**Gokudo (Gokudou-kun Man`yuuki) (1999)** https://anidb.net/anime/466 Source: US/R1 DVD (Media Blasters / Anime Works) Video: x264/AVC 10bit, 700x478, 4:3 Audio: Japanese, AAC CBR 128kbit/s stereo Subtitles: English, ASS softsubs. "Gokudo is an adventurer by heart, his only goals being to get all the money and hot babes in the world. After being told by an old hag in a local bar that an evil king seeks to harm him, he is set forth unknowingly on a hilarious adventure filled with a gender changing genie, demon prince, and sword wielding enemies galore. The story thickens later on when Gokudo and friends find out the real reason for their series of events." (ANN) A fantasy comedy series, perhaps not one of the best but it's enjoyable enough, and it actually has a proper ending unlike way too many others, especially these days. I guess this is technically a v2, replacing my old crappy XVID release from almost exactly 15 years ago. **Video notes:** (begin tl;dr monologue section about video) This was originally released in the US by Media Blasters / Anime Works and later re-released by Discotek. Both releases have plenty of problems, but interestingly the Discotek reissue is actually worse (and they also omitted the extras). Shared problems for both versions were (heavy) noise, image instability, rainbows and halos. Of those, it took me a long time to find a denoising solution that could handle that much noise without noticeable blur or detail loss (and no, "fixing" blur from denoisers with sharpening is not an acceptable solution), but I eventually managed to find something that worked even better than I hoped, and both blur and background detail loss are minimal. The other problems were easy to deal with in the usual ways. What was left, and what also was the main difference between the AW and Discotek versions, was contrast/brightness and saturation being all over the place. In the Discotek release, they are off throughout, but in the older AW version I guess they had at least tried to fix some of it because some episodes are much better than others. Contrast/brightness issues varied too much scene by scene, so fixes would also have had to be done per scene, and that would have taken ages. So that problem is left as is, most times it looks a bit washed out, but occasionally it will burn your eyes out. The color saturation problem however was consistent enough that I could add a *tiny* saturation boost on most episodes that needed it, and skipped those where it was already good enough or if that particular episode had scenes with normal or even oversaturation. You will see some scenes where especially the red in Gokudo's cape will hit you in the face, but those are not me and were already like that in the source. (end tl;dr monologue section about video) **Audio notes:** From episodes 23 onwards there's a drop in audio quality for the OP and ED, but the episodes themselves don't seem to be affected. **Subtitle notes:** Besides the usual typo fixings, lyrics and minor edits, I might have gone a little bit crazy with this one at times, but hey, the series is dialogue heavy and editing took a looooong time, so I had to have some fun to keep going :) Also, the longer version of ED2 that plays near the end of the last episode wasn't subbed on the DVD, so I took the missing lines (both romaji and translated) from some random websites, they might not be 100% correct but hopefully close enough. There's spoken dialogue over the song so it's hard to completely verify it by ear. -X