This is the opening sequence from the 2003/08/29 bishoujo game Majokko a-ra-moodo, produced by F&C FC01 (F&C has multiple game divisions; FC01 is the 'main' one that has done games like Canvas).

Getchu has given "the best game" award to this game. "the best game" is only awarded to games which they think are really good. English localizers, are you listening?

This story started the same way that almost everything else does. madgat gave us this little thing for us to look at. We couldn't turn it down... it looked so cute!

We wanted to do this over the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, but madgat's raw turned out to be his own re-encode. Since he was away for that weekend, we had to give it the good ol' delay.

This meant I had extra time to do something special. Since our previous release had virtually zero typesetting, I went out of my way to make this the most complicated karaoke I had ever done. Besides, I needed a good example for the typesetting part of the digisub tutorial that was being worked on (of course, it's gone now). Everything was done using the ol' text editor, so doing this was just as hard as doing a 25-minute episode. (Mizuiro 2003 1's scripts totalled 75kB; Mizuiro 2003 2's scripts totalled a whopping 232kB, and this script was 126kB). It made my head hurt.

Reikoku had no problem translating this quickly, although we found out that some of the lyrics posted on the web had typos themselves.

It was released just in time for Halloween. Boo!

Can you get much better than this? A crazy-looking karaoke along with a colored subtitle font which actually looks good. And there aren't any TL problems! Ano ko ja wakaran!

While I didn't get any actual feedback, I decided to submit the script to Anime-Kingdom for fun because they were "hiring" typesetters. The A-Kingdom rep was amazed and said I passed the "test", but I turned down their offer. Being a part of NNL was more important to me.

Oh, let's reveal the worst-kept secret around. Haro^2 (the fansub group who continued Gundam Seed after licensing) was actually Anime-Kingdom in disguise. I think everyone knew that!

• 57MB for 1:40? Since no one has yelled at us (yet) about keeping our filesizes down, why lessen the quality? Because of all the bright colors and frantic movement, the 35MB 2-pass encode didn't look too good in some areas. We decided to simply use the first-pass encode for maximum video quality (which is still smaller than the original 85MB raw). Like most of our other opening sequences, keep in mind that this has 25% more frames in the same period compared to a normal ~24 fps anime.
• We used the promotional version of the Op. It's the same as the one included in the game except for the higher resolution and the little ad at the end.
• The song? Nostalgia, sung by Momoi Halko. You might have heard her from the openings to Mouse or Nurse Witch Komugi-chan Magikarte. She also did the voice of Mii in Popotan.