So I FINALLY watched Season 4, Voyage 1 this week. I had picked it up the day it came out, but I was still in the middle of a delayed complete series re-watch, so I held off on watching it until I had arrived at G-8 again.
Since the quality of the show and the dub are so high, I find myself nitpicking more on the DVD technical aspects of the release. For starters, there seem to be some visual oddities, perhaps as a result of having both 4:3 and 16:9 episodes on the same disc. The moment I started watching episode 206, I could immediately tell that the visual quality of Bon Voyage had taken a noticeable dip. I wondered if this was a result of their editing the video to include the actual opening credits for the first time ever. But the credit-less Bon Voyage had the same visual deformities (and the same edited logo…BOO). Episode 206 itself looked fine, but the subtitles were squished a tiny bit.
Moving on to episode 207 and beyond, the visual quality is excellent. If no one had told me otherwise, I would've thought this was actually on Blu-ray. One problem though...the subtitles for episodes 207 and up are horribly stretched...the opposite of 206. It seems there indeed is a problem with having both standard and widescreen episodes on one disc. Either that, or FUNimation simply wasn't careful in how they encoded it. While the stretched subtitles aren't a huge issue in and of themselves, it messes with my head. Because I'm such a videophile, my brain assumes that the rest of the aspect ratio is also screwed up, which isn't the case. I'm sure that Voyage 2 will have properly-sized subtitles. Not sure what's up with episode 207 and up suddenly using all caps in the titles.
Everyone seems to keep their laugh on this set except for Doflamingo. Mike McFarland made it a point to mention in one of the commentaries that when he directs a particular arc, he tries to keep tabs on particular laughs. Perhaps he wasn't handling directorial duties when it came to Arlong and Blackbeard....
Extras are about the same as always. We get two commentaries this time, which is nice. Nothing mind-blowing was revealed, though. They seem to be very weary of spoiling anything by accident, and take to whispers when someone asks about something that hasn't happened yet. I was hoping to at least get a clue as to approximately how far they'd gotten in the recording, but no such luck. For some odd reason, we get a trailer for THIS set, as well as a trailer for Collection 7. I'm not complaining, since I like the trailer for this set, but they really should have also had a trailer ready for Voyage 2. We get credit-less openings and closings for both sets of songs. As I mentioned before, Bon Voyage keeps its edited logo, but thankfully, Map of the Heart gets the uncut treatment. As far as being forced to hear the Japanese songs in the English dub, it didn't affect my enjoyment at all. But I really hope Voyage 3 gets the English songs back in action. It's really nice to finally get some new DVD menus and music offerings. I hope they switch it up more often, as One Piece has such an extensive selection of music.
Thankfully, since it took me so long to finally catch up with S4V1, I won't have long at all to wait until V2 comes out. Plenty to look forward to there, especially the last three episodes.