Video:

Absolutely no picture quality, macroblocking, etc. Watched it on a 27" CRT Panasonic.

Audio:

Also, very fine. Have a surround sound 5.1 Sony receiver and everything sounded clear. I listened to the English audio and all the voices from the first season are intact.

Subtitle:

Subtitles were only slightly less than spot-on, but nothing that would bother the average anime viewer. They didn't impede on viewing the show either -- text was easy to read.

Comment:

I laughed so hard, and when the end finally came I only wished there were more. I blew threw the whole series in about 3 days. Even though the info page has this listed as episodes 1 - 12, it's actually 1 - 17. The first 5 episodes are splt into two mini-episodes a piece, and the remaining 7 episodes are full-length. So all in all, there are actually 17 episodes. For those of you who did research and saw that FMP: Fumoffu was 17 episodes long fear not, this box is complete.

Video:

Episodes come on 2 D5 DVDs, 6 on each. Video is taken from R1 discs in 4:3 full screen, there is some rainbowing causing lines to shimmer, similar to World Of Narue which was from the same year (this is a problem also affecting the R1s, from what I've heard). For some reason, the first 2 episodes on each disc look virtually flawless, but the rest of the episodes show some grainy pixellation. This isn't too bad, but is definitely noticeable when viewing close up. It looked fantastic viewed several feet away on a 21" TV.

Audio:

English 5.1 and Japanese 2.0 - I chose the English dub, as I enjoyed the first Full Metal Panic! in English. Seeing as I don't have a 5.1 system, it sounded great in stereo.

Subtitle:

Two English subs - translation and lyrics/text. I didn't notice any problems, but I haven't watched it with the full subs all the way through. From what I saw taking screengrabs, there must be virtually all there! At least the lyrics/text one was fine.

Comment:

Extras: each disc has approx 10 mins of extras cunningly fused into one long chunk. Firstly, you get trailers for Fumoffu (which are heavily pixellated, for reasons best known to Mac), galleries of character/item drawings, clean OP/ED (same quality as the episodes). Full Metal Panic is one of my fave shows, and this set takes all the comedy elements and ramps them up several notches. The focus is almost entirely on Kaname and Sousuke at school - sadly some characters get virtually no screen time, or very little. Still, it's very funny and well worth it - especially if you love the characters! Still no separate chapter marks in the episodes.