The Tower of DRUAGA (Free Anime)

JKTrix · 04:50 PM

Official Site

YouTube HQ link for the first episode

The Tower of DRUAGA -the Aegis of URUK- is one of the newest productions by Japanese animation studio GONZO. In Japan, it is intended to promote a MMO of the Druaga series. Worldwide however, it is being used as part of a new effort to get this content available and legally translated on the same day as the Japanese broadcast (and somewhat eliminating the necessity of fansubs). I've already given a YouTube link for it, but the official English site provides links to the other places you can get it as well. There is an option on Crunchyroll and Bost to donate however much money you want (at least $0.01) to download various keepable versions of the episode in even higher quality, but I think that is limited to North America. These translated episodes are not available at all in Japan.

As a guy who is pretty picky about what I watch (much less endorse), I have to say I enjoyed this first episode quite a bit. It's probably best to go into it with no expectations, so I won't go into details of the content right now. If you have 25 free minutes today, check it out. It is free, it's legal, and it's subtitled. Even if the rest of the series turns out to be trash, this first episode won me over.

After this post, I plan on returning to my hometown to get married.

After you watch, but no content spoilers for the first episode: You probably noticed that all of the random stuff happening was a dream. There's actually an ura (alternate) version of this episode, but it appears to be unavailable normally to the rest of the world, and appears to have only been shown on Japanese paid video sites. I watched this ura version on Japanese streaming site nicovideo.jp, and everything from the time Gil gets knocked out until he wakes up is entirely different. While Gil is unconscious, he actually murmurs the things that are happening in his dream. It seems to represent what the show will actually be like, much more serious than the translated version we saw but still generally lighthearted with characters who don't seem to take themselves too seriously. It spends more time on characters outside of the 'main party' and looks like it could get interesting. Though the Opening animation kind of confused me, are these people living in the real world, but playing the MMO (like .hack)? Not even the ura version sheds any light on that.