Hyouka’s third Blu-ray volume has come forward, and it appears to contain a few near-totally pointless edits spanning the distance of several pixels – in case anyone was bothered by these invisible issues.
Within the first compilation of discrepancies, pulled from episode five for those curious, some credit text was removed – and a few specs of darkness were added atop a minuscule shoe for shadow effect. As for episode six, seen in the second set of revisions, a girl’s head was smoothed out, some text was arbitrarily replaced, and shadow was added to an abstract scene merely as such is possible – and perhaps, they wanted to add some weight to the moeblob.
These alterations do little to aide the viewing experience of Hyouka. It’s worth mentioning that whilst a common excuse made by many towards a lack of Blu-ray adjustments is that the series is supposedly flawless – rather, perhaps the studio doesn’t even know what to fix, or even, simply chose not to solve any prevalent problems. That’s not to say either are the case with Hyouka – yet Hyouka is definitely nowhere near being impeccable, and the Blu-ray does not contribute much anything to making it so in any way.
At two episodes a disk however, and for a series as this, it wasn’t a Blu-ray particularly worth purchasing at least.
All in all, nothing worth ridicule – although the Hyouka Blu-rays aren’t looking too enticing either.
Sep 5, 2012 @ 2:12 CDT
Time to play spot the difference again…Wow, it’s hard this time.
BTW, why are Eru’s eyes bigger than her hands in the first pic?
Sep 5, 2012 @ 9:17 CDT
“why are Eru’s eyes bigger than her hands in the first pic?”
Kyoto Animation set “moeblob” as their number one priority after the profits of “K-ON!”.
Sep 5, 2012 @ 4:09 CDT
Two episodes per disk, and this is all that was edited? If it’s just two episodes, they’d have MORE time to edit stuff, I’d think. Lazy editors :)
Comparing this to P4 or Nisemonogatari, the edits are pretty bad…but those are high standards, so this is sorta OK. Just thinking more time could’ve been invested here…
Sep 5, 2012 @ 5:56 CDT
LOL, why would they want to edit something that was already good? Editing stuff for the BD/DVD is usually correcting errors. This is just the usual KyoAni perfectionism to show off.
The heavy edits on P4 and Nise means there were more problems with art/animation, didn’t have enough time to complete everything or the studio just wasn’t satisfied with their earlier work.
Sep 5, 2012 @ 8:59 CDT
I don’t feel either of you are wrong. The edits with Persona 4 and Nisemonogatari were not necessary whatsoever – the studio merely went the extra thousand miles and made something super spectacular just because it’s possible, which in turn, makes the Blu-ray far more appealing.
In the case of Hyouka, the animation is admittedly quite high as is – although it’s definitely not perfect, and Kyoto Animation could still have likely done more. Though of course, this is not to speak lesser of it – it’s merely a slice of extra potential wasted.