Another month, another late review by the Turtle God. (I'm trying to keep the other gods from thinking that I'd make a good Turtle Soup. So far, I've learned to have a new fear for Seiryuu.)

Anyways, onto this month's page, BlueLotus: Fushigi Yuugi. Let's examine this page, piece by piece.

Character Profiles

For the most part, I like the originality with which the character profile page was done with. While I don't necessarily agree with what the author had to say about some of the characters, the personal opinions offered by the author are a refreshing change from your normal run of the mill 'vital statistics' information.

What I did see wrong with the profile pages were problems with images. On the Nuriko profile page, there's a distinct problem with that transparent .gif. I happen to believe that transparent gifs are one of the more useful, but still overused, forms of images. They're great when used properly, but when the transparency job isn't all that great, well.... Also, the images of Chichiri and Mitsukake were broken.

There is also a problem with spoilers on these profile pages. This isn't so much an issue with the Suzaku seishi as much as it is with the Seiryuu seishi. I consider spoilers to be anything after (roughly) episode #28 or so. The Seiryuu seishi profiles contain many spoilers for the second season of the series.

Image Galleries

What's a Fushigi Yuugi page without an image gallery? I'm beginning to wonder.... Anyway, the image galleries on this site are complete, for the most part. The single shots section has 2 broken links, and the group gallery as well as a broken link.

Ho hum. Yeah. Wow. More images.

Rant time.

I'll say this much. I'm not a fan of Fushigi Yuugi image galleries. In fact, I think there's too darn many of them. Original image galleries, I appreciate (like fan art, or hard to find cards, or things of that nature,) but many image galleries, this one included, seem to be recycled images. I have been surfing the web for Fushigi Yuugi images for a very long time. None of these images are new to me. This is getting really boring.

More than that... sighrantbbqtime FOR THE FOUR GODS SAKE AT THE VERY LEAST USE THUMBNAILS!!!

Should I define what I mean by thumbnails? Sure, there all the images on this page are small so they fit on the page, but that is NOT a thumbnail. What I mean by a thumbnail is a smaller image (not resized by HTML but an actual smaller representation) of the bigger image that is linked to the larger image.

That sounds like too much work, Genbu!!
Oh well, then use a program like ThumbsPlus and create thumbnails. This program even makes the webpages for you so you don't have to go thru all that work!

Do I sound exasperated? Good. That's because I am not a happy turtle god at this point. In fact, I'm really really annoyed. This image gallery took a VERY long time to load on my modem connection. I guess it's great if you have a nice ethernet connection all the time, but I don't. The pictures are very nice but I am not so patient as to wait for a bunch of images I've already seen in 10 million other Fushigi Yuugi galleries.

Fushigi Yuugi Shop

While I thought the name was a bit misleading, I have to admit that I like the concept. I would love to see this part of the page be expanded upon. It's a great concept to help document the Fushigi Yuugi merchandise that's out there.

Remember what I said about how I hate image galleries except for original galleries? Well, this is an example of an original gallery. I like that, images you can't see everywhere, and I enjoyed the way it was set up.

General

One of the things that I'm not so picky about on Fushigi Yuugi webpages is spelling errors. This page does have quite a few, but again, it's not something I'm all that picky about.

What I DO think needs to be taken away as soon as possible. That midi file. Sure I like listening to midis but man, background midis are the most ANNOYING thing in the world because you can't turn them off!! Please, please, PLEASE put a control on that thing!!

The design for this page is so so IMHO. I've seen worse webpage design, and I've seen better. There is definately room for improvement as far as design goes, but it's definately browse-able (is that a word?)

Overall

On a scale of 1 to 10, BlueLotus has earned a 4 with me. I would have rated it 5 if it hadn't been for the lack of thumbnails on the image gallery and the lack of control for that midi. A fairly average page, as far as Fushigi Yuugi pages go.