The world hopping and strange adventures come to an end in this final volume of Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. Will Sasshi and Arumi be able to make it back to the real world?

This volume contains the three final episodes of this series.  They are:

Episode 11 – Resolution!  Abenobashi Battlefield Shopping Arcade:  After the fiasco with the amusement park in the previous episode, Sasshi and Arumi go to war.  Literally.  They are on opposite sides of a war that is being waged over the Abenobashi Shopping Arcade.  All the war movie clichés you can think of are up for parody in this episode.

Episode 12 – Huge Reversal?! Abenobashi Hollywood Shopping Arcade:  This time the kids find themselves in a world based on Sasshi's favorite movies.  They manage to poke fun a all the big Hollywood movies.  They include everything from Raider of the Lost Ark to Monty Python.  There is even a nod of the hat to Knight Rider.

Episode 13 – Return to Life!  The Legendary Omnyou Mystic: Arumi and Sasshi finally find the way home, but if they return, Arumi's grandfather will still be dead.  Sasshi refuses to let that happen, so rather than stay in reality, he jumps again to another world.  The problem is, he can't dream up another reality.  Maybe he'll have to grow up and face reality unflinchingly.

I can't say I was sorry to see this series end.  There were many good points to it, but it never was successful in blending the serious and comedic aspects of the show.  As it was, ever few episodes there would be a serious story that advanced the plot.  The rest of the time there were comic shows with wacky adventures oin strange worlds, but these ended up feeling like fillers.  Had they gone for a straight comedy series or a regular serious show I think that the program would have worked better.

Another complaint I have is that the comedy episodes were not that funny.  There were many gags in every episode, they had just didn't make me laugh much.   The show did have its moments with some chuckles in every program, but there were few good laughs in the whole series.

I really didn't like the way the series wrapped up either.  Without giving anything away, I though the problems were resolved in a deus ex machina fashion that could have occurred in the second episode.  I was let down and thought they took the easy way out.  After sitting through 13 episodes I was hoping for something more.
 

Audio:

As with the other discs in this series, you have the option of watching this DVD with a 2.0 Japanese language track, or an English dub in 5.1.  I listened to both tracks on different episodes, and I definitely prefer the Japanese track.  Apparently, according to the AD Vid-notes, the characters all have regional accents.  When making the English dub, the actors used southern drawls and other accents to mimic this.  It is really annoying.  The accents don't sound authentic, and listening to them gets old really fast.  With this volume I've really grown to dislike the actor who voices Sasshi in English.  This female actor tries, but she sounds like a woman trying to sound like a young boy, not like a lad.

The Japanese language track is very nice.  There is some use made of the soundstage.  Though there are not a lot of these stereo effects what they do use is effective.  There are optional English subtitles.

Video:

The video on this disc has an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and is anamorphically enhanced.  The colors are clear and bright, and the lines are tight.  There are some instances of aliasing, which show up in most animation, but these are minor and are only noticeable if you are looking for them.  There are a few instances of banding too.  But again, these are minor.  This is a nice looking disc.

The Extras:

As they did on the first disc, ADV did something neat with the FBI warning that pops up before the main menu appears.  They have a voice over that warns the viewer of dire consequences if the disc is illegally broadcast or copied.  There are a couple of different voiceovers with different scripts that pop up at random, so you never know what you'll get when you pop in the disc.  It's pretty funny.

There is an outtake reel that consists of the English cast messing up and ad-libbing some lines.  Most of these are funny.  I especially enjoyed the extended outtake with Mune-Mune in the totally white world.

This DVD also has AD Vidnotes; pop-up notes that explain jokes and cultural references that American viewers might not understand.  The Vidnotes on this disc are a very good.  They have improved greatly since the first volume's notes, which were horrible.  The frequency is very good, and they have stopped including pop-up jokes that were prevalent in the first DVD.   A nice feature to have.
 
Episode twelve has a commentary track by voice actors Luci Christian, Jessica Boone, and John Gremillion.  They seem to have a good time, and they do manage to talk the entire episode, but the content wasn't anything that I was interested in.  They would point out what movie was being parodied, and give their thoughts on the original.  It reminded me of a group of friends talking during a movie.  They would comment on something on the screen and then go off on a tangent.  They told a lot of jokes, and laughed at them quite a bit, but I wasn't amused.  I don't really think it was their fault though; they just didn't have many comments to make about the show.

There are trailers for Kaleido Star, Azumanga Daioh, Cosplay Complex, Super Gals!, Angelic Layer, and Puni Puni Poemy.
 

Final Thoughts:

All in all, Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi was a good attempt, but it just didn't click with me.  I didn't find the humor funny, and the serious shows were too few and far between.  The ending of the series was unsatisfying too.  While it wasn't a horrible show, it wasn't a great series.  Rent it.