Nur auf Englisch!
The long-awaited, very expensive (^^;) Clannad ~After Story~ Blu-ray box finally arrived and here’s my first look. I only watched some parts but I didn’t encounter any bad surprises so far, so that I’m very satisfied with this release. I only criticize the high price, but this is one of my favorite series, so I gladly paid it. The article includes mostly photos and screenshots, for a more complete review, please visit ultimatemegax’s website in a couple of days.
Packaging:
The box follows the style of the first TV series and uses again a matte „cardboard paper“ material. This time yellow is used as main color which refers to the important scenes in a field later in the series.
The inside tray for the Blu-rays is glossy and offers a large illustration on the back. The illustrations on the back and the Blu-rays seem to be new. The packaging isn’t very complex but it’s very high quality and the box is also quite stable.
Supplements:
Like before the booklet lists the credits of each episode in Romaji, which is a little bit surprising for a Japanese release but perhaps they are thinking of the importers who might not be able to read the credits in the endings. Ultimatemegax led me to a small error in the booklet: They mixed up episode 24 and 25^^;.
Disc Contents:
The 25 episodes are evenly spread on 5 BD50 discs. The bonus material is on the last disc. All of them seem to be region free (however I can only test the Codes A and B here myself).
Item number: PCXE-60010
BDInfos: Disc 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5
Pop-Up menu with opened chapters menu
Main menu with opened audio menu
These illustrations were used before as covers of the DVDs (each disc has its own).
The menus are simple but easy to navigate and load very fast so I’m totally fine with them.
Picture Quality:
From disc 5 (it’s always ~35MBps):
MPEG-4 AVC Video 34744 kbps 1080p / 23,976 fps / 16:9 / High Profile 4.1
The picture quality is very similar to the first series and looks great. However it’s quite obvious that it was probably „only“ produced in ~720p. The character outlines and very very rarely parts of the backgrounds have some jaggies but it looks great nevertheless. I also saw in night scenes rarely a little bit of banding. Thanks to the high bitrate the picture doesn’t show any artifacts and I didn’t see any noise. The colors are really vivid and even if the backgrounds are not very sharp because of their art style, it often just looks beautiful and could be put into a frame.
Audio Quality:
From disc 1:
LPCM Audio Japanese 4608 kbps 5.1 / 48 kHz / 4608 kbps / 16-bit
DTS-HD Master Audio Japanese 2301 kbps 5.1 / 48 kHz / 2301 kbps / 16-bit (DTS Core: 5.1 / 48 kHz / 1509 kbps / 16-bit)
LPCM Audio Japanese 1536 kbps 2.0 / 48 kHz / 1536 kbps / 16-bit
The series was originally produced in stereo (at least the DVDs only offered 2.0) but they produced similar to Kanon and Clannad an upmix (uncompressed and with lossless compression on the disc). The surround sound is mostly used to give the the music some more depth and if it fits, the surround boxes are used for ambient sounds like rain. It’s a very atmospheric mix and everything sounds very clean, but obviously because of the lack of action scenes, it’s not a mix to show people how well anime can sound in 5.1. It’s just a nice addition.
Subtitles:
They use again the subtitles from the US release afaik and the lyrics in the OP and ED are also translated. I didn’t find any problems so far. There are also Japanese subtitles on the discs.
Extras:
- two trailers / PVs for the TV series
- trailers for episodes 24 (Summary: Under the Green Tree of Green) and 25 (Kyou’s arc)
- creditless opening
- creditless endings 1-4
- a gallery of 101 promotion illustrations
Screenshots:
All screenshots were created with DGIndexNV and were saved as PNG.
They are mostly from the episodes 1, 2, 23 and 25. Unfortunately, most of the Nagisa screenshots I made included some spoilers so she isn’t visible often in this screenshot collection^^;. And obviously Kyou has my favorite character of the series…
Left: Screenshot from the Blu-rays / Right: Screenshot from the Japan DVDs (they are anamorphic, so they look stretched).
