Bryce's Blog

What a day. I almost did not make a blog post. Fortunately, I did decide to make a post. I have two anime to review right now. Today’s post is on an anime that is not part of the current mainstream called Last Exile.

What is the show about? Last Exile is about two orphaned children, Claus Valca and Lavie Head, who have a passion for flying, and they even make a living from it. During a race, a fellow pilot crashes into them and turns his mission over to them. Surprisingly, the mission has a seven star danger rating, which scares Lavie, but Claus goes through with it. However, this one mission brings them into a new kind of life, one of danger, as well as good times.

What did you like? The story had a very nice start and all the characters were enjoyable. In these adult years of our lives, we rarely live out our dreams, but Claus and Lavie definitely enjoy doing courier missions. Claus can be stubborn, but he always tries to help people, the best he can. Also, I actually liked how the lip syncing was right. Now, let me get this straight, the first time I saw this show was on Netflix and I enjoyed it there, but there was a big problem, which was the fact that the audio did not match what I was seeing. That kind of was a bad impression on me, but thankfully, the dub was not like this on the DVD release. Many anime also seem to only have character movement, but I saw birds flying around and even the waves of strong wind move, not something that is encountered a lot in Japanese animation. The start of the story was interesting, the DVD had better audio timing than the Netflix stream, and the movement of the wind could be seen.

What did you not like? I cannot say that there is a whole lot I dislike, but one thing in particular did stand out as a bit annoying. That particular item is something than comes between the episodes. No, it is not the little things for commerical interruptions, which happen during the episodes. This problem occurs after every few episodes and that is the picture of a girl sitting somewhere and a thing that says, “See You on the Next Flight.” This appears on every episode that is divisible by four on the first three discs and every three episodes on the last disc, of the four disc set. Okay, this makes sense for the old individual sets from Pioneer (now Geneon), but there are 6-7 episodes on every disc of this set. This makes absolutely no sense as the end of the DVD has not been reached on any disc, with the exception of the third disc, which contains episode 20. It’s like they just took all the individual DVDs and combined them into four without doing work on anything, but making sure that audio was good. Doing this kind of thing makes people think that the end of the DVD has been reached, when it has not. However, this does not take down the quality of the show in my book, just the DVD release of it. There should not be anything that suggest the end of the DVD before the final episode of the disc.

Despite the fact that it makes a person think the end of the DVD has been reached, watching this series on DVD was definitely much better than watching it on Netflix. I would recommend people try this series out. It is not for everyone, but if you like to fly, you will enjoy it more.