Canned Dogs

Amazon Japan publisher sales rankings 2007
1. Kodansha
2. Shogakukan
3. Shueisha
4. Kadokawa group
5. Shinchosha

Adult video maker TMA has put up a video trailer (NSFW) for their AV film featuring a girl cosplaying as Hatsune Miku (and other characters). There is a leek.

Akiba-kei star Nakagawa Shouko’s new single, snow tears, which is also the ending theme for anime Hakaba Kitarou, has hit the top spot in the Oricon Daily charts for 29th of January.

Via: Manichi Mantan web

Next week’s issue of Jump has announced that Hunter x Hunter will start in Shounen Jump again in issue 14 of Jump, which will be released on the 3rd of March. Book 25 of Hunter x Hunter will also be released on the 4th of March.

I was really sad when one of the info leaked from Jump’s internal meetings said that they hoped to start in June, the editors must have worked really hard to get Togashi off his online games!

We’ve had the nekomimi maid cafe Cafe with Cat in Akihabara for more than a year now but this newly opened cat cafe, Nekojalala, is completely different from the usual cafes you see in Akihabara. That is, this new cafe is filled with real cats that guests can play with.

Akibablog has an article on the cafe together with lots of pics.

Cat cafes aren’t exactly a new thing in Japan, as they’ve been popping up here and there in the country in recent years. But it’s pretty strange for a cafe like that to open in Akiba.

The owner might already be in prison, but Yahoo news reports that the big image uploader Gazou channel is now back in business with US based servers and a new administrator. No more nasty Japanese censorship laws now that it’s in the US!

An image uploader that generates 300,000 USD in ad revenue per year sounds like a great thing to take over.

The new owner reportedly also lives in Hawaii so he’s safe too.

Melonbooks has announced that they will be getting a new shipment of every single Touhou title that the doujin circle Shanghai Alice has produced up till now. So it’s a great chance for fans who want to get the older titles like Koumakyou but couldn’t get them!

I knew I should have sold my copy of Touhou Koumakyou when I saw it going for more than 15,000 yen in the stores.

The march issue of Dengeki G’s magazine has a staff interview with the Key staff revealing some details about the upcoming eroge Little Busters EX (where EX stands for Ecstasy). They had apparently already decided on making the adult version when they first started work on Little Busters.

The main points in the interview were:

- The chairman asked to let him use some of his business tactics during the meeting where they started the Little Busters project.

- “Ecstasy” was Maeda Jun’s idea, he came up with the name immediately after the idea of an adult version was put forward by the chairman and everybody loved it.

- Current progress is 30% and they plan to finish writing the scenario by February.

- The new heroines Sasami and Kanata will not join the mini-games and their stories will be put into the game in a way that will not break the original storyline.

- They also briefly described how the H scenes for each character will be like.

- There will be new mini-games and BGM, but they’re not sure if they can fit everything into a single DVD.

- There will be a really big extra that will be hidden in the game.

- Everybody was saying that the separate routes in Little Busters was pretty weak, so they plan to add one more emotional scenario in EX.

- There will be some minor tweaks to problem areas in the storyline.

———

The chairman sounds suspiciously like he’s from Circus! I hope they won’t start announcing 10 more Little Busters games and fandisks.

Also I wonder how Sasami and Kanata can enter the story with the NPC / PC system that was established in the storyline.

We had the fan voted rankings a while back, so here are the eroge sales rankings for 2007! The source for sales numbers in the eroge industry PC-NEWS had folded early last year so there aren’t any exact sales numbers for any of the games, and the rankings are taken from Techgian magazine’s top rankings.

Little Busters isn’t an eroge but it’s in the rankings anyway.

If you compare the top sales rankings with the user rankings, you’d notice that there aren’t many games that are in both lists. 2007 was full of games that looked promising but turned out kinda crappy. Like Kimiaru which is in 2nd place! Man.

Edit: Sales rankings from 2006 were previously posted here.

1st place
Little Busters!
by Key
Released 27/07/2007

2nd place
Kimi ga aruji de, shitsuji ga ore de
by Minato soft
Released 25/05/2007

3rd place
Koihime Musou
by BaseSon
Released 26/01/2007

4th place
D.C.II Spring Celebration
by Circus
Released 27/04/2007

5th place
Seinarukana - The Spirit of Eternity Sword 2 -
by XUSE
Released 03/08/2007

6th place
Toukagettan
by ROOT
Released 25/05/2007

7th place
Akane iro ni somaru saka
by feng
Released 27/07/2007

8th place
Muvluv Altered fable
by age
Released 31/08/2007

9th place
HoneyComing
by Hook
Released 29/06/2007

10th place
Aneimo 2 ~Second Stage~
by bootUP!
Released 27/04/2007

11) Xross Scramble ~TEAM BALDR HEAD Perfect Collection~
12) Itsuka, todoku, ano sora ni.
13) Ohzoku
14) Lyrical Lyric
15) Osananajimi to ama~ku ecchi ni sugosu houhou
16) Utsurigi Nanakoi tenkiame
17) Primitive Link
18) Kimihagu
19) Schoolmate
20) Natsumegu
21) ExE
22) Chu x Chu Idol
23) Pia Jan
24) MagusTale ~Sekaijyu to koisuru mahou tsukai~
25) Himekishi Angelica ~Anatatte, hontouni saitei no kuzu da wa~

The aniplex column over at Akibablog has put up 10 pics from the third movie which will start on the 9th of February. The pictures are cool but more importantly, the column has reveals that the scene from the start of chapter 3 will be in the movie completely unmodified.

I love ufotable. They probably couldn’t have done it if it was on TV…

A pamphlet in China for secondary school kids with information about the Beijing Olympics has a drawing of a girl on the cover that bears a strange resemblance to a certain anime character! She looks very similar to that Haruhi girl but I’m sure it’s only a coincidence.

Garden, the latest eroge by CUFFS that was released yesterday, has shocked and awed all fans as everybody finds out that two character scenarios have been cut from the game without any prior announcement or warning by CUFFS.

The official website has since announced that they were unable to finish work on the two character routes due to schedule constraints (despite having delayed the release date by 3 months…!), and they still plan to complete work on the two character routes that were missing from the retail version of the game.

They have not announced if the two character routes will be distributed for free or as a alternate wonderful money making fandisk.

Many fans have since tried to demand for a refund as the game that they bought was incomplete and there was no indication that two character routes were cut from the game till they actually play it.

But that’s not the only problem that plagues Garden!

Garden is made by the famous Suigetsu pair, Gayarou (artist) and Tonoikedaisuke (writer), and all official sources have listed Tonoike as the only scenario writer for Garden. But to the surprise of long time fans, CUFFS had actually used freelance writers to write parts of the scenario, which some have reported that it has resulted in a horribly written story.

The theory is that Tonoike was unable to write the story or didn’t want to write the story, and they had to throw in other writers at the last minute just to get the game out.

The guys that bought Dies Irae are really happy right now because they have new friends who are suffering the same fate of missing character routes.