# Gankutsuou (V2)  **English Title:** Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo **Type:** TV Series, 24 episodes **Year:** 06.10.2004 till 30.03.2005 **Tags:** conspiracy, novel, thriller **Link:** [AniDB](https://anidb.net/a1868) Based loosely on the book written by Alexandre Dumas titled Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo), this story is set in a far future time against an intergalactic backdrop. Albert was a boy who had been born to a noble family in Paris. He made a journey to the moon with Franz to escape from their tedious lives. On the moon, he met a millionaire calling himself the Count of Monte Cristo. The Count lived a life of splendour in a rich hotel, with beautiful women waiting on him and strong men guarding him. Albert was fascinated by this Count who seemed to know everything, and the two became friends. Albert eventually invited the Count to visit him in Paris. The Count's past slowly resurfaces, to the greatest displeasure of everybody involved. --- ### About this release **Group:** Deus EX Anima [DEXA] **Source:** retail Japanese BluRay box-set **Video:** 1080p, HEVC x265 10-bit, CRF16 **Audio:** Japanese, FLAC, 2ch, 16-bit (some extras have AC3 as per source) **Subtitle:** English (based on [KAA] for the series, [Ani-Kraze] for OP and trailer, various sources for ED, original translation by DEXA for Museum 1 and 2), ASS **Chapters:** Yes ### Comments about this release + This release is the **continuation and completion of the experimental 1080p release** of the 1st episode which was uploaded a few months ago. Thank you all for the positive feedback. + I'm releasing this as **V2** because the changes in some aspects are significant and also because I believe that it supersedes the previous 720p release in hopefully all aspects. Please keep on reading to find out what has been changed in V2 compared to V1. #### Changes in V2 compared to V1 + **Brand new encode, now in 1080p for the whole series, including all extras.** Contrary to the V1 release in 720p which only tried to address the sometimes quite horrendous banding, this new encode is more intensively processed in order to enhance the overall image quality of an anime which was aired almost two decades ago in the pre-HDTV digital era, which is very difficult to remaster (if possible at all). As with every applied filter and processing, you gain something and you loose something. It’s highly subjective. However, I personally believe that it's an improvement over the source and the V1 release. Note that the BluRay source very often jumps from okay picture quality to very bad depending on the scene, so if something looks bad in the encode, it's highly probable that it looks just as bad in the source too. Again, this is highly subjective, so check the comparison with the JP BluRay source (for episode 01) below. + **A new extra not found in V1: a full size official AMV of the ED song "You Won't See Me Coming" by J.J. Burnel**, found on the last BluRay disc. + **The Museum 1 and Museum 2 extras are now translated. Translation and styling was done in-house [DEXA].** There's no spoken dialogue, only signs, but hopefully it will now improve the watching experience and put the art concepts into better context. + **ED song lyrics text replaced with other source**, which is slightly different to [Ani-Kraze]. This was needed in order for the ED song to be in sync with the full size video extra mentioned above. Still using the same font though. + **Slight changes to subtitles:** resolution updated to 1080p, even more typos fixed, some timing changes, and made the font sizes slightly smaller, as we're not in 2005 any more when we still watched anime on a 17-inch CRT monitor. + Audio unchanged, still FLAC. #### Extract from the V1 release notes to put V2 into context + Regarding the **subtitles**, the original idea was to just use the ones done by [KAA]. Then I had a closer look, and thought that they will need some love. Then I looked even closer and realized that they will need lots of love. At the end, I ended up creating brand new subs for the OP, ED and the trailer, using the old [Ani-Kraze] release as reference. So let's break it down a bit: 1. **Main episodes** - the original script done by [KAA] had no lyrics for the OP and ED, most probably because they are in English. That was very disappointing. So lyrics for both OP and ED had been created and added by using the excellent but old [Ani-Kraze] hard-coded release as reference. Many other visible and non-visible changes had been made to the subtitles, for example to the French ("Gankutsuou") parts: they are now always single-lined and won't bleed into the Japanese hard-coded translation. Hundreds of useless `\n` tags were removed (useless when wrapping is set to `0`). Timing has been also adjusted to match this release. Some styling changes had been made too. Finally, the last episode now has proper English-translated credits for the actors and their seiyuus, same as in the [Ani-Kraze] release. 2. **OP, ED and Trailer** - subtitles created from scratch using the excellent [Ani-Kraze] release as reference. (V2 note: ED now uses lyrics from another source.) + The Blu-Ray box-set also contained some trailers, including the famous two-part promo released by [Ani-Kraze]. As this trailer is among my favourites, I've made a decision to release it with soft-subbed subtitles, by using the hard-coded [Ani-Kraze] release as reference. #### Closing notes + The experimental torrent containing episode 01 with the new 1080p encode is now deleted. Please re-download episode 01 from this torrent as the files are not the same and have different CRC. + As this release supersedes the older V1 release, the old V1 torrent will most probably be deleted soon. + **[Comparison of episode 01 with JP BluRay source](https://slow.pics/c/bC7C8QdZ)** Bide your time, and hold out hope! --- Seed speeds are slow, bear with it. Please seed this as long as you can, as I won’t be able to seed this for long.