Anime — Noir

Having doled this out in a measured pace, averaging a disk every other week, I finally got to the end of the tale last night. And it did not disappoint, unless you really want irrelevant levels of detail in character back-stories to have been expounded. We learn all we need to know, and there is closure.

Disk 7 also gives us some of the fan-service that we'd been missing to date. And a poignant scene when we see that Kirika has finally achieved peace and happiness - and we know that it cannot last.

If I have to pick nits with the series, it's that it was dub-titled (in about four places sub-titles appeared without matching Japanese dialogue, presumably reflecting the English voice script). In all but one of the cases, it was just adding some suggestion of "noises off" for a distant crowd, so could be ignored. The last, however, changed the tenor of a scene - whether one character calls another's name in warning or not. And in a series - and an episode in particular - that relies heavily on subtle nuance as to what the characters are feeling and how they are reacting, that's a big change to make.

Having been put off the American voices and mispronunciations on the first disk, I can't comment on how that version developed.