Suzaku's Review - November 1998
Page Title: BlueLotus Fushigi Yuugi
URL: http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Garden/3138/bl_fy.html
Creator: Hakomae Setsuma [10012051@wsd1.org]
The first thing I noticed when I went to this site was the MIDI, which
auto-starts as soon as the page is done loading. I don't do this when
I write web pages, but it's alright, sometimes... however, I was
listening to a CD when I was looking, so I went to go and turn off the
MIDI, and found... no controls for it. So I waited a minute to see if
the song would end. Nope. It was looping. Since I won't be bothered
either to put up with this MIDI or to turn off the computer's sound
when I'm trying to listen to a CD in my CD-ROM drive, I'll just have
to use lynx to look at this page. That means any nice graphical
design will be mostly lost on me just because of one badly implemented
MIDI file, and other people may avoid looking at all.
Generally, this page doesn't seem to be BAD... all the images are on one of two Geocities accounts, pretty much, which both seem to be the site maintainer's, and if not, at least there's no bandwidth theft from the second account. I can't see the images in the image gallery to tell if they look familiar, however, and the notes about them don't seem to suggest that they were scanned (If your looking for a certain picture drop us a note at BlueLotus Anime and we'll look for it.). The main problem there is that it's extremely obvious, looking in lynx, that the thumbnails are all fake. Instead of actually making a separate thumbnail image for each picture and making them smaller in file size, the images have simply been artificially resized using HTML, which is usually really ugly on the so-called thumbnail page, and is also very slow to load since there is no decrease in file size and they're all being loaded at once. Good grief, if you can't teach yourself to make real thumbnails, use text links.
Character profiles are ok. I don't know if the author got some of this info directly from the manga/artbooks by translating it or if it was taken from TnM's page, though. Personal opinions being included are good. Some of the interests/flaws and good/bad points are weird, though (Chichiri's 'no da' is a bad point? It's a speech pattern discussed in some of my Japanese grammar books, just an odd form of it.). And flaws = bad points, so I'm a little confused by the listing of both.
The CD pages are pretty good, and it seems here that the page author does do some of her own translating. That's a good thing. Nothing here that I haven't seen elsewhere, but romaji lyrics and the few songs translated are nice and she gives credit here as well. Some of the links here are broken, though. The playing card pages are possibly the best thing on the site, being fairly unique, and apparently is even going to have real thumbnails. That seems to be the last thing to visit, as the episode guide link isn't up yet.
Basically, this page has some alright stuff on it, but there just isn't all that much that stands out, and it's hard to tell what's original and what's borrowed. It's a fine page in that it has some useful and correct information on it, but it's not a huge amount, or unusual information. And it definitely suffers in my opinion from that irritating MIDI.