News roundup: Browser Sengoku Basara is to close down, and success for Kick-Heart!

It was announced today, quite unexpectedly, that Browser Sengoku Basara would be ending its service on 27th December 2012. It had only been running since June, with special character cards having been given away as incentives at special events since. Buyers of August's HD Collection were also given special promotional cards for the game as a first pressing bonus. I didn't enjoy the companion game Sengoku Basara Card Heroes very much, but Browser SenBasa (commonly abbreviated to the more concise BuraBasa) was good fun and several players had become quite addicted to it. What a shame.

The best part about the browser games is that Capcom seems to have commissioned a lot of new artwork in order to decorate the collectable cards you strive for to build your army, a mixture of new (to me) character renders and interesting hand drawn illustrations. It's particularly interesting for the Sengoku Basara 3 characters as they have rarely been shown drawn in different styles. A memorial art book of some kind would be welcome.

A mild bias may be apparent in my selection of card samples

Unrelatedly, and much more happily, Kick-Heart has met its funding goal to become the first successful anime-related Kickstarter project to date. The fight isn't over yet though; they've added more stretch goals. While some are probably impossible, the lowest target adds an extra two minutes to the film's planned run time as well as Spanish subtitles. I hope they make it!

The final newsworthy event for today's post is that Viz Europe have picked up Magi for streaming and home video distribution in Europe. This news is a little odd as Viz Europe are the people behind Kaze UK, who plainly already had the streaming rights as I've been watching it through their streaming portal for the last few weeks. It's good to know that it's coming to home video here too; I'll buy whichever English edition is the better quality so the ball's in their court.