![]() Soul Eater is definitely a little left field in its sound design. The surround is quite nice given all the action, but the minute you hear the evil looking CG sun in the sky, evil-laughing his head off, you realise that you're in for something of an audio treat. Sound The sound comes in DD 5.1 English and DD 2.0 Japanese options, with translated English subtitles or a signs only track. Of course there is that slight regret that the consistency of having all four sets of episodes this way isn't possible, but the change to native PAL had to start somewhere, and the high quality NTSC-PAL conversions of the first three sets aren't to be sniffed at. For Soul Eater it means a brilliant, smooth and clear transfer to DVD, taking full advantage of the higher resolution, free of interlacing, judder or ghosting, although subject to a 4% PAL speedup. Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood recently showed up in native PAL for volume 2, and so has Eden of the East. It's something that they are doing more and more of for anime down under, and it's about time too. Picture Soul Eater gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, but for this final volume of episodes, Madman Entertainment in Australia, who provide the PAL source that Manga use for their discs in the UK, have created a native PAL transfer. If you want to avoid those spoilers, you can go straight to page 3 for the verdict, where there no doubt will be more spoilers anyway. Manga Entertainment presents the concluding 12 episodes of Soul Eater across two discs, and you can read the episode synopses on the next page. Soul Eater introduces and follows three unconventional partnerships, Maka and Soul Eater, who aspire to ultimate coolness, Black * Star and Tsubaki, who are hampered by Black * Star's ego, and the son of the Grim Reaper himself, Death the Kid, for whom symmetry is the ultimate goal, and his twin weapons, Patty and Liz. To graduate and become a shinigami, a Meister and his weapon need to reap 99 evil souls, and one witch, after which the weapon will become a fully-fledged Death Scythe. They do this by using human weapons, partners who literally transform into weapons to reap souls. Weapon Meisters are those people who have the skills and talent to reap souls. Chief among them was Death himself, but the ultimate personification of mortality can't handle all this by himself, which is why he's now the headmaster of the Death Weapon Meister Academy. ![]() ![]() It was the shinigami that saved the world by reaping these Kishin, and by reaping the evildoers before their tainted souls can hatch. Evil people's souls gradually turn from bright and shiny, into warped red Kishin Eggs, and it's the Kishin that go ahead and cause trouble. Soul Eater is set in a world that was once terrorised to submission by the darkest of souls. Naruto Shippuden Part 4 is released on the same day, and reviewing that first meant that I could delay watching Soul Eater for a few more days. But prolonging the anticipation meant that for once I was glad that a selection of Naruto check discs turned up a few weeks later. I got the check discs pretty early, but as I review these things in release order, they went to the bottom of the pile, and then quickly worked their way back up. It quickly became one of my favourite releases of the year, and I have been anticipating its conclusion with an eagerness that's probably unseemly in a person of my age. It's finite at just 51 episodes, it's fast paced, it's quirky, it's cool, and it's alluring. But Soul Eater turned out to be nothing like that. Soul Eater is hardly the show that I would have categorised as one that would tingle my anime taste buds when it started, a shonen action show in much the same vein as those endless filler-fests that are the lowest common denominator of the medium, but that for some reason everyone else seems to love more than anything else. I don't appreciate being rushed or pressured, but I don't mind a bit of procrastination, a little extra eagerness building up before I finally get around to partaking of something. Introduction If there is one thing that I like to do, it's to prolong the anticipation, although only for something that I have been really looking forward to.
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