it incredibly aliased like any other Anime DVDs do (also R1's) the lines were instead still clear and solid. Detective Conan will never look better then this. The animation budget is enourmous, and the colors are very rich and clear. I was slightly annoyed to see they used some CG in some scenes instead of animating it like they should have, but it's not a problem. This is the highest quality anime video I'm ever laid my eyes upon.

Audio:

Beautiful! Has Japanese 2.0 and Japanese 5.1, so this release is full of amazing audio quality. I wish I had a good audio setup to listen to this in, but even without the music and vocals are great.

Subtitle:

Nearly perfect, but not quite. The timing is 100% spot on, it's just a few typos and sometimes bad grammer that make it lose .5 points. All the names I saw were translated correctly, with proper grammer, and most of the buildings and street names didn't seem off either. About 85% of all on-screen text is subtitled to, but even when its not, it's no biggie. It's mostly just building names that aren't very important to begin with. The subtitles are the nice Times New Roman bold font, yellow with black outline. They definantly look very very good, and the yellow subtitles go nicely with the bold colors of the movie. Subtitle-wise, this set is very good. It catches the minor flaws in the person's speaking that were intentionally put their as part of the mystery (those who watch it will know what I mean) and the timing and translations were definantly what I hope to see much more of.

Comment:

Packaging: This uses a perfect R2 cover, with the only difference being the gold DVD logo added at the bottom (which AV started using a new one, by the way). The spine matches AV's Countdown to Heaven and Phantom of Baker Street DVDs beautifully, although this DVD doesn't have the AV logo on the spine like the others. The back looks identical to previous AV movies, with a silloute of Conan, then a large group of screenshots and Japanese summaries and technical information. It looks very good, and was really clear, which is a far cry from the rather grainy movie covers from before. Menus: Directly R2 ripped, so it's all in Japanese, but still looks good. It's pretty easy to figure out what's going on, and they definantly are great visually. Extras: W00t, there are some! There's two trailers for the movie (which kinda spoil some of the movie, so I don't reccomend watching them beforehand) and a small teaser which simply says "Look for movie __ coming soon" (I think it's movie 8, but I don't remember.) Pretty cool stuff. The actual movies: I'm such a huge fan of Detective Conan, and every movie I see somehow manages to outshine the other ones I adored, but this one was just kind of... boring. It continues on and on with not nearly enough action, and some loose ends. The pace is really slow, and it's more of a relief when the movie ends then a sad thing. It's about mainly an incident with Heiji that happened years ago when he's a child which has found its way back to him, and also involves a string of murders by an expert archerer/sword fighter. Heiji and Conan are trying to stop him, but the clues left behing don't add up. This might have made a good TV special, or a TV story arc, but it's not worthy of being a Conan movie. The climax was embarrasing and cliched (how many times has the movie's ending been a result of Conan kicking a soccerball/object at the criminal?) while they were much better done in previous movies. I don't regret buying this as much, because it's introduction (the part that uses the most special effects in all of the movies) is jawdropping (with a new music mix, instead of the one that the last two movies have been overusing), and it still is a pleasure to see Conan animated so amazingly. Overall, probably the BEST original HK release I've ever laid eyes upon, it's just the content that isn't as perfect as the rest. I still would reccomend it, however.