Triple Feature (Films 1-3)
BOX-ART
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The box art is somewhat controversial with fans. Some really dislike the western style animation that Viz had commissioned. Personally, I don't mind it, a different take is fine and I think people are too closed minded. Besides, the contents of the disc are what really matter!
While​ the artwork is identical there are two versions on Blu-Ray, one is a steel-book and one is a standard case with a slip cover. The reverse side of the standard case is in color, whereas the inside of the steel-book version is not. The is most likely because you could flip it and have textless artwork on the front if you want. The steel-book already has textless artwork, since the text is all on the slip. Regardless of what version you have, the disc art is always black & white.
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MENUS
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Renders from the films pop-up on an animated background. You may choose with of the films you would like to watch, with set-up and extras at the bottom. Extras will let you select one of the audio commentaries, or the theatrical short. The set-up menu lets you select various options as follows:
English 5.1 or 2.0 without subtitles
English 5.1 or 2.0 with subtitles
Japanese 5.1 or 2.0 with subtitles (The second film will just be Dolby 2.0 if you choose Japanese. More on that below!)
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Or, if you simply click the movie you want, it will play by default with English 5.1 and no subtitles enabled.
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VIDEO
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I was rather skeptical at first, that with so much content squeezed onto a single disc, the quality would be good. It seems fine, no major compressions artifacts were visible. Unless you specifically pause during some of the more intense action sequences, you'd never notice. Some slight banding is present thought as well.
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AUDIO
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The second & third films feature uncompressed 5.1 & 2.0 in both Japanese and English. The first film, however, only features uncompressed surround and stereo audio on the dub, with the Japanese audio being only 2.0 Dolby Digital at 192 Kb/s.
Each film has two subtitle tracks with one being a transcription of the dub dialogue, and another being a translation of the Japanese track. Something that's the same in both tracks is that some text in the world such, such as signs, posters, etc. are also translated. As a neat side note; you can manually use your remote to trial-and-error your way to the English subtitle track that is the true translation, and display it along with the dub audio to see the differences!
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EXTRAS
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Audio commentaries, with the dub cast, are available on two of the three films. An animated short, that was originally presented in Japanese theaters and on previous dub DVDs, is present here in window-boxed 480i presentation. Both English & Japanese 2.0 Dolby Digital tracks, as well as English subtitles, are available but there is no menu to to select them; therefore you must use your remote to do so manually.
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FINAL THOUGHTS
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For the longest time these movies were only available only on DVD, so It's nice to finally have them in HD! Much like the series, I very much appreciate the inclusion of both the original language and the dub, but the decision to use only lossy stereo for the original audio on the first film is a bit of a bummer. It would also have been nice to have the OVA in full HD, but with only about five gigabytes of space left on the disc, I can see why it was only standard definition.
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TECH SPECS
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ASPECT RATIO: 1.85:1 (Original Widescreen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 1
SIZE: Dual-Layer
REGION: A
AUDIO: English & Japanese 5.1 & 2.0 DTS-HD MA 16 Bit
Japanese 2.0 (Dolby 192 KB/s; Ninja Clash Only)
SUBTITLES: English
RUN-TIME: 5 Hours