Or we make different threads for different subtopics?
How are we gonna have a Funimation Media Discussion subforum and post everything in one thread?
Or we make different threads for different subtopics?
How are we gonna have a Funimation Media Discussion subforum and post everything in one thread?
Yep, I posted about that over in the Interview thread on Friday.
I'd been saying for a while in the Discord at least that we should have probably managed our expectations on JLC. Even setting aside the recent controversies (which have clearly had no effect on the trajectory of her career), nobody in Hollywood works for free, and wanting to fill a role is a long, long way from being available to fill a role. "We'll talk" is never confirmation.
Even "x has been cast by y" Deadline articles are hardly a confirmation anymore. Recasts happen everywhere all the time for a variety of reasons at all stages of production.
Filming is four weeks in on season 2 (Interview says they are on week 3, but the interview was conducted last week).
Filming is expected to wrap in December.
This season is VFX-heavy and "a long way out".
Oda is heavily involved.
South African winter is challenging to work with, they tried taking a shoot indoors but weren't satisfied with the results, so they will re-shoot it properly later in the year. The production schedule sounds on point.
Jamie Lee Curtis will not be involved with season 2. Her scheduled is booked solid and they could not work out an arrangement that squeezes her in, she had too many other deals in first position (contract lingo that makes actors just joining whatever project they feel like whenever they feel like impossible).
The actress they did cast for Dr. Kureha is "amazing".
(Not part of the interview, but fan speculation is currently centered around Diana Lee Inosanto being our Kureha)
I made a chart with Google showing the number of chapters and pages adapted per episode if anybody wants to check that data out:
The chart is small (on account of the data being SO MUCH), but you should be able to navigate it via interactive components.
This is based on data from the Wiki (which can sometimes be inaccurate) and Chapters per Episode is the sum of the ratios of pages adapted from a given chapter to the total number of pages in the given chapter. This calculation DOES include cover stories, but not Animal Theaters or Reader Requests or Color Spreads unless the events depicted in those spreads are canonical (rare).
Any major conclusions to make? Not really. Egghead is currently better paced than early Wano, shorter chapters means higher Chapters per Episode values even if the number of pages remains low.
For the sake of more readable data, I went ahead and released the whole spreadsheet with additional charts for various season groups and all the raw numbers. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQfXj0phPLPqdvJJzu3dLiuujjRJOCVtW0ym_XUB7XI6s4mL7I4fB6kKGNvH3JdYEocL4Xr4N9qkZ6p/pubhtml
I'll try and keep this document updated weekly as much as possible.
Freaky Friday will shoot for like a month, two months max. One Piece is in production until January most likely. There's lots of room to squeeze her in if that's the issue.
Apologies if my feelings of vindication seem rude to you. It's just that I feel that you were being completely dismissive of what to me was a very logical and probable explanation. You provided a theory, I provided a reasonable counter-theory, and instead of going "oh that's neat another possibility, huzzah expression of ideas", you kind of came across to me as like "you're wrong, that's not a valid possibility, how could you even suggest such a thing". It probably wasn't your intention, but all the pushback I got for even suggesting it made me feel like I was suggesting something dumb or unwarranted. I could see a version of events where my response felt the exact same way to you, which wasn't my intention and I apologize if it felt that way.
It really isn't that serious, I agree with that much. Which is precisely why I think it's okay to feel a tiny bit vindictive.
This season break lines up perfectly with the manga (as I said two months ago), so I'm not going to lose sleep over it. Bring on season 17!
Two.
Oh, look, it's a 12 episode set that ends Wano at 1085. Y'all better act more surprised about this, after all that discussion about the last set ending at 1073 being a production error.
Kuro's actually been in the manga this whole time, he's just too fast to be seen. Who do you think brought Luffy the food?
Another big leak brings another wave of Final Fantasy IX Remake speculation, though this is the most compelling yet. An entry linked to an unreleased Square Enix game titled "Momo" was found on the Epic store DB with some pre-order bonuses attached that sound decidedly related to Final Fantasy IX: "Tetra Master Starter Pack", "Thief's Knives" and "Cuisine Set". https://kotaku.com/epic-games-store-ff9-remake-rdr-pc-port-leak-turok-1851534476
Couple that with leaker Midori's recent comments and it would appear that Final Fantasy IX is on the verge of being officially announced.
@Captain-M said in Chapter 1116: Inner Conflict:
On this break with for the manga, with so little else to talk about, I thought I'd introduce an idea that's been hanging over my mind for a long time: a rewritten script for the One Piece manga, compiled from the information in as many previous versions, both official and fanmade, as I can find, and filtered through my own authorial attempts to make character voice, tone and terminology consistent.
I want to make it clear up front that I'm not a translator and I'm not doing a translation. All I'm doing is compiling and revising what's been done by others.
The foreword in the volume 1 doc goes into more detail.
Find the text for the full first volume of the manga in PDF form here:
https://captainmentertainment.com/one-piece-rewrite-project-volume-1/
I would have liked to have copied the text in directly (I know PDF embedding is not going to be friendly to every device) but Wordpress strips all the spacing-related formatting from Word doc text unless I upgrade my plan and start playing around with plugins. I would consider that if it turns out there's demand for this project and people are connecting with my style of writing.
I hope you all enjoy, and I hope you don't think I'm totally full of myself to even attempt something like this.
Oooh, this is an interesting idea. One thing that kinda bugs me about re-reading One Piece lately is especially early One Piece in the states has a questionable translation, and many fan-scanlations are just as rough. I've wanted to go back at some point and take a stab at re-translating myself to help learn Japanese more but also because there are little needling things that bug me, like I've never seen a translation do anything with Chapter 81's title, which is so blatantly a pun that only works in Japanese.
But I wouldn't want to start a project like that until I have more information, because I'm pretty certain Roger's last words are riddled with double meanings that no translation has captured yet, simply because of lack of context -- context we won't have until the true nature of Roger's dream and the One Piece are revealed.
@AceLuffy4ever said in Funimation DVD Discussion IV (Please Check First Post for FAQ):
@Trueblade74 ihave a feeling those Wano Episodes been done, they just been slow with releasing for some reason
I'm hoping that reason is the new English One Piece website that's supposed to drop next week with the Sphere promotion.
Apparently Henry Thurlow was a key animator so there's that.
I did not enjoy this episode much. The Kuma "beating" went on about a minute too long and even appeared to reuse animation by the end of it, and the voice acting was way overdone for me. As for the rest of the episode, I had hoped we'd get to the end of 1075, but the less said about that Sanji scene, the better.
Season 2 will end with Little Garden. We're actually getting 1 episode of Loguetown, 1 episode of Reverse Mountain, 4 episodes of Whiskey Peak and 2 episodes of Little Garden.
Chopper will only appear in the post-credits.
If one of you says "Whiskey Peak can be cut/merged" one more time, Oda said he'll make it five episodes of Whiskey Peak, he doesn't give a fuck.
@electricmastro said in Chapter 1115: Pieces of a Continent:
@Kitsune-Inferno said in Chapter 1115: Pieces of a Continent:
Egghead is great, I pretty much never see any complaining about it in good faith except for the people who complain about it here.
I get the feeling especially since Wano’s ending that people are complaining about it because it doesn’t specifically play out the way people want it to, including things that don’t happen in a way that specifically appeals to them.
For me, I don’t really criticize arcs for what they don’t do and how it specifically appeals to me, but for what they actually do and how it benefits the story as a whole.
Admittedly, I'm a pretty big Wano critic myself for reasons specific to me--it's way too long, does no service to its antagonists, spotlights characters I don't care about and Wano never made me care about, it's way too long, way more important and interesting things are happening elsewhere and we're stuck in this way too long hellscape for... way too long.
But Egghead to me is the exact opposite of that. It's long, but it's long because it's peddling in global concerns, so I don't feel like I'm missing anything else going on because EVERYTHING is going on. It spotlights characters I DO care about and has contextualized its antagonists fairly well. We'll no doubt learn more about the Gorosei with time, but we can glean a lot from Kuma's interactions with Saturn. I'm happy. It's basically the anti-Wano in every way and sure, it's moving slowly and it's not the most organized arc, but every chapter feels like a treat with every new revelation it doles out. It's exactly what I want.
So I guess that's my cross to bear, and maybe that should make it easier for me to understand the criticism, but it's not the emotional criticism that bothers me--it's the constant, repetitive, relentless "objective" criticism that seems to be more concerned with telling everybody it's indisputably awful and terrible in every chapter and every thread because Oda isn't writing the series exactly the way I want it to be written. And I really only see that here.
I'm stealing this analogy from someone else in a different One Piece context, but it sort of feels like we're approaching a dub-sub event horizon, with the time between dub drops rapidly accelerating toward infinity.
I think the anime team deserves a round of applause for not taking Luffy's "I wonder what Ice Pops is up to" and turning it into an 11-minute Water 7 recap. Small victories.~
@electricmastro said in Chapter 1115: Pieces of a Continent:
@Kitsune-Inferno said in Chapter 1115: Pieces of a Continent:
At some point, we should ask if Oda's writing the Egghead Arc or the Final Saga. I think he's only ever used one of those terms before.
Egghead's goals don't appear to be telling an isolated story and has never explicitly established itself as such, it's always presented to me as a setup arc putting all of the pieces in place for the rest of the final act. We are literally inching through a broadcast to the entire world as we speak, which should speak to its global ambitions. Could it have been organized in a better way? Sure. But I think we're trying too hard to argue that Egghead is something it's not.
I recall him mentioning last year that even though he mentions final saga, the manga isn’t ending quickly, so we can just read it comfortably in the meantime.
Reading it comfortably is what I'm trying to advocate for. Even if we're not ending for a while, the mode of storytelling we're looking at now is unprecedented for this series outside of maybe the Reverie arc, so maybe I'm more willing to be forgiving if it's not written in some perfect sequence.
There's also Oda's schedule and output to consider. We've never had fewer chapters per year, or fewer pages per chapter, and that kind of strikes me as signs of struggle--sure, Oda's getting older, he has more on his plate than ever, he's at the height of his global stardom currently, but he's also trying to kick his story into a new gear that up till now has been fairly localized to the covers or the in-betweens of arcs.
It's easy to forget when we're criticizing every little thing that Oda's been writing this story nonstop for 27 years straight, probably constantly outlining only a few chapters ahead at a time, and with the sheer amount of threads being pulled on by this arc, it's easy to see how they might be overwhelming.
I dunno, I guess what I'm getting at is, it's weird to me that we keep comparing Egghead to past arcs, arcs that only bear a passing resemblance to the scope and scale Egghead is going for, and trying to apply the same rules and standards to it, when Egghead is clearly doing something else entirely, and that something else entirely might not entirely be something Oda's used to.
It's not a perfect arc, but I'm enjoying the ride, so it kinda strikes me as odd how much persistent criticism it's getting.
At some point, we should ask if Oda's writing the Egghead Arc or the Final Saga. I think he's only ever used one of those terms before.
Egghead's goals don't appear to be telling an isolated story and has never explicitly established itself as such, it's always presented to me as a setup arc putting all of the pieces in place for the rest of the final act. We are literally inching through a broadcast to the entire world as we speak, which should speak to its global ambitions. Could it have been organized in a better way? Sure. But I think we're trying too hard to argue that Egghead is something it's not.
Egghead is great, I pretty much never see any complaining about it in good faith except for the people who complain about it here.
@Cockycent said in Season 2 (and Beyond?) Speculation Thread (Spoilers):
To me, it is not chapter count. It is content. The crew don't need the Rain Dinners conflict, chase through Nanohana, or the Toto subplot to showcase Alabasta's endurance. The rest of the content is necessary.
We've seen what an Alabasta without those things look like in movie 8 and they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Rain Dinners is the beating heart of the Alabasta saga, imo. People like to boil down the sequence to Mr. Prince, but it's so much more than that: the collision of the crew and Smoker with Crocodile, it gives us the emotional context necessary to want to see Crocodile defeated, it's a great display of Vivi's character and it's the biggest turning point in Smoker's relationship with Luffy.
The essentials of Alabasta (and One Piece at large) are the characters and Rain Dinners is the strongest use of those characters in the arc. There are other ways of conveying that character sure, but if the priorities of this adaptation aren't the characters, then what is the point? Do we care about seeing Alabasta saved if we don't see how hard Vivi is fighting to protect it, even fighting an opponent she can't win against? How important is Alabasta to her when the lives of her friends are on the line? Is Luffy even necessary if Crocodile isn't a despicable force of nature? What's the point of having Smoker around if he doesn't get the chance to see the Straw Hats' true motives that complicate his own sense of justice?
These are the kinds of questions I think the live action will live and die on. And season 1 may not have answered them the same way Oda did, but its success is that it still answered these important character questions.
@auz56 said in One Piece being taken off of crunchyroll?:
some pretty big One Piece creator
Yeah, content creators generally tend to value sensationalism over reality. I take everything whose source is a YouTube video with a massive grain of salt.
Also there's no way Crunchyroll is gonna mess up with One Piece, considering how big it is. They'll treat the dub like an afterthought of course, but they'd be pretty boneheaded to screw up One Piece outside of some rights issues.
@SirCaesar I haven't looked into the pacing for every arc or anything, but Egghead feels like it's moving at a snail's pace. This episode covered only 11 pages of manga. The average for this arc has been 13-14. I believe 1089 and 1092 only covered 10 pages of manga.
EDIT: Apparently 10-11 page episodes isnt too out of the ordinary as much of Wano was similarly paced, but I guess what I'm getting at is that on average Egghead has been slightly worse.
@Zephray The numbering on Microsoft is wack, are you referring to Zoro vs. A Lead Performer! Recapping Fierce Fights? It's the 14th episode on Voyage 14 and NOT on Voyage 15 based on my local files. That's weird they didn't include it in that batch. But when has Crunchyroll ever been known to give a damn about the One Piece dub in any capacity?
Oof yeah this episode was not easy on the eyes at all.
@Cockycent There's also a lot of misinformation out there too. I think someone shared something in this thread about increased episode counts that hasn't been corroborated by any major sources. It seems like a quote taken out of context.
It is a shame that Deadline and Variety and THR are so slow behind the fans, but Deadline's article also comes with the nugget that they are aiming for a 2025 premiere (and not as some fans have predicted, early 2026).
Apparently, J. K. Rowling never realized the Nazi parallels in her own writing, and according to one amusing Twitter response, appeared to believe that she "invented eugenics".
It is so hilariously full-circle watching this franchise burn.
@MugiMikey It's an assumption on my part, I have no idea if Japan does it differently (I always learned to do audio first, then animate later), but it certainly doesn't FEEL like 1071 was done animation-first.
On the subject of the dub itself:
Colleen and David really knocked it out of the park! Luci also nailed Nami's scene with Kaido. Loved that.
Something I noticed while watching this is that 1071 was MUCH easier to follow in the dub than I found it to be in the original. I think a big part of this might be the unique advantage that the dub voices over the original voices -- they get to record against the finished animation and not the other way around. Looking at Chansard's work, it seems obvious to me that he's animating against lines that have already been recorded, and that's likely what's going on when Mayumi Tanaka's Luffy is making random Gear 5 sounds -- they don't seem to perfectly match the actual action of the scene, unlike Colleen's very deliberate inflection and sounds, or how Kaido's voice while getting thrown around by Luffy sounds timed to the scene rather than the other way around.
I know dubbing has its own set of challenges, especially against Chansard's mouth animation fidelity, but holy cow did they put in the effort to make sure it sounds as good as it looks.
@access-timeco Glad you enjoyed FF9! I recently did a replay of it, and came away with a few surprisingly different observations than you did.
Dagger's a pretty solid character in my book, her arc as a princess who wants to be kidnapped isn't totally unique, but it does twist a handful of tropes on their head. Her journey to becoming "Dagger" is endearing at times, though her spontaneity and naivete does cause more than a few problems that could have otherwise been avoided (the sleeping weed, for one). She is admittedly hampered by a few boneheaded ludonarrative choices that lessen her impact as a character. Her whole thing is that she's a summoner, but that's not really something you can exploit until the game opens up in the third quarter of the game...
Which is when the infamous "Dagger can't concentrate" sequence begins, largely robbing her of any usefulness until the latter half of Disc 3. By that time, you've already got a solid squad of 4 figured out and Eiko will have already replaced Dagger in most parties.
I personally love Dagger's Trance however, it's the most exploitable one in the game by far, you just need to be late game to use it effectively.
In my latest playthrough, I actually struggled a bit at times in the game. I admittedly tried to keep grinding to a relative minimum, but as you say, the systems are addicting and encourage grinding.
Yet, FF9 feels harder to me than most other FFs. I hit quite a few points in the game where I lost control of a battle I wasn't expecting to lose control of, mainly because I didn't prepare properly for an unforgiving status effect or I struggled through the portions of the game where you don't have a dedicated healer (like late disc 1). I'm not complaining, I actually enjoyed the struggle, it was a nice change of pace from how relatively simple it is to break most Final Fantasy games.
FF9 has pre-rendered backgrounds and shares that distinction with FF7 and FF8, as well as indoor areas in FF10, though I think FF9's have a hand drawn quality to them where the others are more literally modeled scenes baked into a flat image.
Re, Freya and the four fiends -- as generally packed with content FF9 is, there was some stuff that hit the cutting room floor, such as the other three fiend bosses and all four respective temples. I think the plan was for each group to be playable and have their own puzzle dungeon to get through, but this was cut for time/pacing. I've always suspected that Freya and Amarant's character development went out the door with that content. Otherwise, yeah, Freya's arc basically ends mid-disc 2 and she's just along for the ride from there.
That would be horrible lol.
I'm ultimately just saying it's weird that we're speculating all these things that they COULD do to correct a "mistake" when it's far more likely they're just ending the "season" (which is still a fairly arbitrary delineation) at 1085 and adding 1086-1088 to the next season. It feels like the only other person who sort of suggested that is @Zephray and everyone else is basically saying it's a mistake, or pushing back against the notion when it's what makes the most logical sense, at least to me.
And I get that it doesn't help, as @Sano pointed out, that there's a random Momonosuke recap at the end of the trio that ties the episodes more to Wano than to Egghead.
@Blake-Bakes-Cakes but doesnt the latest release only include up to 1073? If that was truly the case, Id expect this set to run through 1074 or even 1075 and the final batch going up to 1088. 12 in this batch and 15 in the next feels nonsensical and more in line with a Crunchyroll that is aiming to end the season on 1085.
it honestly feels like despite everything now being under one umbrella, there are two Crunchyrolls making different decisions about the sub and the dub and maybe they're not aligned on this.
It just doesn't make sense to me that they end the season with 13 > 12 > 15 episodes when 13 > 13 > 14 or 13 > 14 > 13 was right there.
Re: 1086-1088 being Wano or Egghead-- perhaps the best way to characterize them is Post-Wano? Point being they adapt chapters (1058-1060) that are classified as Egghead/the start of the final saga by Oda, and 1060 is split across 1088 and 1089.
Funimation has never really adhered to the original Japanese season classifications and I highly doubt they'll start now.
Either way, it's not likely we get 17 episodes (15 + 2 recaps) in one drop, so Occam's Razor and such.
@Zephray 1086-1088 are technically part of Egghead, though it'll be weird to have 3 episodes lead into what is obviously a different season, it's hardly the first time it has happened. (Random episode of G5 says hi)
Movie 8 getting dubbed was part of the 4Kids -> Funimation changeover, iirc. I think at the time, going back and dubbing 1-143 was not guaranteed, so movie 8 gave them the opportunity to do Alabasta content, By the time movie 9 came along, they already had the rights to Drum Island. Plus, I think Movie 9 was held back because of Franky (who had been dubbed already in Unlimited Adventure, but I remember a lot of handwringing about it at the time). Strong World took a few years to get dubbed, but it makes sense why they started dubbing the capital F FILMS.
So what you're saying is that Prince Loki is going to fall madly in love with Luffy.
That's sort of how I've been comparing it. If Sabaody is the "skill check" arc for the New World, this one feels like the "skill check" arc for the final saga. It also might feel similar because the major supporting players of Egghead (Kizaru, Bonney, Kuma, Sentomaru, Pacifista, even Caribou technically) were either introduced at Sabaody or played a major part in it.
IX > VII is a fairly common opinion honestly. It's also the correct opinion, in my humble opinion. :)
@Blake-Bakes-Cakes The last several drops have been all over the map. I think the only weekday they HAVEN'T dropped on in recent memory has been on a Friday.
Last time they dropped on a Thursday was last March, but the last three drops have been on a Wednesday, Tuesday, and Monday respectively. Otherwise, yeah, Tuesdays have been the name of the game.
Really annoyed and disappointed with the lack of information regarding the next episode drop. They advertised and showed off G5 almost a full month ago, and we've heard nothing about release dates or any kind of announcement. I know this is par for the course and how things have been for a while, but it's only affecting me now because I only have 17 episodes of dub left to watch, we watch about 30 episodes a weekend, and I am REALLY eager to show my partner G5
Outside chance they drop tomorrow?
@Nobodyman said in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth:
Finished up Chapter 7.
It'll be interesting to see how they plan to handle revisiting locations from Rebirth, since some locations like Fort Condor were likely cut because they're more relevant in Disc 2 of the original, but they still have Mt. Corel, Junon, and of course Midgar as major locations to go back to that were covered in the first two games.
In terms of NEW content for the third game, there really isn't that much that I can think of:
I could see them tacking on these locations to the existing open world they've created and using locations from Rebirth to tell side stories, with the occasional return to some locations for plot details
Shonen Jump sits on chapters for about three to four weeks before publishing them. With that in mind, it suggests that the break is likely in response to Toriyama's passing, and anything Oda does in commemoration will likely come in 1112.
There's a whole subforum for you to baselessly complain about the live action. Doing it here is just in poor taste.
I don't care if they're behind the Japanese release. Plus I do caution that just because voice work is being recorded doesn't necessarily mean the episode is ready or even close to ready to air. Robin could be the first one in the booth for all we know. Even if she were the last, there's still a lot of mixing and sequencing to be done, I'm sure.
It is good to hear that they are likely recording for episodes that have yet to air, which is a pretty big and encouraging milestone to reach!
What I take issue with is the utter lack of communication when it comes to episode drops. Give us a schedule or something.
Has anybody seen The Traitors? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Verraders
It's a Dutch reality show that plays very similar to Mafia/Werewolf with many localized counterparts in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, etc. that hems by a very familiar premise: there are Faithful and there are Traitors. Every night, the Traitors decide on one player to Murder. Every day, the Faithful must sus out who amongst them is a Traitor and vote to Banish one of their own. If the game ends and all of the Traitors have been successfully Banished, the remaining Faithfuls win! But if there is even a single Traitor amongst them, the remaining Traitors steal the win!
It plays extremely similar to Mafia, but has a few subtle differences -- namely in that there are social mechanics at play and the only way to win is make it to the end, so win conditions are a bit more fluid, and the host (of the American version at least) is super flamboyant. (A role I was meant to play!)
I've been interested in experimenting with the format, if people are interested in playing. It would be ideal to play with 12-24 players, but that amount in this forum climate would be unrealistic, so I may look into possibly playing with as few as 8.
Anybody interested?
If I can get at least 3 or 4, I'll start seriously composing something, then we can see what happens from there.
Starting this thread to specifically talk about One Piece on Crunchyroll, since it's not really releasing to DVD, and I feel bad for cluttering the DVD thread with complaints about Crunchyroll. I'll start a Microsoft Store thread when the next release drops, as well as a secondary streaming release thread (Hulu, in particular) when more episodes drop on those platforms.
Linking to this Reddit post because it's been a great source of up-to-the-minute information regarding the release schedule of new batches of episodes: https://www.reddit.com/r/OnePiece/comments/1b3tzyo/one_piece_dub_release_schedule_2024/
Mainly starting this thread because I really do not like the Crunchyroll app experience one bit, but it's the most effective way to be up-to-date on One Piece without shelling out 40 USD every few weeks or resorting to piracy.
I'm mostly a dub watcher, but ever since Wano in particular, the official release has not been translating on-screen text, and it really irritates me how inconsistent with providing subtitle tracks for the dub.
Starting with episode 1001, there is no English subtitle track whatsoever for English-dubbed episodes. Before then, some episodes have had multiple English subtitle tracks with one captioning dialogue and the other translating on-screen text. Good luck if you need both.
It's really frustrating how inconsistent they are with the dub release, especially since the Funimation app largely did right by the series, and is now going away. The lack of any subtitles whatsoever for 1001+ is especially annoying.
Wrapped up Cosmo Canyon story stuff, still gotta do the area's side content but I have lots of thoughts on what went down in this chapter.