I will be the first to admit NIS America's anime releases had me hesitating but until now, they had not licensed a show I wanted Well, it looks like that has changed with them releasing Katanagatari and Arakawa Under The Bridge on July 5th in glorious DVD/Blu-Ray combo packs at $69.99 suggested retail price. I am then faced with the question: what should I do? I never had much confidence in them following their continued messes but I had an ephihany if you will. They really are not that bad at all.
In retrospect, I have some confidence in them. Toradora/Persona -ts- Part 1's had bad video discs and they fixed it free of charge, no hassle. If you got scratched up discs, they replaced them again free with no hassle at all. Part 2's for each series were perfect in every way. They can put out a perfect and capable product. That much has been proven.
Then we have the second slate of titles with Our Home's Fox Deity and Pandora Hearts. Pandora Hearts was a show with heavy grain and was animated in dark setting or tone. What NIS or whoever was over production aspect in the quality control, lightened the picture through filters. There was never a replacement or change to this, but this is the only legitimate mark I can give them on their record.
Moving onto Our Home's Fox Deity, the first set had zero problems and was perfect. The second set had no problems with the DVDs themselves - it was just the hard case, which really is not a big problem, just a moderate to small and easy to fix problem. After all, you pay $40-50 for this set and you want what you paid for. I cannot really mark them off for a bad case as the DVDs and content were still in great shape. They have since worked on fixing the problem.
Then we have Wagnaria, it seems to be select players with playability problems. It seems highly likely it is the same anti-piracy software that Geneon, Bandai and sometimes even Funimation has used it. It causes slight pauses to sometimes just total problems. It's an inconvenience but a very easy fix and I expect they will issue replacement plan soon. There was also the note of video color drop in one episode but it was only for five minutes and the rest of the disc was perfectly fine.
Now taking all this into account, NIS America may have a spotty record but they have been extremely good to people and have gone well out of their way to gain trust and consumers back. They are going to great lengths to make us feel comfortable buying from them. I do not see much reason to avoid their releases as even if something is wrong, they have proven they will do what they can to fix what is wrong.
I will be pre-ordering Arakawa Under The Bridge and Katanagatari in the hopes they use the last few and next few months ahead to perfect these releases and put out an outstanding product. I am hopeful that the DVDs will be great and the blu-rays will be even greater. My pre-order and following money symbolizes more than a vote for more anime from NIS America, it will be my vote of confidence to them as a company.
