Hello fans,
ASR: Kurou has moved to http://asrkurou.com !! but for convenience this site will stay active for people to redirect themselves to the new site.
Please go to the new site as it will be the noe of which will be updated with releases and projects not this one.
Thank you
deanofantastico
It’s been busy the past few days in the ASR channels. After something like a week of deliberations, we’ve finally come up with our list of projects for this summer. We knew this summer was going to be incredibly busy, since we’ve been planning on subbing Spice and Wolf II forever. So we were looking for a few things in particular – one series that we could take our time on and practice our workflow with, maybe work out any kinks in the system before things got hectic, and a few series that were high-exposure that could get our name out there in the field.
In the end, the first series came down to a choice between Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo and the Lupin III vs. Detective Conan OVA. After talking it over with Ryono, we decided on the Lupin III vs Detective Conan OVA – StrikeS has been consistently working on SoKS, and we didn’t want to vulture the series off of them without giving them a fair shot to complete the entire thing.
We also decided to officially pick up the remaining Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Rei OVAs to be broadcast on May 22nd, the Utawarerumono OVA to be broadcast on June 5th, and the Clannad Kyou After OVA to be broadcast on July 1st. They’re all fairly high-profile, large-audience OVAs, and they all fall directly into Ryono’s area of expertise, so it’s a perfect match. Picking up this many series means that our summer is going to be incredibly busy, though!
If you haven’t heard yet, we also hired Yuurisan as our primary timer and typesetter, and Matt4212 as our primary encoder. They’ve both worked for several groups in the past, and we have great confidence in their ability to do very high-quality work. Please look forward to our releases this summer!
We at the scanlations department have got a hold of the first volume of Yumekui Merry. This looks like a very interesting and humerous project that we have picked up and it may have a touch of romance as the story develops. There is basically no information at all of which I can gather at this moment from other websites so below i have created a synthesis of some sort.
The story revolves around the male protagonist Yumeji who has the mysterious ability to determine what dreams a person will have by the colour of their aura and of it its state. Yumeji is residing with a childhood friend Asana who works as a waitress in a familly restaurant. She calls in a favour and asks Yumeji to go and buy her a book. On the return journey from the bookstore a mysterious girl called Merry who runs off after losing her hat. Yumeji is then pulled into the dream world which he visits while he sleeps only he was fully concious at the time. He then meets the “Boss” of the relam called John Doe “the chaser”, who wants to take Yumejis body and enter the real world by any means neccessary.
Alright, there’s no doubt that the first release sucked. After bringing Shal onboard we decided to make a second version. Now we’re using .ass files for subtitling. Here are the links to download version 2:
[ASR_Kurou] Spice and Wolf 2 OVA [v2] – Torrent
[ASR_Kurou] Spice and Wolf 2 OVA [v2] – Zomgupload
[ASR_Kurou] Spice and Wolf 2 OVA [v2] – Megaupload
[ASR_Kurou] Spice and Wolf 2 OVA [v2] – Hotfile
All grammatical errors have been fixed, lines should be no longer than 2 in length and the timing has been fixed.
We decided to start up our anime devision. The first project we decided on was the Spice and Wolf season 2 OVA. We opted for this since it literally just came out on April 30th and no one has subbed it as of yet.
Ryon is the person who translated it, I (Near) am the one who subbed it and encoded it. Both of us have never subbed an anime before, so expect problems. Most notably are the 30 some odd spelling errors. For example, at one point the word “princess” is spelled “princes,” completely changing the context. I apologize for these problems as I didn’t spell check all of the lines of text that Ryon wrote out for me. This will not be the case in our future anime. I didn’t realize these problems until after I had waited two hours for the video to render out (thus why I am not fixing them).
So, without further adieu, here are the links to mirrors for Spice and Wolf season 2 OVA:
[ASR_Kurou] Spice and Wolf 2 OVA [MP4, 640x360] – Dropbox
[ASR_Kurou] Spice and Wolf 2 OVA [MP4, 640x360] – Megaupload
[ASR_Kurou] Spice and Wolf 2 OVA [MP4, 640x360] – Torrent
(Note – If this series gets licensed to the US we will remove and delete all links to download this episode.)
Hi, I’m the Photoshop expert for ASR. I’ve been using Photoshop for over five years now which basically places me at the number one slot for cleaner here at ASR. I thought I’d give you all a glimpse at the quality you can expect from our cleans. Here’s page one of Chapter five from Tomehane!
Alright, most of this is fairly simple. Removing the text from the bubbles is easy, as well as the text around the page. But there’s one major part I had to clean: the text over the pole in the first block. This took about 20 minutes of removing and redrawing to get finished. Most other groups would have just left it if it took that long, but I didn’t. That needed to be cleaned so I did it. Here’s the result:
And there you have it. You can’t even tell there was anything there! Now two questions you all may be asking: What about the exclamation point and the text at the bottom? Well the exclamation point is a universal symbol. We all know what it means. As for the text on the bottom, that represent the title. We’re just going to throw an English version up in the center of it but keep the Japanese text for style (if this were to be professionally translated they would do the same).
Now lets take a look at this little gem from chapter 1.
The problem here is obvious. There’s text covering entire heads of people and most of their bodies. I spent 30 minutes working just on this. I had to literally use a brush and draw the characters to get it looking right. Here’s the outcome:
As you can see, it looks flawless. This is probably the best example of the kind of work we plan to produce. But just for a future note, we won’t be removing all text. Some of it is just impossible to remove due to having too detailed of an environment (text over a house for example where we only see the roof as the text is covering all the main parts of the house). We hope you all appreciate the effort as much as we do.
~The ASR Team
The first official project we here at ASR will be translating is Tomehane! Tomehane is a seinen manga which is based on a calligraphy club in Japanese school. Not much is known about this manga in the western world since no one has translated it and there’s not even a Wikipedia page for it! Therefore we here at ASR felt that it’d make an ideal first project since no one has bothered with it. We will translate every single chapter, and seeing as how it’s still being produced we will continue to translate new chapters.
Tomehane!
Original Title: とめはねっ!
Demographics: Seinen
Chapters at ASR: 57
Releases by ASR: 0
Publishing Status: Ongoing
Writer(s): KAWAI Katsutoshi
Artist(s): KAWAI Katsutoshi
Serialised in: Big Comic Spirits
Published by: Shogakukan
We will be releasing chapters in chunks at a time. At the moment we have cleaned the first five chapters and are waiting for final exams to end for our translator to translate them. We hope you all will enjoy this series as much as we’re having translating it!
~The ASR Team
Hello and welcome to ASR: Kurou Underground Translations. We’ve only just begun but we have a few things in store for you folks. We plan to bring you quality scanlations as will as subs in the near future. Not only that but we’re darned fast at releases. So if you’re interested bookmark our site or subscribe to our RSS feed. Likewise you can join our IRC room and chat with us: irc://irc.rizon.net/ASR1
~The ASR Team
