Fansub Review: [Node] Monogatari Series Second Season (Episode 01)

A night of Monogatari.

Okay, let me outline the major players in Monogatari S2 so you understand WTF I’m going on about when I drop names like Christian babies tonight:

Daisuki.net, a new competitor to Crunchyroll.com is simulcasting the series

The subtitles for the Daisuki.net simulcast were provided by Aniplex

HorribleSubs grabbed the Aniplex subs for Daisuki.net and improved the typesetting (though normally a straight rip group, HorribleSubs is actually staffed by fansubbers)

All right, got the gist?

Disq’d.

Node hardly changed a thing with their release of Daisuki.net’s Aniplex-subbed Monogatari scripts. While this means they didn’t fuck up to the degree every other disqualified group did, they also did very little to the script to make their release stand out. Most of what they did was delocalization, such as adding honorifics and converting terms/phrases back to Japanese. (For example, the Schlink onomotopeia was turned back to the Japanese “Sha kin~”)

Though they did improve the HorribleSubs typesetting, they didn’t add karaoke. And the encode is also the same as the HorribleSubs encode.

Aniplex

Node

The comma is grammatically incorrect here.

HorribleSubs

Node

Bad Node. Next time use characters that display.

…and yeah, that’s about all they did that could be considered objectively wrong. Good on them?

As you can see from the above image, very little was changed between the scripts.

Normalized* script differences (expires one year from post date): http://www.diffnow.com/?report=xzrug

*Typesetting was removed because it’s irrelevant to these comparisons, manual line breaks were deleted because who cares, and fansubber comments were removed because you don’t see that shit in the release

tl;dr:

I suppose if you need to wait for karaoke improvements, and prefer the HorribleSubs translation to the Commie effort, you’d want to get this release. But otherwise I’m not seeing significant enough differences to recommend this over the HorribleSubs release which as of episode 2 has two scripts — honorifics and no honorifics.