"Any card—so long as it exists—has a power that is needed."

Episodes 144 and 145 are now finalized! Coming off the end of the Supreme King mini-arc, we see that Judai is understandably traumatized in the aftermath and spends time recovering while we're reunited with Chronos, who has been going through this world alongside Echo (would've liked getting a scene or two about how they landed here and how they started making moves but oh well), and Ryou and Ed fill him in on everything that happened. Ed's conversation with Echo is also interesting, where she expresses the kind of love she has for Amon, and before long we also catch up with Amon himself, who's sided with Yubel temporarily in order to smash the will he's had through which he's put himself last. Amon arguably gets much of his hate from this two-parter and how he treats Echo, but I think it ends up with a good bit of schadenfraude in about 5-6 episodes (though I do like his line at the end of 145 in which he says he'll dedicate Yubel's neck to her). That said, we do lose Ed in the process, with Echo apologizing for getting him mixed up in all this, and I do like the dramatic flourish they added with Exodia being assembled to show his LP slowly dropping to zero to buy time for Judai and co to escape. Next episode, though...

In terms of animation fixes this go-around, there were a few minor ones--and a major one in 145--across both episodes, but overall, nothing too big to report, and 144 only had one I looked at that wasn't in a flashback. Details past the end of the post below for the interested, as always!

Housekeeping-wise, one of the fixes I applied to 144 was also applied to 143, so it's been updated in its release post with 141 and 142, while its hardsub, DVDRip, and MKV have been re-uploaded to NAC (where I'd posted 144-145 first pending Videagate's resolution).

(Also, another little recurring housekeeping request: I've previously tried to ask around to see if anyone knows any anime song cover artists that do Italian covers; since I'll be coming up on finalizing my Season 4 work sometime in 2026 [hopefully], I'd like to incorporate the Italian dub into my releases given that it starts to be adapted straight from the Japanese version as of episode 156 [versus being based on the 4Kids dub for episodes 1-155], and I'd really like to commission Italian covers of Teardrop and The Sun [even if just for one episode], as well as Precious Time, Glory Days and Endless Dream for S4 proper. If you happen to know any, pls drop me a line 🙏🏽 [Worst-case I'll check Fiverr soon maybe, but thought I'd ask for some leads on some good ones first lol])

With all that said, enjoy! Hope to work on 146-148 next as Judai's grief episode ("I... I should vanish!" judai NO) along with Ryou vs Johan/Yubel go into each other nicely and is a favorite set of episodes for me--we'll just see if I can at least post those in the next month at the latest, lol; before that, I'll be going back to do some translating for TFSP as I work on the ZEXAL cast's overworld text (and try to start on their in-duel lines), though since drafting this in late April, I've finished up the ZEXAL cast's overworld text and will start on some of their in-duel lines before shifting back to 146-148. Stay tuned!

Fixes and Edits! (144)

In the 143 recap, as Volcanic Devil launches its last attack only for Supreme King Judai to play Super Fusion, he chooses to fuse his Malicious Edge with O'Brien's Evil Token into Malicious Devil, with the two Monsters put into a split-screen as the darkness consumes them; as they split apart, there's a quick frame where the border on Malicious Edge's split is missing a glow. Reprised my quick fix in Vegas for it as applied in the episode proper, in which I reapplied a glow along the split's border for that frame.

A bit later, as Judai is having his nightmare about having beaten Jim and O'Brien while Supreme King, we see the shot of O'Brien piercing Supreme King Judai with the Eye of Orichalcum as its light fades and the two are sent flying--but before they're sent flying, we see Volcanic Devil still on O'Brien's Disk, shown in Defense Mode but taking up the space of a card in Attack Mode, which is inconsistent with the following shot as they're sent flying where it's no longer on his Disk (having just been destroyed with Malicious Devil). I'd only just noticed it while working on 144, so I went back to fix it there first, clearing the Zone in Photoshop, for one frame while the light was around them and one after it fades, and then using AfterEffects's position/scale motion tracking to re-zoom the fixed lit frame in the shot and having it fade into the fixed unlit frame, and redrawing some of the shadow aura as it passes over the zone. Once done there, I applied the fix for the shot in 144.

Later in the episode, after Ed plays Clock Tower of Seclusion and then his two Eternal Dread cards, Amon is surprised to see him play two, and Ed joins him on a split-screen to explain that one Eternal Dread places two Dread Counters on Clock Tower; their split-screen then splits, but there's a flicker in the split-screen border between them the frame right before they start to split apart. A quick fix by just copying the prior frame of the split-screen over the error frame in Sony Vegas.

Fixes and Edits! (145)

After Ed summons Diskguy through Doctor D, he explains how his effect lets him draw two cards when he's Special-Summoned, before then tributing him, Diamondguy, and Dunkguy for Dogmaguy--but there are several animation errors that happen in this animation cut: as the shot starts, Ed's deck is missing some detail while his right arm isn't fully drawn, then after he draws and ostensibly starts to reel his arm back in to look at his drawn cards, his arm and shoulder aren't drawn in, his hand with the drawn cards isn't fully drawn in, and a few other things. I broke down the errors in this post, along with showing how I fixed them (or did my best to lol)--mainly taking the error frames into Photoshop to fill in Ed's arm or splice in Ed's arm from a different but similar shot to bridge the three-frame gap between his arm being out from the draw and his hand with the drawn cards coming into the frame, while masking the missing deck/hand card detail back in from subsequent frames in Vegas.

Later, as Ed tributes D-Cubic, Diabolicguy, and Departedguy for Bloo-D, as the split-screen showing the three of them fading for the tribute splits apart, the split for Diabolicguy takes a frame longer to slide offscreen than the other two. Fixed this in Vegas by timing the other two's slide-outs to Diabolicguy's so they all slide offscreen together.

...I first used Photoshop to splice in the part I needed for his Disk from this earlier shot...

...which I then re-sized and adjusted into the last frame of the zoom-out that the shot then lingers on to make it fit and blend in properly, redrawing some of the outlines around each of those Monster Zones as needed; this part actually wasn't too bad.

After that, I took the fixed frame into AfterEffects, where I used its motion tracking to re-zoom out the frame; had to make some adjustments to the motion tracking keyframes (it can be a bit finnicky when also accounting for scale) and I applied a subtle sharpen to the earlier parts of the zoom-out which goes away as the zoom-out ends, but once done, it was looking good. I then applied a brightness increase on the edit as the light around him brightens when he fuses his Cybers together, and boom goes the dynamite; looks pretty good in motion! (Give the gif a quick sec to load:)