This is the animated opening sequence to minori's 2002 bishoujo game, Wind -a breath of heart-. The game itself has some nice graphics, and the producer of the animation in this Op is also the producer of Hoshi no Koe (Makoto Shinkai). If you liked that, give this one a try.

August 20, 2002. Fresh off the failure of Ai Yori Aoshi 13, we wanted to do something that no other group has done before. In other words, we wanted to do something stupid. Unfortunately, we didn't have have any raws available... or so we thought.

While browsing an fserv with 0 sends, I came upon something called Azurewind. It was marked as raw, so I greedily downloaded it. After taking a look at it, I wrote it down as a possible choice.

Flashback to May 28, 2002. UFG was in #elite-fansubs@ETG (now dead) that day and started yapping about his new web site devoted to the non-hentai aspect of bishoujo games. One of the games he was screaming about was Wind -a breath of heart-. After linking us to a bunch of screenshots, I was in awe. I never knew bishoujo games could look so much more refined than anime. UFG noticed, and asked if I wanted to see the opening movie. I jumped at the opportunity, and it was tucked inside a folder for nearly an eternity.

Now, after I marked down Azurewind, I remembered that I had this Wind Op raw somewhere on my computer. After a quick search, boom! There it was. Now we magically had two raws to work with. Life was good. We decided to begin work on one of the raws the next day.

Except on the next day, something appeared on the newsgroups that took all of us by surprise. Some other group released Azurewind! Shocked, I grabbed the fansubbed product. They did a very fine job with it.

So Azurewind was out of the question. We focused our efforts on Wind and finished our first homebrew script with my very own "l33t effects" on the 27th. This was slated to be NNL's first solo release. However, there was one tiny problem. Who was going to encode it for us? We wanted to break our ties with AnimeForce, but we didnt even have an encoder.

madgat tried to solve this problem by attempting to encode the product himself. However, the end product produced massive artifacts and we couldnt figure out why. When it was apparent that all hope was lost for a solo release, we tried to consider other options. The problem was that we would probably be perceived as a n00b group by all the veteran groups out there.

Then I remembered Azurewind. It was fansubbed by a new group called Bishoujo-Fansubs (#bishoujo-fansubs@ETG), and anrp, the leader of that group, did a nice encode on it. He also owned a fat distro line. This was too good to be true... Wind was right up their alley, and they had two things we didn't: a dedicated encoder and a fat distro (remember that BT wasn't around, so it was all about obtaining "illegal" xdcc bots back then).

I took a deep breath and brought my case to anrp. I was prepared to be rejected ...

Looking back, this was destiny. All the pieces fell through to make this happen. Wind -a breath of heart- Op received excellent feedback. Thank you, anrp.

We did an okay job, but compared to today's work, it's not really that good. The following is a list of minor problems with this release, but they have all been fixed in the 2004 redo.

• In the original script, the jabber subtitles at the beginning faded out after each line. Even though the code to do this was in the end product, it appeared to be omitted. This was because the final subtitle colour was darker than the original, and I didnt notice that this nullified the effect until a day after it was released. The subtitles now abruptly disappear (except for the last one), which in my opinion ruined the calm essence of the dialogue. But I'm sure I'm just nitpicking here... no one else complained.
• The romaji kawaranai machi o mikete should be kawaranai machi o nukete. The singer just SOUNDS like she says mikete. Augh, we should have noticed this.
• After one of our edits, we decided that we should split up koisuru kimochi o to ko isuru kimochi o to make it easier to read. Looking back, that was a big mistake. UFG noticed this error, embarrassing us. We then decided that future romaji interpretations would be done word by word, not just because "it looks better".
• anrp added some kickass effects to the karaoke. Unfortunately, that made the romaji become off-centered, leaning to the left by a couple of pixels in comparision to the Japanese characters. Actually, it was our fault, because this error was in the original script that was submitted to anrp.

• The boy, Makoto, is the protagonist in this game. Like, duh!
• The girl with the blue hair is Minamo. She's one of the two lead characters in this game.
• The girl with the red hair is Makoto's sister, Hinata. She's a genki girl, heh heh.
• The girl with the blonde hair that you see briefly drinking water from a fountain is Nozomi.
• The girl with the teal hair is Nozomi's sister, Wakaba.
• The white-haired girl you only see a flash of is the other lead girl in this game, Hikari.
• Wakaba's book in the clip is called The Voice of a Distant Star. Can you guess what that is?
• What's the song called? Wind, sung by Megumi Hasegawa.