Vampire Knight 1-13 (sub) and
Vampire Knight: Guilty 1-13 (sub).
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Short opinion:[/color] Read the manga (...well, at least
first, anyway).
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Long opinion:[/color] I do have two positive things to say about this adaptation. The first is that the music is great, and fits the series' tone quite well; and the other is that the voices (in the sub) are
excellent (all the characters are perfect).
That said (very long rant + full spoilers ahead!)... [spoiler]As my friends can attest, at 5 minutes into the finale of the first season I had said I was liking the adaptation so far, and hadn't really minded most of the stuff that they had added and changed since (...at
that point!) they were just basically giving you more of the characters' backgrounds or feelings or whatever. However, that was before I had seen the very end of that ep. (...and, for that matter, the second season). I mean, what? In the manga, Zero did not fall that far then! Yes, Kaname does make him drink his blood, but Zero never fell to Level E (and thusly is also never chained up for doing so). And, actually, the act of Zero taking Kaname's blood only happens
once-- just during their fight with each other later on (which is how they should have kept it; I mean, considering the fact that Kaname had already consumed the blood and powers of Hio, having Zero drink it twice makes no sense!). And, later on in the second season, the orders from the society when Rido was about to attack the academy were just to
detain and imprison Zero, not outright kill him (well,
yet, anyway)-- so Zero never attacked his teacher in return; in fact, all Zero did was simply let him lock him up, without any resistance whatsoever! *AND*, he (
again) did
*NOT* 'lose control' during the battle with Rido Kuran-- for heaven's sake, the entire point of having to consume his poor brother beforehand was so that he could gain the control he needed!!
So, unfortunately, they did change Zero's character at times, which they shouldn't have.
(...And while Zero's character changes were the biggest, even Kaname is portrayed a little better in the manga.)
Indeed, the large number of additions as well as the many, many changes of detail increasingly annoyed me as they piled up. Particularly in
Guilty. I mean, like I said, I was okay with it in the first season (well... up until the end of its finale, anyway), but the stuff in the second season-- *those* additions and changes to scenes, dialogue, and character were definitely
not necessary... at all! I mean, first there were all the aforementioned changes with Zero. And then they
totally changed the scene where Kaname and Yuki argue about her staying (which was so great in the manga-- and even included a kiss, which is initiated by Yuki, no less)!
And Ichijo's grandfather didn't kill the Hunter President-- it was *Cross* who killed him, after exposing to all the other Hunters there that the President had done a deal with the Senate in exchange for vampire blood! And sheesh people, it's a TV14 show; rather than (or in addition to) just having Kaname walking around evaporating the lower members of the Senate and then destroying the building, why didn't they show the
actual execution of the High Senators as per the manga? They could have, with that rating, and it was way more powerful of a scene. And, finally, the most vehement "?!" of all goes to the final ep.-- seriously, what in the world were they thinking (...or perhaps drinking?
) when they wrote the script for that?!?!! Sober or not, some resounding virtual
's are definitely in order. For one, Kaname never 'released' the other vampires, nor did he say something so mean-sounding to them (and, of course, thus neither does that silly thing happen with Aido and the marble to 'decide' whether he'd follow Kaname or not
)--
rather, they simply ask if he trusts them because he's leaving Yuki with them for the moment, and he just tells them to believe what they want. For another, the main cast of vampires were actually not at the battle with Rido in the manga because they were either too busy protecting the students (who had not evacuated yet in the manga, either) from Rido's servants, or in Aido's case was told by Yuki to leave so Rido couldn't try to control him-- so actually the only people in that battle were Zero, Yuki, and Rido himself. ((And re-insert aforetyped mini-rant about Zero losing control again here.)) For yet
another, in the manga Kaname does not return from his cleanup of the Senate until after Rido is destroyed-- at which point Zero is vowing to end the problem by killing all Purebloods, and is thus pointing his gun at Yuki (but can't fire it because he still loves her), and of course the sight of that sets Kaname off, so he and Zero begin to fight (but Yuki ends up stopping them)-- all of which was cut out of the anime! And, finally, the entire scene where Yuki and Zero have to say their goodbyes is completely, totally, and
utterly different!!!
In the manga there was no weird "I don't believe you're a vampire" (?!) dialogue, nor does Yuki say that she'll
wait for him to kill her-- rather, she says she'll
run from him forever to give him a reason to live!! Plus, according to explanations in volume 11, she couldn't have even used her fangs at that point because of her mental state (indeed, the only reason she could right at first was because she had
just awoken, and had used them out of desperate, overpowering instinct), so she never drank Zero's blood, either (indeed, it's actually Zero who drinks hers)!
*AND*, topping it all off, in the manga,
Zero actually kisses her!!! (How they could cut
that out of the anime is truly beyond me.)
*Sigh*... the manga is
so much better!!![/spoiler] In the end, I guess I don't really
regret watching it, if only because (as mentioned at the beginning) I liked the music and the voicing was perfect (I will definitely 'hear' those voices mentally when reading it now, and that's a good thing)-- but I
*really* didn't appreciate how much stuff they changed (and the increasing severity of those changes), particularly as it went along (re-cue rant...
). (Man, that stuff was frustrating! I think I'm going to go reread the manga again now...
)