Today's acquisitions (29th April 2015)

I read Weekly Famitsu magazine as usual this afternoon but there wasn't a single piece of news worth mentioning this time. There's no Weekly Famitsu next week due to the holiday season in Japan, so I guess we have to rely on the weekend events for Sengoku Basara 4 Sumeragi news until the regular updates resume in a fortnight.

This means I have more time free than expected so I'll post a picture of the goodies I've been lucky enough to acquire recently.

I backed the Time Of Eve (Eve No Jikan) Kickstarter a long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that I had forgotten I paid enough to earn two A4 prints and a fully-translated book about the series. The actual Blu-ray disc shipped a while ago so it was a complete surprise when the extras turned up this week. The colour prints were safely protected by an attractive A4 clear file and delivered in the largest shipping box imaginable. My neighbour laughed as he handed over the package, asking whether I'd ordered a box full of air.

The art book is lovely too. It's the kind of thing I'm used to seeing in Japanese but having all of the production notes and interviews translated for English-speaking fans is extremely rare. What a great Kickstarter project that was.

The other big item is the first Blu-ray disc of the brand new Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin series courtesy of UK distributor Anime Limited. The store-exclusive packaging can only be described as ostentatious; the stunningly-illustrated outer box is as large as a vinyl record even though all it contains is a Blu-ray case (in a slipcase, naturally), art cards and a storyboard book. I haven't seen the anime yet so I'm looking forward to checking it out.

It's never going to fit on my shelves.

The final delivery in the picture is NIS America's standard edition rerelease of Ground Control To Psychoelectric Girl (Denpa Onna To Seishun Otoko). It actually arrived a little while ago and I completely forgot to mention it. I already own the limited edition version of the show so this was a vanity purchase for one reason alone.

My review was quoted on the back! This blog was originally set up for anime-related ranting and reviews. I didn't get too far before posting about Sengoku Basara started consuming all of my free time, but it's a great feeling to have my blog's name on the packaging of a show I really loved.

Today's acquisitions (31st October 2014)

My updates might be sporadic for a little while so here are the things which arrived in the last week or so - it's been difficult to keep up with blogging during this busy period at work!

First up, it's Anime Limited's Gurren Lagann: Ultimate Edition Blu-ray box set. This is the first time I have bought a local BD release that was region locked, so I had to pick up a cheap BD drive at the same time to be able to play it. This is how it looks when it's all packed up in its outer sleeve (an o-card). It's nice that Anime Limited have started doing this so that they can conform to the legal requirement to show the BBFC age rating and marketing information without ruining the packaging inside, much like the obi slips commonly used for Japanese releases.

The next picture shows how it looks without the sleeve. There's a chipboard art box with a wraparound illustration (left), the Digipak with the actual Blu-ray discs (centre) and a hardback art book (right). Not bad!

There are three video glitches in the set from the masters Anime Limited were sent (thanks, Aniplex), but given how much cheaper this is than buying the Japanese set it suits me fine. I paid £80, which isn't a bad price for the entire series, the movies and the Parallel Works extras.

Next is the New Directors From Japan Blu-ray/DVD set. It was a Kickstarter project which managed to meet its goal and deliver the finished discs without any drama at all, making it the most no-nonsense Kickstarter effort I have ever contributed to. I hope that Third Window Films will consider launching more niche projects this way; it's a fantastic opportunity to get region-free Blu-ray produced for films which would otherwise never see release in the west. I'm looking forward to watching them shortly.

My backlog of Japanese books suddenly increased when this old batch of preorders from Honto arrived. The first picture includes all five existing volumes of Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun - a must-buy after the fantastic anime adaptation. They're accompanied by the Diabolik Lovers: More, Blood Sakamaki-hen Prequel manga and both halves of the ridiculous-looking Mahou Shoujo Ore. I don't know how I'm ever going to find the time to read all of these books...

The third BASARA CLUB Press newsletter arrived too, with a Halloween-themed cover drawn by Mikami.

Last but not least, Gekijouban Sengoku Basara -The Last Party- Official Illustration Collection II and the first volume of the Mame Sengoku Basara 4 manga by Sumeragi.

I'll talk about Mame Sengoku Basara 4 later in a proper review (spoilers: it's really cute!) but since I will probably never have time to post about each individual art book at my current pace, here's an overview of what to expect if you purchase Gekijouban Sengoku Basara -The Last Party- Official Illustration Collection II.

As the title implies, this book collects all of the leftover materials and illustrations which Production I.G. produced since the previous Sengoku Basara -The Last Party- art collection. There are some pictures which relate to the television series too, and others which have nothing to do with either the movie or television versions, such as the illustrations Ookubo Tooru produced to promote various regional festivals in the Touhoku area.

The first 47 pages are full colour illustrations from posters, merchandise, guide books and other sources, and if you love the anime art style these alone make the book worthwhile. A few design sketches from Mini Sengoku Basara break up the serious poses nicely.

The next feature is a long 'commentary' on Sengoku Basara -The Last Party- from director Nomura Kazuya, screenplay creator Mutou Yasuyuki and character designer Ookubu Tooru, which is a group interview where they go through all of the movie's key scenes and add their comments. This feature includes storyboards and script excerpts for a few scenes which never made it into the finished film. These were the climax of the fight between Kenshin and Shingen at Kawanakajima, the Maeda family sharing a meal with Keiji, Ieyasu and Motochika, and some expanded character development for Yukimura after he's forced to deal with his new responsibilities. All three would have been nice additions in the finished movie, especially the exposition at Kawanakajima. It's a shame that the storyboards were never animated in the end.

The final pages of the art book are dedicated to a more general interview with the three staff members.

Given how text-heavy it is, this book is probably for serious The Last Party fans or Japanese-speakers only, but if you want a decent collection of the rarer illustrations used for the anime box sets and you're crazy about Ookubo's art it's a good buy.

News roundup: Takarazuka to perform Sengoku Basara?!

This morning, my Twitter timeline suddenly exploded into action with rumours that Sengoku Basara was to be adapted for a musical performance by the famous Takarazuka Revue. It wasn't at all difficult to trace the reports back to their source.

A Google search result showing the page existed

Unfortunately, by the time I had time to look into it properly, the page had been taken down by Capcom. I dug a little deeper and found a screenshot to confirm what had happened.

The article on the official Capcom Sengoku Basara website

In a post on the official Sengoku Basara news feed, someone had mistakenly uploaded an article (dated this coming Friday) with a title which unambiguously announced that the Takarazuka Revue would be performing Sengoku Basara. The article text was a copy of a different news item from a few days ago describing the Blu-Ray/DVD release for Sengoku Basara -Moonlight Party-, so no further information was found in the leak. Friday just happens to be the day of the new Butai Sengoku Basara stage play. It's likely that the announcement was originally planned to debut there and that's when we'll find out more of the details.

The crowd on Twitter have reacted with cautious enthusiasm. I'm excited for the eventual Blu-Ray/DVD release since seeing it live would be challenging for me at the moment!

The other three news items which have caught my eye recent have been Aksys Games announcing the localisation of another Hakuouki PSP game in the US, this time Hakuouki Bakumatsu Musouroku. Hopefully they'll consider a limited edition again as it will be a guaranteed purchase.

Secondly, Kick-Heart was not only successfully funded in the end but it also made its two lowest stretch goals, which means the short will be twelve minutes long rather than the planned ten. In addition it will come with an English dub and Spanish subtitles on top of what had already been announced. Congratulations to the Kick-Heart team for making anime history!

Finally, Crunchyroll have revealed that Giant Killing is going to be removed from their site in a few days. I hadn't taken the time to watch it and now it's looking unlikely I will. A DVD licence in the US would be great.

I'll end this post with a video suitable for the current festive time. In "Helloween" below, the Sengoku Basara characters star in a strange Hong Kong Disneyland commercial with some help from Miku Miku Dance.

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.

Kick-Heart Kickstarter progress update: two weeks remaining

Following on from my previous post, I've noticed that Production I.G has overhauled their rewards for Yuasa Masaaki's Kick-Heart Kickstarter drive. Having taken on a lot of fan feedback from the backers of the project, they're trying to add more value in the form of additional subtitle tracks, additional rewards for supporters and additional goals (which may be impossible) such as lengthening the short film substantially if there's enough demand. They've promised to make it thirty minutes longer if they can raise $400,000 rather than their original goal of $150,000, and if they can get over $1,000,000 they'll go all out and create a full feature film.

The extra rewards are interesting and I've ended up slightly raising my own bid as a result. They've added DVD editions, as some customers were complaining that they wanted something physical other than the Blu-Ray. There are also t-shirts and soundtracks on offer. The progress had slowed greatly over the last week, now sitting at $105,000 with 14 days left to make up the rest. I think they'll be able to pull it off.

Kickstarter progress update

A day later, and Kick-Heart has raised more than $40,000 towards its $150,000 funding goal. It is looking very achievable.

There's been a lot of negativity in fan communities about the length of the project (10 minutes) compared to the amount that they are asking for, but in spite of this an increasing number of funders are now in the low donation category; the average bid has decreased markedly from the early figures. This means that the project is working successfully not because of a handful of wealthy otaku acting on their own but because hundreds of people are throwing smaller amounts in the pot.

One discouraging thing that has happened is that unfortunately, some people aren't too good at reading a situation before leaping in and saying things that they probably shouldn't. On the official project Kickstarter comment page, I spotted this odd remark amidst the questions and words of support:

The user's words aren't deliberately malicious in any way and he's even supporting the fundraising drive himself both financially and in his intent. I find it worrying that not only do people like this not see why what they were doing was bad (even though their videos were removed), but also that they chose to broadcast this fact directly where the people who worked so hard to make those commercial anime projects would be reading, rather than try something more productive like spreading awareness of the many legal ways to support Yuasa's work. It's not my intention to single this one guy out as a villain all on his own. This attitude is widespread; it's disappointing that a subset of western fans throughout the industry can remain so blind to how much damage their unintentionally cruel words might do that it never even crosses their mind to consider their words with care.

With the culture of the internet, the English language has come to need an expression equivalent to the Japanese kuuki yomenai.

I wonder how this kind of thing can be wiped out with some education. In this current climate, mass indignation at any kind of intellectual property protection swiftly drowns out any point that wronged creators might try to make about respecting their work.

Bucking the trend: Kickstarter

One of the recurring themes in this hobby lately, from the perspective of a foreigner, is that the industry is closing itself off as much as it can from entire regions, actively preventing sales and growth. Realistically, foreigners outside Japan (and the major markets it recognises such as the US) aren't worth a great deal, I know. There is a old fashioned belief both in America and in Japan which persists that each market needs to be treated separately, and those not being catered for don't wish to contribute.

However, today a project was set up which moved me to create a post (and indeed, to finally start using the blog I'd prepared!).

Kickstarter is a website which arranges for projects stuck in funding hell to get a boost from private individuals with money to burn. It's like a matchmaking website for wallets. For some reason, it's become extremely popular lately in America and people who would normally be too cheap to pay $20 for a PSP game are suddenly breaking out their savings to help fund strange indie gaming projects which may never go anywhere. I don't entirely understand it, but there have been a number of significant successes to date and if it's convincing fans to contribute more, it seems like a good idea.

Kickstarter was successfully used for a US manga project recently, but to date it had never been used for anime. Rumblings from western companies implied that it caused problems in negotiations with the Japanese rights holders and had a stigma of making things seem that the production companies had no money; in Japan, where companies generally retain some level of dignity and distance from their customers, it wasn't seen as presenting a good image.

There's also a logistical problem in that to put an anime project on Kickstarter, you need to have the licence to it; speculatively creating a project for something you don't actually have any rights to is not going to look good to anyone, and only risks ending in disaster when the contract negotiations fail or the asking price jumps. Similarly, few Japanese companies are going to want to let a western distribution house sit on a title trying to raise funds, preventing the creators shopping it to other companies. Not to mention the fact that a US distributor would only hold the licence for their region, crippling their ability to reach out to would-be investors globally.

In other words, the only way Kickstarter was ever going to get a proper anime project going was for someone in Japan to take the risk. Amazingly, that has finally happened.

Today, Yuasa Masaaki has launched a one month Kickstarter for a short, experimental anime called Kick-Heart. It's an absurd-sounding story which is bound to make for a very entertaining short film, and he has enough on his resume to get me interested even before considering that Production I.G. and Oshii are attached to the project too.

As I was just watching another quirky indie-style anime only the other day (Yamamoto Soubi's This Boy Can Fight Aliens, which received a US Blu-Ray release recently), I finally signed up to Kickstarter today and threw my support in for this one too. One of the site's gimmicks is that 'backers' can be encouraged to bid more by being offered rewards for meeting certain targets, and the $60 reward is a Blu-Ray of the finished animation if it all gets off the ground. Given that standard Blu-Ray pricing in Japan isn't cheap anyway, I decided that it was more than a fair price and this was the tier I went for (sadly, the $10,000 tier with its promises of a dinner with staff and a personal studio tour is a little out of my reach). The creators have since added some more reward tiers between the ultimate prize and the more affordable ones, so hopefully the response will pick up quickly as the wealthier backers start bidding. They've already been making good progress towards their target ($14,000 raised out of $150,000) in the few hours the site has been online.

Although I'll certainly be happy if I can be watching a shiny Blu-Ray disc of secret pro-wrestling nun romance in a few months from now, I want this project to succeed for other reasons. The creators are reaching out and directly targeting English-speaking foreigners with their Kickstarter page, and for the first time we can go straight to those creators and show them how much we want to support imaginative new anime. Even though I'm not in America, even I can throw my money down and show them that I both love anime and am willing to pay for it, and it doesn't have to be a safe romantic comedy adapted from some flashy new light novel with guaranteed sales potential.

I'd like to see more of this kind of thing. 

As for what the next Kickstarter project should be, I've already decided what the most sensible western anime company funding need is: the second half of Glass Mask! Sentai Filmworks reportedly mentioned at Anime Weekend Atlanta in the past few days that it was never happening (the first half sold too poorly for a release of the second to be profitable). Ok, Sentai Filmworks, you have the rights to it, and there is a small and passionate minority of fans who bought the first half sitting around waiting for the second. Stick it up on Kickstarter and we'll fund the release of the rest of the show. I'm ready when you are.