At 10,000 Yen, approx. $140 for this box, it’s absolutely THE most expensive Blu-ray box I’ve ever spent, and it’s only for a single movie (oh, well, a game too).
The collector’s edition has more external bonuses, all the first and second row items are bonuses for this Hybrid special edition. If you buy the regular edition, you only get the bottom row stuff, which is the movie itself and a box. I think it’s worth the extra $40 for the special edition.
The movie itself comes with a 48 page booklet and a box, same as last movie – Itsuwari no utahime (false songstress). Movie spec is 1080p 24fps video, LPCM 2.0 and DTS-HD MA 5.1, same as last time. It came with the game Macross Last Frontier. Unlike the movie’s bundle with the Macross Trial Frontier, I think this is actually a full game. The game play is about the same, but it has some ground fighting inside MF islands mimicking the scenes from the movies. There are quite a few trophies, but it’s a lot harder to get unlike in Trial Frontier.
Now moving on to bonuses for special edition. First you get the 原画 Original Drawing (60 total) collection and Blu-ray jacket posters (37 total) collection.
You also get the AR script books, print out ones. Each one has over 500 pages. This is a big reason I chose the special edition.
And you get the shrink sized pamphlets they gave away during the movies. I’m not sure how big the original is, but these are decent booklets. It’s a bargain for the movie goers, considering the ticketing price in Japan isn’t significantly higher than the ever increasing US prices…
Last thing for the physical goods is the film strip, I have a little better luck this time. I got Cathy Glass with Bobby standing on Macross Quarter’s bridge.
Aside from all these physical goods, you also get redeemable code for two exclusive PS3 themes. Of course you need a Japanese PSN account. The themes are poorly made IMO, icons are very repetitive and not complete.
Now putting the two movies side by side.
The big box is designed to hold both movies. And it does fit everything as you can see.
Vol.7 include episodes 17 to 19. The story picks up after episode 18. Episode 17 is like the director toying with audience by showing so many death hints to Ozma, but in the end he survives. Episode 18 shows the potential of Ranka, and put Sheryl into a bad situation. Episode 19 is quite a turning point (climax) of the show since Ranka’s reaction is directly related to Vajra.Back to packaging of this volume, the jacket picture has Sheryl and her manager
BelldandyGrace on the front, Canaria’s VB-6 König Monster variable bomber on the background. Grace has a very suspicious pose with Sheryl’s medicine in her right hand. I liked this cover better than last one since it depicts the show’s tone quite well.Disc label:
The booklet focuses much on interviews on character designer Risa Ebata and animation supervisor Yūichi Takahashi.
2. Spec, Video Quality, Audio Quality, screenshot comparisons...
Here is the spec:
Video
Codec: mpeg4 AVC
Resolution: 1080p
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Audio
Japanese: LPCM 2.0
Audio Commentary
Japanese: LPCM 2.0
Disc
BD 25
Bandai/honneamise manages put 4 episodes (acutal content is 3 episodes, but the way of authoring the disc is that they duplicate the video of episode 4, and put the audio commentary on that one, so it counts as four episodes of space) But anyway, the video bitrate doesn't drop because of that. It still got a beautiful full 40Mbps full bitrate transfer.
2.1 The Video: A-
The videos this time remain the same quality.
2.2 The Audio: B+
The audio is again clean and clear, that's all I can say. It has not too much dynamic range. There's very little if not at all channel separation/directionality are present... LPCM 2.0 seems to be standard nowadays, but for this series, 2.0 is really limiting the Blu-ray capability...
2.3 The Menus and Subtitles: B
Same as the last four volumes, the menu of this release includes both non pop-up, DVD style always-on menu. Menus are static with no background music; as well as Blu-rays pop-up menu. The pop-up menu is missing the music chapters, the only way you can access the music chapters is thru the always-on menu, which defeats the convenience of what Blu-ray offers. The menu is simple and effective (Not so for the pop-up menu!), navigation is easy and intuitive. But again I would prefer a more Macross related theme...
And again, there's NO subtitles.
2.4 The extras: B
Audio Commentary (haven't listened yet..)
Other extras (ads) . Bandai related ads . It's not an extra feature rich disc, but there's a 16 page booklet, I'd rather prefer to have an actual print-out of the "extras".
3. Content:
needs more work
Final thoughts:
add later.
Lastly, booklet scans:
JPEG version:
Uncompressed TIFF version (5 parts):
See You Next Deculture