HD raws of Nine have been floating around the web for a while now. They were streaming rips, and they were letter-boxed or pillar-boxed. I wasn't prepared to transplant Orphan's Nine subs to these raws without a re-encode to strip off the black borders. It took a while to find a willing encoder, and even longer to move the copious typesetting to the new raws. But at last it's done. Here is the first of the three Nine OVAs, Nine: Original-ban.
Nine: Original-ban tells the story of two friends who are just entering Seishuu High School: record-setting middle school sprinter Niimi Katsuya and prefectural middle school judo champion Karasawa Susumu. Dropping by the school's baseball field, they see a beautiful girl staring forlornly at the school team's miserable performance. On impulse, they decide to join the baseball club, in order to cheer her up. She turns out to be Nakao Yuri, the baseball coach's daughter and soon to be team manager. They also meet Kurahashi Eiji, a middle school baseball phenom, and persuade him to join the team as well. Thus begins their athletic and romantic odyssey, which will take them from the agony of defeat to the hallowed grounds of Koushien, Japan's high school baseball championships.
Of course, there are complications. Niimi's running skills attract the attention of Yasuda Yumiki from the track club. She thinks Niimi would make a great coach for her and an even better boyfriend. Yuri is being courted by Yamanaka Kentarou, a slightly older rock-star pitcher for rival Bunan High School. And Karasawa would also like to court Yuri, although Niimi, as the designated hero, has the inside track. You can get more details, including notes on the cast and staff, in the original blog post.
So what's different in this release, besides the higher resolution? For one, the color balance, which tends more towards blues and greens than browns and purples. As a result, the stylistic choices - featureless backgrounds, limited color palette, lack of detail - are more obvious. For another, the audio track sounds different. But most importantly, this release of Original-ban is the widescreen movie version, 1.85:1, instead of the classic TV version, which was 1.33:1. Was Original-ban made as Open Matte, to be viewable in both ratios? It's hard to tell, but I think not. In some shots, the cropping is obvious and damaging to the scene. The three Nine OVAs were made for TV viewing in the pre-digital era. The movie was cobbled together to exploit the popularity of Adachi Mitsuru.
The credits for the HD release are mostly the same as the original. Moho Kareshi translated the dialog and songs. laalg checked the dialog translation and added many additional signs. Sunachan checked the song translations. ninjacloud timed the original version and this one. I edited and typeset. The typesetting had to be redone completely, because of the change in aspect ratio and color balance. BeeBee, Topper3000, and VigorousJammer did the original QC. getfresh and Uchuu did a release check on this version. bananadoyouwanna encoded the 1080p raws down to 720p, stripping the letterbox bars in the process. He felt, and I concur, that the artwork doesn't justify 1080p.
So baseball may be hobbled until after the pandemic, but we'll always have Koushien. You can too, by getting Nine: Original-ban in HD from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.
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