Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon is a Sunrise show, from the description it sounded like it would be action/politics of a sort similar to Code Geass. I really enjoyed Code Geass toward the end, it felt like they were getting their formula down, so let’s see if they can execute on it in episode 1 of Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon.
…thirty minutes pass…
Are they really so desperate to sell the DVDs that they have to censor a fully-clothed breast grope?
So, I’ve had bad experiences with Commie subs in the past, but people said they’d gotten better and the HorribleSubs version of this show was unwatchable. Unfortunately Commie has not gotten any better. They still leave important details out of their translations, translate things in supposedly “natural-sounding” ways that actually destroy large portions of the meaning, and make some questionable judgments about what the actual factual meaning of certain Japanese expressions actually is. Plus they tried to translate the song at the beginning so that it rhymed, which is a really bad idea. Translating songs is hard enough without adding extra constraints like that, and Japanese songs don’t usually rhyme in any case.
So with that in mind, it’s hard to tell how much of the trouble with this show is actually a problem with the show itself, rather than a problem with the subbing. It was difficult to understand what people were doing and why, and that might have been due to translation problems, but it might have been due to the show trying to introduce a million characters at once. The setting did not really come across clearly, and that might have been due to translation problems, but it might have been due to the setting being ridiculous and making no sense and including things like archfiends and sentient slimes and holy archers with cyborg eyes and incubi without penises (if there is one characteristic that it seems like you would have to have in order to qualify as an incubus, it would be having male genitalia). The silly unnecessary censorship pictured above is probably not a translation issue, unless Commie edited it into the video to troll us. I wouldn’t put it past them.
I won’t be following this show unless a more reputable group starts subbing it and I hear from other sources that it’s good. It’s possible there’s potential here, but odds aren’t good enough for my taste.
suntzuanime 