Have a pleasant festive period and a happy new year, folks, and remember that the new check-in period on iM@S Channel starts today!

And… that’s pretty much it.

Those of you who have been looking up the list of shows for the upcoming anime season have probably noticed the inclusion of Go! Go! 575, the TV show in which best friends Azuki and Matcha (who go together like… green tea and red-bean buns, I guess) decide to form a Haiku club at their school. And also sing and dance, because that’s what you do these days. The show is based around SEGAs Project 575, a media-mix project that is mostly spearheaded by the two game titles, the iOS Utayomi 575 and, probably more significantly, the upcoming Vita game Utakumi 575.

They released a trial version of Utakumi on PSN yesterday. I’ve heard (but haven’t bothered to verify) that they’re limiting it to 200,000 downloads for some reason I can’t quite fathom, though I’ve seen no particular indication that they’ve hit that limit yet (I’ve seen nothing through their Twitter, at least). You might want to grab it promptly if you have a Vita and are *cough*in Japan*cough*, though.

I have, of course, downloaded and played through it several times already.
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The second series of Love Live doesn’t start until April, which leaves them having to come up with some way of selling more CDs. Concert ticket application forms can only go so far, and that’s been milked as far as it can go for the time being elsewhere. Instead, throwing in a goofy short OAV (particularly given that they were going to have to animate a music video anyway) was the solution they came up with, then they doubled-down on it by throwing in a bunch of dumb extras in for the LE release (which was only just a little more expensive than the regular BD-coupled version), just to allow them to maximize the benefit of the fan-cash-extraction process. Also, continuing the same smart move they’ve been running with all along, they used fan voting to determine it’s characters focus, ensuring that the audience has some incentive to pick it up.
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I’d imagine the following post isn’t going to be news to most people reading this, at least at first blush, but since I still seem to be getting an unusual (for me) amount of traffic for that post about Katyusha being missing from the Crunchy stream of Girls und Panzer, despite there being a number of better-written posts on the subject elsewhere, I figured I may as well make another post now that the US disk is in retail channels.
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Depending on where you reside in the world, the iDOLM@STER Secret Event happened earlier today (or yesterday), and the Bandai Channel re-stream of it wrapped up about half an hour before I started typing this. This isn’t to say that I actually watched it myself – I fear that messing around with proxy and VPN settings feels like one of those slippery slopes, starting with just wanting to watch one or two idol concerts, and climaxing ultimately with getting intensely frustrated with Kantai Collection registration lotteries. I’ve too much consuming my time already without having to worry about another bunch of time sinks.

I digress, however – what even I saw out of the event were the new PVs for both the iM@S Movie and the new game, One for All. Post event chatter has been somewhat dominated by the movie trailer, rather than that of the game. It’s perhaps not too astonishing, given that’s where the real bombshell was dropped – the movie is going to feature a number of characters from Million Live.
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