As ES Force Members, Eclair and Lumiere are used to tracking and arresting the intergalactic criminal element. Their latest assignments are no exception. A high speed reactor capable of turning an ordinary human into a super being has been stolen. To make matters worse, the two heroes get caught up in a terrible battle for supremacy between rival gangs that threaten the lives of innocent children. The only chance for survival may be through help of their greatest rivals... and fellow ES Force comrades!
The three episodes on this volume comprise:
4. High/Speed
5. Day/Off
6. Twin/Star
The second volume of the latest GONZO series to hit the UK proves to be on par with the first.
Audio:
I listened to the Japanese track for episodes five and six, and found the actors did a bang up job. The stereo mix comes across nicely, with the music in particular coming across nicely. I noticed no dropouts or distortions during regular playback.
I also listened to the first episode on the disc in English. The dub continues to be really good, with Monica Rial as Lumiere and Colleen Clinkenbeard as Éclair getting the most exposure and doing a fine job. My only gripe with the track is that it does sometimes stray a bit too far from the literal translation for my liking (which is often the case with FUNimation dubs). The 5.1 mix is pretty nice, adding a bit of directionality, though it didn't seem that great a difference over the stereo track to me. I noticed no dropouts or distortions on this track during regular playback.
As this is a FUNimation production, we also get dubbed openings and endings, and in the case of Kiddy Grade, they're very good. It's quite a feat with the opening song, too, since the original is quite nonsensical in its use of English. Dub songs really do add big brownie points in my book, especially since they're not cringe-worthy like some older dubbed themes.
Video:
With only three episodes on this disc, and coming from GONZO, you would expect it to look great, and you won't be disappointed here. The transfer continues to be crisp and clean, and colours are extremely vibrant. This is another one of those digital looking "shiny" shows. There was also no artifacting that I noticed, and aliasing is kept to a minimum.
We also get alternate angles for the openings and endings. This means that you can either watch the translated, English credits in the opening, or the original Japanese opening with kanji. Likewise for the ending.
Subtitles are in a nice yellow font, as opposed to the white font used on the US discs. They're generally good but I noticed several spelling and grammatical errors throughout the episodes.
Packaging:
No packaging was included as this was a check disc.
Menu:
The menus are simple but functional, with the static opening menu featuring a shot of Lumiere this time to the right of the screen with the logo above her. There are the four choices as static buttons, with some background music looping over the top. Sub-menus are similarly static with much the same use of text and buttons, as well as Éclair on the right side of the screen. The menus are far from the high point of this disc, but they serve their purpose well enough and look fairly attractive.
Extras:
There aren't that many extras on this disc. We get some short, text-based character profiles, as well as the textless ending. One of the better extras is a good promotional slideshow, which has some initial artwork from the series set to a piece of music, that runs just over four minutes and has some really good drawings in there. The final extra are two original commercials for the second volume of the Japanese DVD release. The extras are nice, but nothing more than a bit of fluff.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With three more episodes of Kiddy Grade on this volume, we get a little more insight into the daily lives of Lumiere and Éclair. The episodes themselves continue to be stand-alone stories, with just a few side comments here and there that seem to be hooks for future plot threads. While it's a fair amount of fun, there is a bit of a niggling feeling while watching that there's no real movement in the grand scheme of things.
The episodes on this disc explore a few different themes, but have a lot of their focus on Éclair. The opening episode centres around Éclair and Lumiere trying to retrieve a stolen reactor which is inside a cyborg. In order to find it, Éclair poses as a female fighter (in a catsuit no less!), to try and find the cyborg which holds it. While she doesn't find out who has it during a fight, she does catch a glimpse of Foxy Fox, the so called "strongest woman in the universe" on TV, and realises it's actually inside her. She does all she can to get it back, but it's quite obvious that trouble will be just around the corner. This episode is chock full of some really good action sequences, and the story is quite interesting. There's one particular point that comes up just before the eye-catch regarding Éclair's past that had me really wondering where the story will go.
The second episode is really enjoyable, as it follows Éclair and Lumiere on a day off. Éclair decides to go out with a friend, and they go to an upmarket restaurant for dinner. Unfortunately, it's the scene of a meeting between two warring groups of gangsters, who are discussing joining force. Their meeting is interrupted by Éclair, when her friend Ricky puts some lipstick on her, meaning she has trouble controlling her powers. She ends up pushing a man who tries it on with her through a screen covering their meeting, and all hell breaks loose, leaving Éclair captured by one of the sides. Meanwhile, Lumiere is on her way somewhere, too, when she's caught by the opposite side, and both ES members then have to escape their captors. This episode is a lot of fun, showing Éclair and Lumiere outside their usual GOTT activities, while also giving them both a chance to kick a little ass.
The final episode on the disc sees an important document needing to be returned to GOTT headquarters by two newly introduced ES members, Dextera and Sinistra. They leave Éclair and another woman from GOTT, Mrs Padushka, as "decoys", carrying the real documents while Dextera and Sinistra are really being the decoys, expecting the enemy to come after them. Things end up going slightly differently though, as it turns out the enemy actually goes after Éclair and Padushka. This is another enjoyable story, and though it's pretty simple it has a couple of amusing twists in it to keep it interesting. It's unfortunate that the two new ES members aren't really two involved, though the glimpse we get of them is relatively interesting, and also Lumiere is noticeable by her relative absence.
While there's little in the way of major plot developing through these episodes, there are a few questions raised that have yet to be answered. The main one is raised in episode four, and that's an aside of dialogue with Éclair mentioning that she doesn't know anything about her past. It's interesting as I don't recall it being mentioned in the first volume, but it would seem that her past before she started working at GOTT is a mystery, and that's surely something we'll find out about in later episodes.
We get a particularly good insight into Éclair this volume, seeing her in a variety of situations, in particular in the day off episode. She's a really fun character to watch, packing a punch while being pretty carefree and also quite self-conscious about the things she does. She and Lumiere work together really well and have a great understanding of each other. It's fun here to watch the pair of them working on different things with the goal being the same. Again in the episode where they have the day off, they end up doing exactly that, with Lumiere being captured on one side of the warring factions and Éclair on the other. Both work on escaping and when they see each other, a simple nod is all that's necessary for and they understand each other. It's a nice "buddy" relationship to watch.
As for the other characters, well, we don't really get to see many of the group introduced in the first volume, as the other characters at the forefront in this batch of episodes tend to be episodic characters as opposed to regulars. And that's perhaps my biggest complaint besides the slightly "plodding" feel of the volume at times; it's mainly Éclair with a bit of Lumiere. While that's not necessarily a bad thing, it means that there's scant little development for any of the other ES members, and we only even briefly see the couple of new ones introduced here.
Despite the story, the look of the show is as gorgeous as ever. The character designs are simply fantastic, and the episodes are quite consistent throughout. The show just looks great, with gorgeous characters and some good backdrop design, with the animation remaining quite solid throughout. My biggest gripe continues to be the disc count, which is out of MVM's hands. With only three episodes on a volume, they fly by and in the case of this volume I just wanted to get to more story, but it wasn't there. This can be a good or bad point depending on a person's attention span, though. If they're not completely hooked after these opening episodes, there's not much incentive to pick up more.
In Summary:
The second volume of Kiddy Grade continues in the same manner as the first. There's no real over-arching story so far, and the episodes are a little lacking plot-wise, but the individual stories are fun to watch and the characters enjoyable. There continues to be a lot of promise shown by this series, and hopefully it will begin to shine soon, or else it may well run out of steam. The hooks presented here worked well in keeping me interested to see where the series is going. The presentation is excellent, outside of the low number of episodes per disc. But if you can overlook that, Kiddy Grade is a good action show with a lot of promise.
Philips 28" Pure Flat Widescreen TV, Pioneer DV-464 code free DVD player, JVC gold-plated RGB SCART cable, standard stereo sound.
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