I have an admission to make – I’m weak against Sunrise. Well, okay, that’s not really much of an admission – I think it’s something that’s been made abundantly clear over the years. The fact is, though, that there’s an unusually high chance that I’ll end up purchasing a show produced by Sunrise, more so than anything by any other studio.

I’ll not be buying the US Blu-Ray of Kurokami, though.

The whole situation surround Kurokami has been a bit peculiar from the start. If you remember back to when it was new, it was originally touted as being a rather significant release from Sunrise, and indeed a significant release for the anime industry – the first show to air in Japan, the US and Korea, in their respective languages, all within a day. Whilst “airing in the US” amounted to screening on a cable channel not many could get even if they wanted (though it did become available via online streaming later into the series), it’s still kind of an impressive feat. Kind of a shame that it all went so dramatically wrong.

The shows broadcast timing couldn’t have been worse, really. It hit back around the same time as Hetalia, and when that shows TV broadcast was canned due to complaints from Korea, an awful lot of ill sentiment was generated in the fan community. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a show based on a comic series by a couple of Koreans ended up being the target of a lot of undeserved animosity. Then those fans of the original work willing to give it a chance complained (quite fairly) about some of the sweeping changes made to the content for the anime. Kind of left the show without the audience.

Honestly, the shows not that bad. The first few episodes have their share of pretty spectacular moments, and though it was one of those series where budget constraints resulted in a fairly sudden drop-off in quality partway in (though not certainly not to Gonzo levels), it hasn’t hit the level of terrible as far as I’ve seen (which is about three episodes short of the end). But, regardless of that, the show tanked in Japan. Infact, tanked probably isn’t strong enough a word to explain just how badly it’s done – we are talking less than five hundred copies per volume terrible. No-one in Japan wants it.

So, now we’ve got the upcoming US release, where the Blu-Ray is going to be English dub only, apparently due to whoever makes these decisions in Japan withholding the rights to use the Japanese audio track. This kind of nobbles the chances of Blu-Ray sales in the US as well – I mean, it’s the more expensive SKU (marginally) of a niche product (anime) on a niche media popular amongst anal audio and videophiles. The kind of person willing to drop the extra to get the BR release over the DVDs aren’t the kind of people who would buy it dub-only.

I do wonder precisely what justification those in Japan are using for withholding the alternate language tracks. I have to admit I’ve been somewhat expecting this to happen on something ever since I heard the region groupings for Blu-Ray put Japan and the US in the same group – whilst I realise DVD encoding has effectively been broken for some time now, putting Japan and the US in the same media region still doesn’t have positive connotations for a market where the content suppliers are terrified of reverse importation. Which kind of makes me wonder if the Japanese are blaming the lack of sales on the fact that they were forthcoming from the beginning about the fact that it’d be getting a cheap, prompt US release from before the series even started airing, rather than the real reasons behind it’s lack of sales.

This is the point where I come clean and admit that the real reason I’m not picking up the US release is that I’m one of the few who have been buying the Japanese release. It’s actually a good release – It’s got three language tracks (Japanese, Korean and English), a couple of different omake features per volume (a motion comic and Akane-sensei’s Korean Lessons), audio commentaries, two booklets with every volume and some other physical extras (artboxes, postcards and the like). Compare that to the other Sunrise show being released on BR at the moment – The better and more popular Sora Kake Girl, with it’s magnificent, errr, occasional Weiss Schwarz card – and you’ll see it’s actually pretty packed. Any other show shipping with that kind of additional content would probably be selling pretty well. It also shows that the Japanese release has a lot of neat content you’ll not be seeing in the US – you’ll be lucky if you get a creditless OP on that release.

Which brings me back round to the point I’ve already made – it’s not selling in Japan because, honestly, no-one over there actually wants to buy it. The US release, on the other hand, might have actually done pretty well if released properly. Blu-ray penetration in the core purchasing-part of anime fandom is, by industry reports, pretty good now. The show itself got the feel of one of those janky 90’s action OAV’s which tends to go down pretty well outside of otaku crowd, but those people (who probably wouldn’t care about the lack of Japanese) would probably be buying the DVDs rather than the BR. I really can’t imagine the BR release selling at this point. It’s probably just being released because, somewhere back down the line, Bandai said they’d do it. They’ve been generating an awful lot of negativity recently with faulty disks, ever-slipping release dates and prices out-of-synch with where the industry is heading – failing to release something they’ve repeatedly promised would probably do even more to damage their reputation that his horrifically nobbled release will.

The big joke here is that I’ve been watching my import disks dubbed. If it wasn’t for the fact that I wouldn’t buy them on principal, I could have saved an awful lot of money buying the US release instead…

Hmmm, other news? I’ve finished reading Usurper of the Sun, which Omo wrote about a few days ago. I need to formulate something to say about it. Otherwise, I’ve still been playing games in most of my freetime – I’ve managed to endure the pain of Atelier Iris 2 all the way up to the final boss, but I admit that the grinding I’m having to do to take him on is seriously grating on me. I’m not sure how much longer I can last…