I seem to be getting a day ahead of my actual comic schedule here, but, hey, my copy of Final Fantasy XIII turned up in the mail. Don’t expect much on Friday ^^;
Not that unfamiliarity with the property doesn’t mean that I’ve not been following the whole Vampire Bund editing fiasco with, admittedly muted, interest. There’s plenty of crazy speculation going on relating to why, exactly, Funimation has ended up with the show in the catalogue in their first place – the unifying cry of a lot of fandom has been “why license it if they’re going to have to edit it?”, and in a world where in manga exists in English, even if they paid for the show prior to it going into production, they should have known what they were getting themselves in for.
The fact that Vampire Bund and BakaTest (which, honestly, was the more initially interesting part of the announcement to me) are both Media Factory properties is probably not insignificant – that they were told that they could only buy BakaTest if they picked up Vampire Bund as well isn’t beyond the realms of possibility. Admittedly, I don’t really think that BakaTest is so big a property that it’d be worth paying for what’s a new, therefore probably pretty expensive, license just to get it – it’ll probably sell well, I don’t think it swings either nerdy nor mainstream enough to do particularly spectacular numbers.
The other theory that’s being thrown around is that the show’s been picked up because IT’S GOT VAMPIRES IN IT! Because, you know, Twilight and all that stuff is kind of popular right now. This is leading into the reasoning behind why they might want to edit the thing – they want to go wide with the show (IT’S GOT VAMPIRES!), and the last thing Funimation would want is for some tweeny girls parents to see it and kick-up a publicity shit-storm. Anime really doesn’t need that kind of attention.
Whatever the case, though, I can’t see this any being anything more than a public relations nightmare for Funimation. For a long, long time they fought against the reputation earned from the TV edit of Dragonball – to this day, the less well-informed Internet denizens decry every licensing announcement with shouts of “They’ll cut it to shreads!”. Having managed to shake much of that reputation off through years of decent releases, the last thing they should be wanting to do is actually play up to that reputation. Even if they never edit anything ever again, it’s going to be at least a year before people stop bring it up constantly. The kind of people who do that are probably aren’t the bulk of Funi’s sales on any individual title, but they are the people who buy a great percentage of everything they put out. Plus, it’s the kind of thing that makes fabulous justification for fansubs for many a person. This is how you lose people.
Honestly, I have to wonder if any number of projected sales is really worth them actually releasing the show – it’s a bit late now, but even if they had to pick the series up to get BakaTest, I do wonder if they’d have been better off just burying it and forgetting they’d ever picked it up. They’d save the dubbing costs, and no-one would have been any the wiser. As it is, they are doing nothing but alienating their most loyal customers. I’d have questioned Vampire Bunds ability to sell in great quantities anyway – by nature of being SHAFT it’s mainstream appeal is limited, and whilst there’s not really been that much talk about it amongst English fandom (at least where I frequent), what I have seen has been as highly polarised as any other SHAFT production, perhaps even more-so. Once they dub the thing (and they will, since Funi make a point of dubbing everything), I’d question their ability to break-even on it now that they’ve effectively killed the release in the eyes’ of it’s core audience.
Even they do manage to ride the Vampire wave (which, honestly, may well have played out it’s course by the time they can actually release DVDs of the show) and go “wide” with the release, is any number of sales really worth the kind of long-term damage this kind of move could cause? It’s not like Vampire Bund is a 100+ episode monster they could bank on for some time to come – it’s a short show. Potentially damaging sales of their more otaku releases across the board really can’t be worth it.
Which, really, is kind of my position on this – VB wasn’t really on my radar, so the release doesn’t effect me regardless, but I honestly can’t fathom how this situation came to pass. I just can’t see the logic behind this being a good decision…
I was kind of surprised to discover, whilst browsing an online book retailer, that Tokyopop seems to have actually published the second volume of Gosick in English. I liked that first book, so this is good. Admittedly, I imagine it’s mostly a result of Tokyopop finding it increasingly difficult to license new titles in a market which most the major Japanese companies have either partnered up or are getting into the market themselves, but I’m not going to complain about the reason when the result is in my favour.
I admit, this whole Nick Simmons thing has left me somewhat surprised. This isn’t so much about the blatant imitation of Bleach art, as that kind of thing probably goes on far more in comics than any of us realise (if, admittedly, using photographs rather than other comics). It’s not even so much as being surprised that Nick Simmons is writing comics – when your pop’s spent a good deal of his life masquerading as a cartoon character, that’s got to have an effect on you.
I do have to admit I am, however, somewhat surprised that anyone has actually read Incarnate. It’s not like this is a situation like Gerard Way writing Umbrella Academy – Gerard actually had is own fanbase from My Chemical Romance from prior to starting that series, not to mention that particular book having a reputation as being good. On the other hand, it’s kind of telling that most of the Incarnate news stories tend to lead off by referring to Nick Simmons as being Gene Simmons son. I suppose that has to be worth something, but as an original comic by an unproven author from a small publisher, I’d be surprised if it’d shifted 10,000 copies.
Then there’s the fact that part of this audience overlaps not just with people who read Bleach, but with people who read Bleach scanlations. That audience doesn’t particularly strike me as the kind who’d have been really into US comics, less-so indie ones, and doubly less-so anything that has been passing itself off as “American Manga”.
Which I guess is why I’m really surprised – I’m kind of shocked that anyone actually noticed this. That anyone has read both seems surprising enough in itself. That someone amongst the few who had were into Bleach enough to be able twig onto the similarity between the two is on another level of astonishment. It may seem like an odd comment coming from someone who wrote a post about Halo Legends having a shot from PreCure in it, but there’s a distinct difference a shot that was not only repeated in the OP sequence of every episode, but also reprised the for OP of the sequel, and some panels of a manga that, at this point, spans tens of thousands of pages. It maybe speaks volumes about the way in which I read manga, but, honestly, panel art just doesn’t tend to stick clearly enough in my mind that I’d be able to pick up on something like this. It boggles my mind that so many comparisons between Incarnate and Bleach surfaced so quickly.
As for Bleach, the series kind of lost me part-way through the crews first venture into the Soul Society. That the extended plot-arc robbed the series of a lot of what made the earlier chapters charming probably had something to do with it, as did the shonen power creep, but mostly I just think it was the spectacular job it made of dramatically increasing the size of the cast without giving me a reason to give a damn about any of them. I suspect that reading the series at the pace that it was being published in the US rather than Japan didn’t really help – reading it in batches spaced out by months rather than on a weekly basis doesn’t really do much for your ability to remember who anyone actually is, particularly when your cast is so large. I finished out the plot-arc, but honestly, I’ve had absolutely no desire to go back to the series since.
Anyway, this is from Astro Fighter Sunred, from the second episode from what I can ascertain. There’s not really much to say about it – it’s nice and clear and front of screen, so at least no squinting and wondering about whether nor not it actually says Mikan is required.
Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s really not much point in protracting these posts out at this point – there’s never anything new to say about them. The only really significant thing to say about this volume that doesn’t apply to the ones preceding it is that this volume sees the move from Endless Eight into Sigh’s.
So, apparently NISA have decided to have a go at this anime thing. The reactions to it seem to be a little on the mixed side.
Reaction on some of the gaming forums I read is kind of just a massive, simultaneous facepalm – the Japanese parent company has just announced a massive drop in profits (note – drop in profits, it’s not like they’re in the red or anything), and here they are throwing their hat into an industry that’s been in a state of freefall for the last couple of years. It probably doesn’t really help that in recent times NISA has gone from being a fan favourite (mostly on the back of titles that ATLUS handled the localisation on) to a laughing stock generally known for a lack of quality control. The lack of quality control thing came to a head when Ar Tonelico 2 was published in the US last year.
To establish a little context here, the Ar Tonelico games are, rather than being developed by NIS, developed by a Japanese studio called GUST, and published over there by Namco Bandai. NISA publish a number of their titles in the US. GUST aren’t particularly renowned for their technical prowess – they tend to produce RPGs with low production values that target the otaku market in the precise fashion that higher budget projects can’t really afford to focus on. Typically, their first titles on any given platform will look an awful lot like a C-grade game from other publishers on the previous generation of hardware.
Take the recently released Ar Tonelico 3, for example – that game looks an awful lot like a C-grade PS2 game, by which I mean not a Final Fantasy, a Xenosaga, a Tales game, Tri-Ace game, or even a Shadow Hearts. It’s a game in which most of the dungeon-type areas are built flat, with ladders providing verticality, because the game isn’t advanced enough to understand the concept of running down a ramp – on those occasions where the game has something like a staircase, reaching it tends to result in your character continuing to move forwards, like Wily-E-Coyote running over a cliff. Downwards momentum is provided by licensed Havok Physics engine, but because the characters have so little weight, the result is that they bounce along in a hilarious fashion.
Even beyond that, GUSTs quality control isn’t typically the greatest – Ar Tonelico 3 even left the debug menu available from certain screens in the release build. It’s good for getting some easy Trophies (Level 99? No problem!), but it doesn’t exactly leave a good impression. Basically, GUSTs games aren’t unknown to have bugs.
But, hey, the game has an unbelievable amount of fanservice, including a combat system built around stripping the female characters.
GUSTs typical standard is why it isn’t really a surprise that, for the US release of the game, NISA kind of managed to introduce a bug that causes the game to freeze whilst fighting one of the bosses towards the end of the game – you kind of get the impression that GUSTs games are easy to break, and NIS release an awful lot of them.
That said, that’s only one of the many reasons that made Ar Tonelico 2 notorious. In the state that the game made it out onto the market, it’s hard to believe that anyone had actually bothered to play it before release, or that Sony actually passed it through the approval process. The games script is full of grammatical errors and mistakes in the text which go beyond mere typos to being simply the wrong words – and that’s where they actually translated the text, there being a commonly recurring piece of dialogue which wasn’t translated at all. It was pretty embarrassing mess, really, particularly coming after a couple of minor hiccups in other games, not to mention the name changes in Mana Khemia.
NISA have, at least, turned something of a corner since then – there’s been minor glitches in a few of their games since then, but no hysterically bad translation issues or game breaking bugs or anything like that, as far as I’ve ran across anyway – but people have long memories.
The point, I guess, is that Ar Tonelico 2’s reputation proceeds it, which means a lot of people are freaking about the possibility of NISA ruining their animu’s. Seriously, we are getting all kinds of reactions, from people expecting broken scripts, name changes and, god forbid, changing the order of the characters names. It’s kind of hilarious, given that it’s mostly unfounded. I mean, anime is a completely different kettle of fish to videogames – the scripts are far, far shorter, and there’s none of that pesky programming stuff to worry about. It’s a lot harder to screw up than a game is.
We don’t really know all that much about the direction NISA is going to take with their anime publications, but we can make some pretty good guesses based on the press releases and hearsay. The likelyhood is that we’ll be seeing 13-episode, subtitle-only releases that’ll only be available from a handful of online-only stores – I’d reckon NISA’s own RosenQueen, Rightstuf, Amazon and possibly Roberts. There’ll probably be extras of some kind, and you’ll almost certainly get more of them if you order directly from RosenQueen.
Chances are, though, that they’ll run it similar to how people (at least tend to) think of them running their videogame business. They’ve already claimed that these shows are going to be limited print runs, which is what they also tend to say about their games. They like to build the assumption that, if you don’t buy their games immediately upon release, you’ll probably not be getting them as they’ll be impossible to find later. You can’t wait for the games to get cheap like the major studio releases, because they’ll no longer be available. This, of course, kind of flies counter to the way the US anime industry works, where people tend to wait for the boxsets.
That works for games, because there’s not necessarily another option for getting ahold of that material. Not everyone has the hardware to play pirated games, nor the bandwidth to download them. Toradora, on the other hand, has kind of already been “available” – you can’t really increase the value through scarcity at this point, because even those who they are going to be target the release to will already have seen it. Still, I guess the idea is that they’ll only produce what they think will sell at retail in the first couple of weeks. No pesky returns to worry about and reduced warehouse requirements and all that, and no ongoing concerns – a small but guaranteed profit instead of risking the kind of long term returns issue that caused the US market so much pain a couple of years ago.
Ultimately, it’s kind of a wait-and-see situation, though. Chances are that the releases themselves will be entirely fine. If there’s one concern I’d have over this enterprise, it’s that it could potentially have a negative impact on their gaming business – frankly, I’d rather see them announce English Ar Tonelico 3 already instead these anime titles. I’m kind of concerned about the titles they’ve announced as well – I think it’s telling that they led things off with Toradora. I don’t mean to say that Toradora is bad, but rather exactly how badly the move reflects on the quality of the Persona anime. Given the popularity of the games, the fact that they aren’t shouting about it sends what I gather are all the correct messages about it…