Corodon Wrote:I really don't get the appeal of bootlegs. If you're not going to buy from a legitimate licensor so that the creators get their cut, just fire up BitTorrent and pirate away.

I would like to guess convenience. If someone wants a series on DVD, then they would probably buy it from a bootlegger (thinking they are getting a very good deal on a legit DVD or DVD set) instead of dealing with the work it takes to find them on the internet to convert to DVD.

That is just my opinion though, based from experience. I remember when I was younger (about 5 years ago), I used to order from someone whom I thought was giving a good deal until I found out that he was selling bootlegs; however, at the time it was convenient because I was a freshman in high school and was just interested in the shows I wanted to get as opposed to the Japanese language. As long as they had decent English subtitles (which most of them do not have), I thought it was okay to buy.

Corodon Wrote:I really don't get the appeal of bootlegs. If you're not going to buy from a legitimate licensor so that the creators get their cut, just fire up BitTorrent and pirate away.

Put your download on the shelf next to a good bootleg and see which looks nicer.

I've already stated other reasons above, but this one is enough.

Oh, and don't act like it costs the same for a bootleg as the 'legit' version. The pricing is way, way different.

Unfortunately the price of the real stuff can be really high.
I was in BookOff last week, they had the box set for Tiger and Dragon - Y15000 (more than USD$150)!
Great show, I'd really like to buy it, but that's just insane.

PS: I've never bought bootleg, but damned if I wouldn't be tempted.

I don t know where you guys are buying your box set .... but I never bought any box worth a five digit number in a book off.... 6000 yens is my upper limit
and you still can find some prison break/ doctor house/lost set ...As for japanese drama I still don t know much about them and I never cared to look for them so I m not so confident but theorically it should be roughly the same.

obviously you have to look around a bit and to buy your stuff second hand but as japanese are very respectful of their stuff I dont think that s much of a problem....

ghinzdra Wrote:I don t know where you guys are buying your box set .... but I never bought any box worth a five digit number in a book off.... 6000 yens is my upper limit
and you still can find some prison break/ doctor who/lost set ...

As for japanese drama I still don t know much about them and I never cared to look for them so I m not so confident but theorically it should be roughly the same.

Yeah, I didn't buy it, it's way too expensive, as much as I love the show.
Sure, you can get the western stuff at reasonable prices.
I think a whole season of Prison Break was about Y4000.
But in my experience the Japanese stuff tends to be way more expensive.
If anyone knows a place to get this stuff cheaper I'd love to know!

ghinzdra Wrote:obviously you have to buy your stuff second hand but as japanese are very respectful of their I dont think that s very much of a problem....

Even second hand stuff is expensive (IMO), you generally only save 10% or so unless you manage to find a bargain. Most of it is perfect quality after all.

It's the same with anime last time I checked.
In Japan, I've seen anime that is Y5000 - Y6000 for a disc, and it will often only contain only 2 episodes. The same anime released in Australia (which also has the English translation, but no Japanese subs I think), goes for less than $25 (Y2000) with 3 episodes per disc.
I'm sure there's some reasonable stuff around, but overall it seems really expensive.

On the other hand, I managed to find the DeathNote manga episodes for Y100 in BookOff, and I saw the movie for Y500 (didn't get it, but might when I go back).
If you can even manage to get it in Australia it would be 8-10 times the price.

every second　hand manga in book off is worth 105 yen .... It s the standard price . Nothing really fancy about it . If you happen to know a personal store and have a card /recommandation you can even find some mainstream manga for 60- 75 yen....
Once I bumped into a salaryman in okazaki while I was looking for a 古本屋　 and it turned out that once of his friends had a store of his own . He just gave me his calling card and advised me to tell the owner I had his recommendation .... Not only did I get a member card but I got a 10 percent cut ....

500 for the movie deathnote huh ? I would nt take it if I were payed that little . Demand 1000 (or the whole manga/anime serie for the damage)or leave it .

ghinzdra Wrote:every second　hand manga in book off is worth 105 yen .... It s the standard price . Nothing really fancy about it .

Not exactly from what I've seen in the second hand book stores I've been to in Tokyo (a couple of different Book Off's, and some other place I in can't remember the name of in Shinjuku).
A lot of recent/popular series (e.g. ２０世紀少年) are Y350 each if it's good condition.
Remember these are Y500+ new in book stores.
As the series gets older/less popular, the price goes down - there are plenty that are Y250.
There is a lot of older stuff for Y100.

Of course, if you're willing to "settle" for less than perfect condition you can get it cheaper, which is what I go for

ghinzdra Wrote:500 for the movie deathnote huh ? I would nt take it if I were payed that little . Demand 1000 (or the whole manga/anime serie for the damage)or leave it .

That bad huh? :o

well.... I must acknowlege that I m very biased about movie adaptation of manga....
as for me it always turn out to be a disaster and a huge disappointment to the exception of crying freeman ... which was realized by a french guy .
I am both thrilled and fearful about the upcoming wave of hollywood adaptation... I definetely think that the japanese cinema is so cheap that they ll never be able to live up to their own manga.... but I also think that hollywood is so dumb and money obsessed that they ll make a wreck of 90 of everything they use .... I really have a hard time to see how they pull it off for the cowboy bebop movie with keanu reeves starring ,a third rate director and a plot that focus on the red eye drug while the main feature of bebop ,as the title hints , was the unlikely mix of genres and styles . I trust a little more james cameron s gunm adaptation.

For the movie deathnote I wasn t able to watch more than 30-35minutes...
they utterly betrayed the character of raito.....Besides being a hottie he s supposed to be a cold blooded -highly charismatic bored genius who used to solve police cases and turned to evil to get a kick ....they made him an extremely lame law student ,an very emotional guy who tries to kiss his girlfriend (her mere existence is an insult to the very conception of raito character)in a museum and all the stuff....not to mention that most japanese actors have about as charisma as a frozen turkey especially when they are this young .... what s more unfortunately for them raito is maybe the manga character that looks the most like a gaijin : his design stands out so much among his so typical japanese family that I have always wondered if his mother didnt have an extra marital affair.... so taking the star of battle royale was not a very good move as he s the embodiment of the very opposite of raito : the standard dull highschool japanese
I won t mention the other character that are as much unfaithful to their manga counterpart as raito .

the realisation is , as expected from a japanese movie , as cheap as usual ..... I especially like the way his character writes in his deathnote .... while the manga shows a raito driven by sheer madness writing an ultra packed list , this time we have a school boy three line-spaced errand list . The ryuku CGI is as grotesque as yoda in the new trilogy (seems like people just don t get that nobody will ever beat frank oz and his puppets.....) ... Forget the 24/ brian de palma split screen look of the anime or the razor cut panel of obata....

Last but not least even if I didnt bother to check it out , I know they changed the end and while I enjoyed the extreme ambiguity of the manga (N seems to have won but he s not trusted by his own men , Raito seems to have lost but he s a god for half the population and his former opponent are considering that this so called victory doesnt make any sense) , I despise the warm hearted end of the movie.

the only thing to save from this wreck is the L character that seems to be very close to his manga counterpart.

But don t mind my opinion . go for it if you crave for it....

ghinzdra Wrote:But don t mind my opinion . go for it if you crave for it....

I haven't seen it. I'm only up to book 3 of the manga.
Thanks for the write-up though.
No wonder it's going cheap (there were a few copies)!

I take it the anime is faithful to the manga.
I think I'll probably stick to that.
Might try a download first if I'm still tempted later.

avparker Wrote:

ghinzdra Wrote:But don t mind my opinion . go for it if you crave for it....

I haven't seen it. I'm only up to book 3 of the manga.
Thanks for the write-up though.
No wonder it's going cheap (there were a few copies)!

I take it the anime is faithful to the manga.
I think I'll probably stick to that.
Might try a download first if I'm still tempted later.

Are we talking about Death Note? If I might open a can of worms (any kind of analysis of this series gets the critic immediately painted as being a biased fan in some way)... I recommend just reading the first arc (you'll know when it ends). The second arc of the manga felt weird and empty. Between my analysis of how the writing quality changed and articles I read about the publisher's influence, I think it had something to do with the publisher wanting a certain ending to the series, and the plot being dragged out for the purposes of franchising. I guess we'll never know, I can't imagine the author admitting to such things. Not until they've completely milked the series or are freed of having to work within that system. ;p

nest0r Wrote:Are we talking about Death Note? If I might open a can of worms (any kind of analysis of this series gets the critic immediately painted as being a biased fan in some way)... I recommend just reading the first arc (you'll know when it ends). The second arc of the manga felt weird and empty.

I read the series in English, and I agree about it being different... The first arc was -way- better. The second didn't even seem like the same story, somehow.

Though, I'd still recommend reading it.

nest0r Wrote:

avparker Wrote:

ghinzdra Wrote:But don t mind my opinion . go for it if you crave for it....

I haven't seen it. I'm only up to book 3 of the manga.
Thanks for the write-up though.
No wonder it's going cheap (there were a few copies)!

I take it the anime is faithful to the manga.
I think I'll probably stick to that.
Might try a download first if I'm still tempted later.

Are we talking about Death Note? If I might open a can of worms (any kind of analysis of this series gets the critic immediately painted as being a biased fan in some way)... I recommend just reading the first arc (you'll know when it ends). The second arc of the manga felt weird and empty. Between my analysis of how the writing quality changed and articles I read about the publisher's influence, I think it had something to do with the publisher wanting a certain ending to the series, and the plot being dragged out for the purposes of franchising. I guess we'll never know, I can't imagine the author admitting to such things. Not until they've completely milked the series or are freed of having to work within that system. ;p

critics about the secund arc are well known.... and obviously nobody will dare to claim that it lives up to the level of the first arc....
But I must disagree on the ending : there definetaly has been some pressure on the authors because the editor coulnd let the bad guy win (I know I have read it somewhere ....maybe from the very mouth of the mangaka contrary to what you think) . But it s not like it s the first time that an artist is compelled to alter his work to please his mecene/client . I like to think of it like one of the challenge an artist must cope with now and then : when it comes to artistic challenge peoples always think about a new installment in a licence , a reboot , the adaptation of a very popular book but I think the death of an actor (see how the death of ledger affected the latest gilliam and what he come up with ), the lack of money (how orson welles in his macbeth version flooded the set with fog to hide his cheap background ), etc... are also some interesting challenge .... Some guys succeed to make some good with it, some don t .And some do something even better than it would have been otherwise. As for me I dare to say that Deathnote ending is definitely one of the 10 best ending of the manga I read . As I said earlier it s one of the most ambiguous ending ever : see above
AND while it may disappoint the fan of raito I think it adds a new psychological depth to the character . His end remind me a lot the end of the character played by toshiro mifune in 蜘蛛巣城 aka Spider Web Castle aka the adapation of Macbeth by Kurosawa. Great ending.

I always wanted ライト to win. Would've made things much more interesting, plus a longer story.

From the start I also wanted raito to win .... but you know how it is .... you rarely get what you want in this world.... or in the manga world.

we still have 3 consolation
1 the manga is done such a way that we can easily pretend that it finishes with the 1st arc .... whenever I feel depressed I just love to watch the infamous moment every deathnote fan knows.
2 as I said the ending is ambiguous in a certain way raito has won
3 if you read shonen jump you might have read the special chapter not included in the tankbon where there is a moral consolation for raito fan (like me) uring the Kira 5 case , N acknowleges that Kira/L 2/Raito was way more intelligent than him and that he won only through a fluke .
He also acknowleges that neither him nor L didn t have any sort of high moral ground as those retard of L fan like to claim and that he s no better than raito . It was just a battle of ego. It has never been about justice. I think he even resorts to the word "cheater" or fool player when he refers to L and himself....

I think that s the way the mangaka has found to make up for the defeat of raito.

ghinzdra Wrote:the editor coulnd let the bad guy win

Whoa whoa whoa... "Bad Guy"? Heh. Whatever.

Successfully compromising artistically with the publisher is something Death Note clearly failed at toward the end and shouldn't have been necessary from the viewpoint of my values and principles. It was seriously bad writing. Even the illustrations were worse. I blame that failure both on the business system, the sociocultural norms and taboos, and the author. Death Note is dead to me! Except the first arc. I'll never forget the trauma I felt, waiting for each chapter week to week, slowly growing more shocked and depressed as the magnificent manga descended into such mediocrity, watching my fellow fans dissolve into Light/L factions and degenerate into kindergarten-level critical analysis. *sob*

So, I got my package today. Everything looks very official and very from-Malaysia. It all has English, Chinese and sometimes Malay subs. They all have Malaysian price stickers and official seals proclaiming them originals and legit and that the copyright holder has licensed the works.

So no, I don't think they are bootlegs.

Quality, though, ranges from 'TV' to 'VHS'. If you're looking for eye-candy, these are not the discs you're looking for. To get an idea of the quality to expect, check how many discs and episodes it is. If it's 13 eps per disc, it's going to be pretty bad. 9, it'll be about TV quality. If you get 5 or 6, it'll probably be pretty good. (None of mine are in this range, and I doubt any of the ones on the site are.)

Let's see, amazingly inexpensive DVDs that ship from somewhere in Southeast Asia, are not carried by any mainstream retailers, are region-free, have both Chinese and English subtitles, mediocre video quality, probably a high episode count per disc, questionable translations, and cheap cardboard packaging...

I'm glad you're happy with your DVDs and all, but I could buy a Rolex from a guy on a street corner for $50 and have a better chance of it being on the up-and-up.

It's kind of sad that you only get a few episodes decent quality episodes on one dvd... It would cost a fortune for a whole series..