Piyo Piyo Productions presents: Bewitching Nozomi 1-3 5/31/17 https://www.otakubell.com/ Project notes: I think this may have been the first sports anime I ever saw, back in the mid 1990s, and I must say, it still holds up as an all-time favorite. Back in the pre-digital fansubbing days, NT-Anime (NT = North Texas, not to be confused with Newtype Anime, who were operating out of Virginia Tech) subtitled all three episodes, but they only had the laserdisc for the first episode, so that’s all they released. When their translator got wind that I was planning to subtitle the entire series, he sent me three pre-timed scripts, which saved me a lot of time, I just had to re-synch 2 and 3 from their SVHS source to my LD source. I wasn’t entirely happy with one of the lines near the end of episode 1, its real awkward, but the translator just kinda shrugged when I brought it up, and my own limited Japanese wasn’t strong enough to come up with a suitable correction. In a sense, you almost don’t need episodes 2 and 3, as episode 1 stands alone as a complete, and excellent, story. Its a classic story arc: Hapless guy gets roped into a situation he doesn’t really want to be involved in, reaches a low point, discovers new talents, and rises to the top. That’s not to say that episodes 2 and 3 aren’t great too, mind you: They expand on episode 1, and there’s a great finale that ties everything up perfectly. Nevertheless, people would ask me all the time: Will you subtitle episode 4 too? They asked me enough that I had to put a FAQ up on the old LGA site. There is no episode 4. Episode 3 is the end. If you think there needs to be a fourth episode, watch 1-3 again, because you have missed the point of this series. I think I can say, without spoilers, that it isn’t about the main character’s accomplishments, its about what they represent. Anyhow, its a shocking travesty that this was never reissued on DVD, and nobody ever picked up the rights to it. I don’t get it. But as I’ve mentioned in the past, my tastes are weird and tend not to reflect the tastes of the “mainstream” anime viewing audience. With regards to filtering, it turned out this one was a little jittery, which I was able to somewhat compensate for, but was otherwise pretty clean. Filtered X264 convesion and untouched high-bitrate DVD conversion included.