I have a lot of nostalgia for the Unicron Trilogy and I’m interested in watching the Japanese versions with subtitles but I can’t seem to find them anywhere for the life of me. Anyone know where I can see them?

 

@kary will be able to direct you to Micron Legend. Best of the 3 imo.

Also, Car Robots is on kary's YouTube channel fully subbed and that is a very good, albeit laid back show. It's got some really good fights and fun characters that bounce off each other just right.

 

Karyuudo Fansubs released a subbed version of Armada (under its Japanese sub-header: Legend of the Microns). I believe it even comes as a dual-audio set that lets you swap between watching the English dub or Japanese audio with Kary's subs*.(EDIT: Lovecraft beat me to it, but he's tagged Kary, who likely will pop in here now and can provide you extra help with his group's stuff)

TV-Nihon did fansubbed versions of Energon (Super Link) and Cybertron (Galaxy Force).


Each subber group name above links to their home page.

I don't know about the site's policy on linking to torrent sites so I won't, but TV-Nihon has their own tracker for their stuff on their website which you should find easily from the link I provided. Karyuudo uses another tracker. The link to it on their blog from the specific post about Legend of the Microns may not work because of how old it is and the fact that the tracker relocated after that point, but there's a link from a post they made in May of 2017 that takes you to the proper new home for all their releases (which also includes other TF stuff like the two Japanese Beast Wars shows or the original JP version of the 2001 Robots in Disguise anime, originally called Transformers: Car Robots. Well it was actually "Fight!! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers: Car Robots" but that's a pain to write out  )

*Kary's subs here include 2 versions: one keeps character and faction names to what they were in Japan, so Autobots are Cybertrons, Decepticons are Destrons, Optimus Prime is Convoy, etc. The other swaps out the Japanese names for familiar English ones in case the former is too hard to follow.

I know you didn't ask for any additional info, but I love the Karyuudo stuff as it very respectfully handles the balancing act between subtitling for accuracy and understanding of the new audience (ie: we TF fans who speak English and not Japanese) vs keeping the spirit and intention of the original dialogue. TV-Nihon suffers from a bunch of unfortunate bad subbing habits like overly literal translations, refusing to translate some words for reasons like "flavor" or "because there's no direct English equivalent" when all that does is makes the work harder to understand, or leaving a bunch of translator notes that over-explain terms that they chose not to translate or even telling you to go watch or read a different work to get the context to understand the term they're not translating.

I haven't watched both series all the way through yet in Japanese, but I don't think TV-Nihon's work is as bad for these TF series as it is in something like, say, a Kamen Rider or Super Sentai show where there's a lot more Japanese cultural stuff that they are likely to fumble. But I just wanted to point out that if you start with the Karyuudo subs, you're probably in for a bit of a shock when the later two series change their approach to translation so much.

 

Very informative. Thanks man.

 

No problem. Glad I could help even if I did ramble.

I actually went back and found an old post about TV-Nihon's stuff that I made on here a while ago with some examples of what they've done in Transformers series.

I had one that was specific to the Unicron Trilogy, in an episode of SuperLink (Energon) they give a line as "follow me-tachi!" with a translator's note that the "-tachi" suffix means "and company" and is used to address groups of people instead of just one person.

The problem (as I understand it. I don't speak Japanese myself besides some stuff I picked up from anime fandom) is that while this is a necessary part of Japanese grammar, it's not in English. the fact that you can address one person or a group of people with "follow me!" might seem confusing if you really think about it the construction of the sentence, but there's no need to futz with the sentence to create proper subject/verb agreement because it's something English speakers are used to. Or if they're really anal about keeping that context, they could've used "Follow me, everyone!" But instead they kept a Japanese term in for no good reason and make it harder to follow. In that thread where I noted this, Kary added that it doesn't make sense to leave the -tachi suffix from his perspective either, noting that if someone says "Break-tachi" it could easily be translated as "Break's team/group" or "Break and the others" without damaging the dialogue or changing its meaning. TV-Nihon hurts themselves and the ease of understanding their work to no real benefit.

 

Huh. That is weird. But I do still want to watch the subbed versions of all three and from what you’ve said, they’re the only ones who’ve dimension Superlink and Galaxy Force. I’ll have to stomach that, but hey it can’t be any worse than the dubbing errors can it?

 

Click on the link in my signature to head to our page. There should be a link to the torrent on Nyaa that you can grab. Let me know if you have any issues.

 

The post you have about releasing Micron Legend (Dec 2014) has the old Nyaa link that doesn't work anymore. The link to your proper list of releases on Nyaa are in the May 2017 post about Nyaa being down.

That was the only way I was able to find it, at least.

 

Thanks for pointing that out. I've updated the link in the original post. Karyuudo Fansubs　狩人ファンサブ: Transformers: Legends of the Microns [The Ultimate Collection] - Now Available