A link to KyoAni’s online store provided in the AoD forums reveals that the upcoming DVDs for the new episodes of Haruhi are going to have English subtitles on disk. Or at least the page says “英語字幕”.

That’s the good news. Kind of, anyway – I kind of suspect the subtitles will be a little janky like the Haruhi-chan ones.

The bad news, well, the first volume is going to contain all of one episode – Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody – for a cost of 4,830 yen for the LE, and 3,780 yen for the regular edition.. That’s kind of pricey. I’d imagine that they are going to follow the same pattern as the original series and the future volumes will see a price hike for two episodes a disk.

The worst news, however, is that the LE release will see the return of the hellish insanity that the first series did. Well, it’s not with sticker sheets this time, but this first LE at least will come with one of five possible Postcards/Coasters. The random nature of this is bad enough, but the real kicker is… THE RETURN OF THE SP EXTRA!

Yes, once again they’ll be driving those with a collector mentality even more insane, with an extra that you only have a limited chance of actually getting (another coaster, apparently). They don’t say whether or not there’s just one SP coaster, but I’m willing to bet they’ll go the extra mile in their evil games and there’ll be a dozen different variations distributed in such a way that there’ll be a chance of getting the same SP coaster in more that one volume.

The swines!

Of course, there’s also the fact that for the two volumes that’ll follow this one, assuming those will have two episodes a disk, the content isn’t exactly going to have much variance to them…

Knowing what I’m like, I’ll probably end up getting them anyway. I’m such a sucker.