Video:

The quality and artwork for Kino was excellent. Rich colors and great artwork.

Audio:

The intro and ending songs were well down and the score throughout was cool. They really captured the mysterious of certain scenes or the elation of others.

Subtitle:

For part of the series you can understand what they're trying to say as long you realize they're directly translating from Japanese to English, which means you'll have to translate it again in your head to understand what they are trying to say. For the other part, including the final episodes, it is near indecipherable and basically worthless. Horrible.

Comment:

This had the potential to be a a wonderful series -great artwork, ambient and fitting music and deeper level meanings. Unfortunately the subtitles ruin any chance of it. Unless you understand spoken Japanese, I would avoid this copy. I hate to say that too, because it's an awesome series that I enjoyed (except for the painful subtitles...). I believe you can buy the box set in mainstream stores, so if you can afford it, I would go that route.

Video:

Ripped from television. After one episode, there's about half a second of TV commercials... Not really good.

Audio:

Sounded quite okay to me.

Subtitle:

Now this is where this set really sucks. The subtitles are a mixed bag - about one half of the show is using not so good fansubs, I think. You can still get some sense out of them, but it's far from perfect. Whereas the other half is just unintelligible gibberish and you're left to guess what's going on. Oh well, what a disappointment. Especially in a show where the dialogues are that important.

Comment:

"The beautiful world" is quite an interesting series - one of those rare shows that compare to nothing else out there. More philosophy, less action, but still an interesting thing to waste your time with. Unfortunately, the DVD set often fails to convey the meaning of the dialogues and it's up to the viewer to make some sense out of the events going on. The video quality is also rather flawed. Even though the series is quite good (at least that's the conclusion I've come to after watching it with those flawed subtitles) and the packaging looks great, I wouldn't recommend this set to anyone. Even if you're dying to see this series, don't buy this set! Series: 8/10 Quality: 4/10 Extras: - Packaging: 8/10