Mizuiro

ec2-18-223-172-224.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com | ToothyWiki | RecentChanges | Login | Webcomic

An OAV which has recently been released (spring/summer 2003). And it's sweet, silly and cool.

The characters and setting are the same as those in the game of the same name, and the plot has marked similarities too. But it diverges significantly quite early, and has a different story to tell. I was quite happy, given this is sortof a conversion from a DatingSim, to see that the two main girls are if anything more of the stars and leads than the SociallyIneptMaleMainCharacter. The characterisation is excellent (although AC didn't like the art style quite as much as in the game), and being a 2003 OAV the animation and music are excellent too.

On its own, the OAV probably isn't anything to enthuse hugely over. It's fun and touching, but probably nothing to jump in circles over. As a companion to the game, however, it's magnificent. The OAV obviously doesn't have time to build the setting and characters in the depth that the game does.

Hmm, this doesn't actually tell you anything about what actually happens. Like, at all. OK, um... hmm. I'll provide a background summary that can apply to both the game and the anime, i.e. before the plots start diverging.

Three main characters: Ken-something (Kenchan), the SociallyIneptMaleMainCharacter; Yuki, his not-quite-sister (adopted by his parents when he was about 6 and she 5 years old), who does all the cooking, cleaning, and pretty much everything else in the house that they live in alone; and Hiyori, a girl who they were both friends with while children (about 10-12). Yuki and Hiyori would both give fancy Valentine chocolate to their oniichan Ken (remember this is nicely ambiguous in Japanese society, indicating either romantic interest or just deep affection); being a boy, he would naturally eat the chocolate but spurn the affection.

Point of pedantry: I think the chocolate is called different things to tell whether it's just being polite and generous or if it is some kind of romantic interest. I think it's called 'giri choco' if it's the friendly sort and 'honmei choco' if it's meant to be taken more seriously. --FR (who only knows because he read LoveHina recently)

: I think that's right (having corrected "girl choco" to "giri choco", where "giri" is Japanese for "duty"). That is at least consistent with SeasonOfTheSakura?. However, in general it's not necessarily clear which one some chocolate is unless someone explicitly says so. --AlexChurchill, remembering one SotS? girl evocatively saying "I don't want giri choco"

Hiyori moved away when she and Ken were about 12, and Ken and Yuki haven't heard from her for years. They're 18 and 17 now, Ken's taking tests in school... and then one evening he hears a shouting from inside his bedroom wardrobe. Guess what: Hiyori's stuck in there, and crying to be let out. And she's wearing the clothes she wore when she was 12, and doesn't know how she got there...

Oh yes: like TriangleHeart, the fansubbers of this tell us there was apparently an H OAV by the same name a while back. This isn't it.

AC would be very interested to hear from others who've watched the anime - in particular, who haven't played the game before (most of you?), and so who were being introduced to the characters and setting from scratch. My suspicion is that it might just feel like there was quite a bit of background you were missing out on (like WindABreathOfHeart). What did people find, who saw it?

One question about getting this to run; I downloaded the 2 episodes of it by Bit Torrent, and can't seem to get it to play at anything more than 1 frame a second for either episode, on 2 different types of player. Is this just because they're rather high quality (350Mb for 35 minutes) or should I try *shudder* downloading again?

Throw virtualdub at it and see if it can fix it - it ought to be able to, regardless of whether it's just too high quality or not. It may take some time to convert, though. On this issue - what the heck is going on? People invent better compression - for a while eveyone goes "Yay! Sensible file sizes at last!" and then, slowly, it creeps back up to unusable territory. --Vitenka

Ah, yes. I did have significant difficulties actually playing the episodes. (And also found them pretty much *the* slowest-to-download torrents I've ever seen, irritatingly.) They're encoded in an XviD? codec, which I seem to have on-off trouble with. I used to normally use 3ivX, but IIRC that had problems with the Mizuiro OAV. One bizarre fix is to get a 4CC changer and just modify the .avi file so that it says it's DivX rather than XviD?. Very bizarre like I say, but it often works. The codec which played the Mizuiro avis best AIR was some "all in one" codec package - I'll look up the name tonight. --AlexChurchill

Nimo. The problem is that both the divx decoder and 3ivx are registered to play xvid. MPlayer, allegedly, lets you select which codec to use when there are multiple options. Most players go ahead and guess. MediaPlayerClassic? appears to select randomly, WindowsMediaPlayer? actually uses a priority list which you can twiddle in ControlPanel?->MultiMedia?->AudioVisual?->Codecs --Vitenka (FreeLancer? bitches about too)

Hmmm? That ControlPanel? section doesn't seem to be there under WinXP. Closest I can get is System -> Hardware -> Device Manager -> Sound Video + Games -> Video Codecs - which gives a list, but doesn't let you reorder them. Have they removed that for XP, or...? The only codec pack I've installed on my fresh new WinXP Home is "codecs5056_allin1", googling for which produces a download, and which may well be the Nimo one. --AlexChurchill

: Gah - stupid interface changes... where's it hidden... control panel - sounds and multimedia - video codecs - properties ... no priority setting. Evil! Priority settings only exist for audio codecs? Truly evil. Only thing I can suggest is temporarily ticking 'do not map through this device' for the codec you don't want to use. Then again, if it's the sound stuttering, you may be able to fix it.

Well, people may be entertained to know that AlexChurchill has bought a copy of the untranslated Japanese game from eBay, for DreamCast, and started attempting to play it. (The translators at ayashii.com have only translated one of the five storylines, you see...) It turns out I can understand approximately half of the Kanji that get used in the text. Having Halpern's Kanji Dictionary on hand helps significantly for the rest, however! Obviously the spoken sections are much easier. It will be quite slow to get anywhere, but quite a labour of love, I'd imagine! My other main fear is related to the wonderful style of the narration in Mizuiro: I'm slightly worried that I won't be able to appreciate it being so new to the language. I'm sure I'll miss a lot... but it should be great fun, anyway ^^

Update: I did play through the first half, several times along several of the multitudinous branches. It was wonderful - very slow going, but great fun and great Kanji practice. The vocabulary got rather harder for the second half, and so I never finished a playthrough. I think I'd like to do my translation practice on something where I can either copypaste the text I'm translating into a document where I write my translation alongside it, or failing that have a book where I write my translations and store them with it. But it was fascinating to read such a large chunk of authentic (and often colloquial) Japanese, and the wonderfully evocative narrative style came though very clearly (although I'm sure I still missed a lot).

CategoryAnime