Flash Showdown: The Tower of Druaga Episode 1

I recently watched the premiere episodes of The Tower of DRUAGA -the aegis of URUK- and BLASSREITER on BOST TV, Crunchyroll, and YouTube to compare the visual quality and the placement of subtitles and also to see if they were shows worth following after the first two episodes. I decided to formulate two separate posts for each series so the next one will be about Blassreiter and will likely have the same technical results. (Links: BOST TV, Crunchyroll, and YouTube.)

Story:
I went into The Tower of Druaga not expecting much considering it takes places 60 years after the events of the 1984 Namco arcade game so I was surprised that I enjoyed watching the first episode. There are a number of game cliches, such as the boastful enemy line “I am here to defeat you” and warriors admitting their intent to marry upon returning home right before their demise, that are played up to humorous effect like how another GONZO title, Welcome to the NHK!, exploited the tendency of Satou to take some obsessions too far. There is even a part where a Roper, basically a tentacle monster, ensnares flame mistress Fatina and Neeba, an ally, watches her struggle until she yells down at the party to stop getting off on it and defeat the monster.

Hopefully in future episodes, we’ll get to see their real-world selves interact as hinted in the opening credits along with Jil’s family since they are shown in the opening sitting at the breakfast table and also as game characters in the closing credits. The train station poster at the end of the opening credits provided a date of July 2009 for the game’s release on their world while there is already an MMORPG subtitled “the Recovery of BABYLIM” developed by Q Entertainment as part of the “Animation X Online” project.

Accessibility:
Both Youtube and Crunchyroll allowed me to view the episode without having to log in while BOST TV required me to sign into my account because of their already existing credit and subscription system. As an already registered user, I received an email containing a promo code that gave me credits for the first episodes of both Druaga and BLASSREITER.

As you can see, the episodes expire in two weeks on the 18th and 19th and I expect to get sent another code for the second pair of episodes. The login and expiration barriers aren’t present on YouTube and surprisingly Crunchyroll and I hope that they are not taken down at the same time as BOST will remove their versions.

Subtitles:
I might have said this before but I don’t have the Japanese language skills to analyze how accurate the subtitles are. However, I can criticize how the translation were implemented visually. According to the YouTube description, the translation and subtitles were done by BOST and GDH so they should be the same across all versions and the lines were identical.

The opening and closing credits were unfortunately not subtitled because the lyrics “were unavailable due to licensing issues”, according to BOST’s notes section. The opening song is the upbeat “SWINGING” by ska band Muramasa? and I can’t wait for the single to come out in a couple months; I don’t care as much about the ending since it’s an average pop-rock tune, “T?ch?sha-tachi” by Kenn (Jil’s voice actor). Now that I’ve waxed music critic for a bit, let’s move on to how the video looked on the services.

Visual Quality:
Even though any of the three streaming versions may not provide viewers with a 1280×720 resolution as a raw or fansub derivative might, they still look pretty darn good when watching them in a browser, some more than others. BOST’s version was the largest at 640×360 and looked fine like a raw with some fading in light areas.

CrunchyRoll gave me a default size of 580×324 for the high quality version, which had some noticeable artifacts in portions like the above dark scene. (I am not going to donate to CR simply to download a more high-quality version from them! The major tenet of the GDH offer is providing viewers with an opportunity to sample the series without needing to blindly pay for them.)

The YouTube version looked pretty crisp at regular size, probably due to some back end H.263 compression, with some small artifacts popping up occasionally and the interface allowed for the smoothest skimming experience when navigating to different portions of the video. So in this category, I would rank BOST first, YouTube a close second, and CrunchyRoll third.

Downloadable Versions:
An interesting aspect of this whole free streaming experiment is that you can download iPod- or PSP-encoded versions of the episodes from BOST. The subtitles on the iPod versions are displayed in a letterbox under the action similar to the subbed versions of Death Note and other series sold by Direct2Drive while the PSP subs run on top on the image.

iPod version subtitles get their own box (actual size)

PSP-oriented version larger and more “widescreeny” than iPod one

For those who enjoy raw stats, the H.264 iPod download has a resolution of 320×240 at 30fps, a bit rate of 574.83 kbits/sec, and file size of 102.6 MB while the PSP download has a 480×272 resolution at 29.97fps, bit rate of 541.96 kbits/sec, and file size of 96.22 MB. The downloads will disappear when the streaming episodes expire so get ‘em while you can if you want ‘em.

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