Good Witch of the West

This product comes as two Blu-ray discs for 12 episodes. Japanese audio with English subtitles. The picture quality for the year this anime was created is poor. There is some awkward character movements in the show that will make you laugh or outright feel ashamed at having seen such mistakes be allowed to make the final edit.This story makes absolutely no sense. Some lost royal relative is found after attempted murder and is sent to a school to be trained as a lady at the request of her standing relative who rules the country. The school is a cut-throat place where girls will kill people to get ahead. They are all women being trained to seduce men of power and influence. There is some wacky student council the main character is sent unknowingly to destroy. An out of place romance with a boy who sneaks in as a girl to protect the main character. This story is a hot mess and the animation is blow standard for its time. Recommend you avoid purchasing.

An attempt to mix an almost Spanish Inquisition-like society with magic (or possibly technology so advanced it operates like magic) with medieval European intrigue. While not overall a bad series it sort of falls flat IMO. It would benefit from a good dub, or at least better subs. Characters are good, story line is solid until the end when it lamely depends on deus ex machina to end it. This one went into my "give it away" pile on finishing it.

Description says that it is English dubbed, but it is subtitles only.

Young Firiel lives happily with her foster parents in the lovely Sera Field while her father works in isolation in the tower nearby with his assistant, a boy named Rune. On Firiel’s 15th birthday she attends a ball and discovers a secret about her heritage that turns her whole world upside down. And that will be the least of the secrets she will soon uncover…Firiel is the standard spunky heroine, but she has some of her own special moments that make her stand out as a character. Rune is a very moody, but he has a good reason for his tense behaivor. And his devotion to Firiel is unwavering. The other characters have much less focus, their primary existence to make the main characters shine, but they are each different and likable (for the most part of course).I first encountered this series in the manga form, which is only 7 volumes long, but tragically only 6 were published in the USA and the last volume can only be found in Japanese online. Hoping for answers, I turned to the anime. It is quite faithful to the source material - for the first half or so. But once it starts getting into the mysteries of Firiel’s world and the complexities of the ending, it changes everything completely. The manga was shaping up to be a possible sci-fi story with some interesting twists, but the anime abandons that to focus on the romance, which is admittedly quite sweet. It just sort of makes up a mumbo jumbo ending. I still found it enjoyable and entertaining, but I was a little disappointed. Still, I will end up buying it because I really like the series :)PS This series is 13 episodes.

Fairy and Bard and all flavors of Princess form the basis for this tale, with a baby unicorn thrown in to keep the watcher from asking too many questions.The problem is that there needs to be a conclusion for this story, and there is no conclusion, instead we are offered a conclusion but then it is somehow ignored and goes back to people who do not have technology who rely on magic to do-- uh-- something. Maybe. Maybe not.Beautiful artwork, strange interplay between characters, and no real conclusion.It is at least entertaining, although it could be much better, it is still better than most anime winds up being because it drags the viewer into caring about the story, the land, and most of all, the characters involved.I still feel it should have had a conclusion, not a postponement of the end.

The anime it self is pretty good, the actual product itself is mediocre. The picture transfer is pretty subpar, seems like they basically took a DVD rip and forced into 1080p, nothing has been remastered to make the picture look better. On my high end Plasma, there is quite a lot of stuttering in pans and movement, quite a lot of noticeable video errors as well. The color is alright, but then again that can just be attributed mostly to my Plasma TV. To be fair, the discs were manufactured relatively well, at least in comparison to many modern Blurays. The case that came with is alright too, at least again in comparison to awful modern cases. I would recommend this if you simply want to own this anime, since there is no other English release of it.