Masterfully Remastered Indeed
If you're new to the series, I'd definitely read another review detailing the DVD release.
If you're interested in product details, peruse on...
Anime Works got a hold of the original master film for Magic Knight Rayearth, Season 1 and they have faithfully dished out a new 4-disc DVD set, digitally remastered; 2 less discs than previous incarnations. Is it worth schilling out yet more money for yet another release??? Simply put : YES. The picture quality is nothing short of STUNNING. Where the old versions were dark, grainy, fuzzy with black particles floating everywhere, this release is pristine, sharp and extremely colourful. I literally was shocked.
To add yet another bonus... the missing sections from the episodes, around 4 minutes, has been gratefully restored... with the original Japanese title intro, commercial exit/intros, the preview for the next episode, and the 'guessing game' (that was previously part of the 'extras'). Very much like what...
"This feels like a video game!"
Indeed, Magic Knight Rayearth was designed on purpose to reflect the world of a typical J-RPG. There's a world in need of saving, a princess in need of rescuing, lots of leveling up, and a series of monsters and bosses to fight before the characters are ready to take on the bad guy and fight through the epic showdown. The interesting thing is the execution of the idea. You might expect a story based on such common ideas to be very by-the-numbers and predictable, as just about every other series based on an RPG is, but excellent character development, fantastic art, great action sequences and beautiful music make this show much more than it could have been. It's not perfect, but it is a classic.
The first time I saw this series I didn't like it. Everything seemed to just take too long and to be too predictable. Zagato sends out a minion to kill the young heroes, they defeat him/her, the minion begs for another chance, fails again, another minion gets sent out, rinse, repeat...
An Entertaining CLAMP Series Fantasy Anime
I had actually bought the 1&2 season box set that had been released a few years ago and like many other buyers was somewhat annoyed at the quality of the season sets, not so much the dvd cases but the video and audio quality of the series. The two major parts of the season that have been addressed and remedied are the video which has been cleaned up vastly with no lines or frame skips like before and the audio problems which the previous version had in vast amounts, like many other people who saw the earlier version the audio seemed to basically focus on one side mostly the right speakers which was extremely annoying when you tried to listen and it wasn't just the dubbed audio but the subbed as well but this remastered version has fixed the annoyance as well. Also the remastered version has put all twenty episodes on four dvds instead of six this time and while it has cut back some of the extras(Basically not needed anyway) the quality of the set makes that forgivable to me...
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