Crest of the Stars: Special Edition - Anime Cartoon International Inc. DVD-203-E This is Crest of the Stars condensed down into movie length format. In my opinion, this series is different from your standard anime series, both in story and character design. This series is one of my favorites. Special Edition is best used as a refresher when you are transitioning from Crest of the Stars to BattleFlag of the Stars, or if you wanna trim down a TV series into one sitting ;-) Video: Looked great in my Apex DVD player and Pioneer DVD-ROM. I think this is from a DVD source. Audio: Sounded great on my systems. Stereo. Content: I don't even know how to break this down, but I will try. Jint's planet gets attacked, where is father is ruler. He makes a deal with the invading aliens to be royalty, and Jint is sent away for training. Raphel, a princess, picks him up, and they have an interesting adventure. Subs: The subs were good and very understandable. Some minor things were hard to understand, but it is pretty easy to figure it out. Overall: I would recommend picking this up unless you utterly detest the character designs or hate science fiction. It is something new and fresh and I find I enjoyed it very much.

This special is basically the entire 13 episode series of "Crest of the Stars" cut down to 90 short minutes. All of the big events in the story are still here (meeting Lafiel at the space-port, the Gothloth at war, escaping from the Baron, surviving on a planet taken over by the United Mankind) but a lot of the "little moments" between Lafiel and Jinto get left out. There is a little bit of new animation--I only noticed one or two shots for the first two-thirds of the special, with most of the new stuff coming during Jinto's and Lafiel's escape in the space coffin (a more detailed launch sequence and you actually see the United Mankind personnel try to shoot the coffin down after the launch), and an extended conversation between Lafiel, Jinto, and Spohr. Visually and audio-wise, this release is fine. The subs here are HK Originals, and again we have different spellings for the main characters, who are now called Jet and Raphel. In fact, all of the proper names get butchered, and most of the subtitles are what I would call "understandable engrish." They're somewhat comparable to the sub quality of MI/AC's "Seikai No Senki" set, but not nearly as good as MI/AC's "Crest of the Stars" set or their "Seikai No Senki II" set. I know there are people who are satisfied with "Seikai No Senki's" subs, but I'm pretty picky about subtitle quality. While the small amount of new animation was nice, it doesn't add significantly to the story, so I wouldn't recommend purchasing this unless you are a die-hard fan that needs to collect everything related to "Crest of the Stars." edited by btzillaguy on 05 Jul 2002 9:33 pm