Descendents of Darkness Vol. #3: Tarot Curse

By Chris Beveridge     May 14, 2003
Release Date: May 13, 2003



What They Say
A killer stalks a ghost ship, and it’s up to dashing supernatural detective Tsuzuki to stop him! Contains episodes 7-9

The Review!
Tarot Curse arrives with a three episodes self contained story that lets lots of pretty men talk quite a bit.

Audio:
For our primary viewing session, we listened to this show in its original language of Japanese. The series features a good stereo mix with some nice sounding instances of directionality, but for the most part it’s a full stereo mix that simply fills up both channels with the same sounds. Dialogue is nice and clear and we noted no dropouts or distortions on either track.

Video:
Originally airing during the first half of 2001, the series features some very nice looking late night animation. There are a few slight instances of cross coloration along some characters during the first episode, but it seems to disappear as the episodes progressed. Some slight chroma noise manifests during some of the Japanese text logo screens with the red against black, but it’s very minimal. Unfortunately, CPM has foregone a second subtitle track, so there are a few instances of hard subtitles on the print, which also suffer from minor cross coloration.

Packaging:
The cover for this one is again very nice as it shows off the solid artwork of the character designs with two of the Bureau men right up front while Princess Tsubaki is shadowed in the background with the pentagram. The back cover does a bit more of the shaded character imagery and provides a short summary of this arc. The discs features and technical specs are all clearly listed here. The reverse side of the cover has some black and white artwork but mostly focuses on providing the scene selection and bilingual cast list as well as the detailed production listings.

Menu:
Less problematic than the previous menu, things here are nicely laid out and easy to navigate with the selections in a straight up and down line as opposed to at various points of a pentagram, allowing movements to go where you expect them. Access times are nice and fast and we had no issues moving about.

Extras:
There’s an interesting mix of extras included with this release. There’s a decent video art gallery included and the usual round of character profiles as well as the trailers we’ve come to expect. Going with the in-house produced in-theme extras, there’s a multi-page piece about Tarot Cards that includes a virtual reading for the viewer (for entertainment purposes only, as the small legal tagline goes). But what’s really interesting in its inclusion is the first episode is run through again here with a Fun Facts feature.

Fun Facts? Well, we get the entire first episode (in dub-only form) of this volume here that has a cat-form Tsuzuki pop up at key times and provides useful and interesting information about what’s going. During the opening sequence, a lot of little tidbits really helps flesh out just the simple bit of movement going through the main building. There’s also a sense of humor, as it whisks by the cast members and lists their names as well as pointing out a photocopier. Ok, you have to see it to be amused by it.

This is a good extra, but after seeing essentially the same thing done elsewhere, this really feels like a poor mans version, especially since if you hate dubs, you’ll likely not watch this.

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The Guardians of Death are back again for another three part adventure. Unlike past adventures though, this one comes across much weaker for a number of reasons.

The premise is simple. The Hall of Candles has asked for assistance from the Guardians as there’s something fishy going on out there in the world. A lot of people have been disappearing lately in Hong Kong and there’s reason to believe that there is something supernatural behind it. So after a brief bit of the usual in-office foolishnss with Tsuzuki trying to eat some food, he and Hisoka are shipped off to the luxury liner where they think some of the people there may be involved in the situation.

Tsuzuki takes on the role of one of the ships staff on the luxury liner that allows him to get closer to the owner of the vessel. Hisoka takes on the role of a young man named Azumi, the son of a friend of the owners who has been out of the country for quite some time, allowing him to easily assume the identity. While he’s unable to get close enough during the time everyone is in the gambling areas or mingling with other adults in a social way, he inadvertently gets closer by becoming friendly with his daughter, Tsubaki.

As the liner moves off from Japan and heads towards Hong Kong, we get to know a small cast of characters that are involved with the owner in some fashion, from someone who is blackmailing him to a woman who seeks opportunities to blackmail. The twist comes when one of Tsubaki’s closest friends is Muraki, using his skills as a doctor to help Tsubaki with the weak heart that she has for the past several years. While Tsuzuki doesn’t take well to his being there, Hisoka has quite the hard time with it himself.

Before any of this can really come to a head though, the small cast of new characters start dying one by one, most of them with their hearts removed and hints of a ghost that stalks the ship being involved. This ends up spanning the majority of the three episodes, and since it’s a murder mystery, there’s so much that can be easily given away that it’s difficult to talk about the show itself.

But after the three episodes were done, since it’s a self contained story, this is something that you feel like could have been done in at least one less episode and would be better suited to a show like X-Files as opposed to this. The two lead Guardians here barely used their abilities at all and the inclusion of Muraki really only added some personal issues for Hisoka to deal with, though there were some amusing moments as Muraki moved forward in seducing Tsuzuki.

The pacing of the episodes here is another killer, since it’s playing out the murder mystery slowly. There’s so much reaction to each death from each character that it doesn’t move that fast. With a bit more editing, this is something that you’d see some other series pull off in one episode. Granted, there wouldn’t be the same level of atmosphere and tension, but by the third episode I was checking the clock to see if I was closer to being done with it.

In terms of the disc, CPM continues to come ever so close to doing things just right, but not making that extra effort needed. During one sequence where you have some on-screen kanji going across, it’s nicely soft-subtitled. But then the next, scene when it shows up again on the back of a chair, it’s hard subbed. It makes no sense. And I still continue to truly dislike that with the first episode of the volume that they’re putting their volume name (i.e. Tarot Curse) on there. This should just be the show name itself and that’s it. On the remaining episodes, they leave it alone otherwise.

And with the addition of the Fun Facts, they came very close to offering what’s one of the more interesting extras to be done on anime DVDs in the past couple of years by another studio, but in the end they have it feel like a poor mans version. I’m admittedly not a subtitler, and I’ve heard the difficulties that come up in doing ‘pop-up’ kind of subtitle tracks, but would it have been that much more difficult to do it as a separate subtitle track and allow everyone to use it? It would have been a huge selling point to this particular volume and given CPM some solid kudos for adapting one of the best things to happen to anime DVD subtitling.

So close….

While I’ve been enjoying the overall premise of the Descendants of Darkness series, this volume left me more flat than the previous one since it was so derivative of your basic spooky hour long drama on prime-time TV. The animation continues to be good and the designs appealing, but the story was just too weak here for me to really be all that interested in.

Features
Japanese Language,English Language,English Subtitles, Virtual Tarot Card Reading, Fun Facts Video,Art Gallery,Trailers

Review Equipment
Toshiba TW40X81 40" HDTV, Panasonic RP-82 Progressive Scan codefree DVD player, Sony STR-DE835 DD/DTS receiver, Monster component cable and Sony speakers