Canned Dogs

Inakoshi Kazuyuki from Messe Sanoh has written on his Famitsu blog about how he is not very happy with Capcom, as Gyakuten Kenji has gone on sale on the 28th and he had found that 3 days ago the Premium edition DSi set was on preorder on Amazon at a 10% discount, which actually meant that the sets were selling for lower than the cost price that he gets the sets at for his shop.

Inakoshi understands that it’s normal for a company to pursue profits, but complains that with Capcom pricing their products in such a way that allows Amazon to sell at below the cost price of what a normal shop gets the same product at, Capcom will basically be killing the existing game distribution network.

Messe Sanoh is a long running shop chain mostly situated in Akihabara and they deal in video games, eroge, doujin games, and doujinshi.

I don’t know if Messe Sanoh has to deal with wholesalers or if they are directly using Capcom’s own distribution network, but I guess in any case it’s probably really tough for small store chains to beat Amazon since Amazon is definitely big enough to negotiate for much lower prices with the makers.

supercell has announced that their first major single kimi no shiranai monogatari will be the opening song for the upcoming summer anime Bakemonogatari. The song will be composed by ryo (obviously), and surprisingly for the vocals they managed to get the famous Niconico douga singer Gazelle.

The single will apparently also contain the theme of CENCOROLL, which is an instrumental track that was used in the promotional video for CENCOROLL.

supercell is a unit formed by nico nico douga creators, largely centering around the composer ryo, who made popular Hatsune Miku songs such as Melt, World is mine, and Black rock shooter.

The vocalist Gazelle used to be really popular on nico douga in 2007 and early 2008 before she retired and removed all her videos, and now she is reappearing with supercell under the artist name of “nagi”.

Yomiuri has written a news article on the matter reporting that the Liberal Democratic Party (the ruling party) has formed a team to see what can be done about the current situation with all these games featuring sexual violence in distribution. Komeito had already formed a similar team mid-May, so they will probably start to seriously get into discussions with the ruling party about tightening regulations.

The LDP held a session on the 29th of May to discuss the regulation of sexual violence in PC games. Discussing how Japan is being pointed out as being too lenient on games depicting sexual violence and child porn, and are hearing from the relevant ministries and government offices.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry which was present at the LDP meeting says that the independent review committee for the PC game industry has already responded to the current situation:

(1) restricting the sale and production of Rapelay, making it practically impossible to buy it within Japan

(2) they are in discussions regarding the banning of the sale and production of rape games or sexually violent games

—

I guess this is the closest to an “official” confirmation that TBS was wrong in their report.

The directors in the EOCS mainly comprise of eroge industry people such as the chairman of Alicesoft, so they are people that would technically try to side with the eroge industry, but it does look like they are under a lot of pressure right now.

Either way it looks like some sort of change is inevitable.

Related:
Rape games will be banned in Japan
Rape games not really banned and I hate TBS

VisualArts chairman reports on the VisualArts official BBS.

According to the Ethics Organization of Computer Software (EOCS):

1. TBS came to them to do a coverage on the Rapelay thing
2. They accepted the interviews, but TBS had edited the footage and misrepresented EOCS’s intended stance (as usual by TBS)
3. They just got another request for a 2nd interview the other day
4. They rejected the request because of what happened at point #2
5. The news report by TBS appears out of the blue

Comments from eroge industry guy on 2ch ◆tCkJGHo4HY:

For exact details wait till the meeting on the 2nd of June. The TBS news report came completely without warning even for eroge makers. Nobody has any information about this.

TBS as usual has jumped the gun and exaggerated everything. If it is really decided that rape games will be regulated we’ll definitely at least have till past July to comply. The used game market will probably still be OK. The EOCS is currently in a situation where they might lose to outside pressure so please help them!

It hasn’t been decided that rape games will be regulated, they still have to listen to the opinions of all the member companies so something like that won’t be passed that easily. But we can’t be optimistic about this.

Via: エロゲ規制問題2009対策wiki

Comments from the Abel official blog (The Abel chairman Kanno Hiroyuki is one of the directors of the EOCS):

Something that none of the actual EOCS directors even knew about is being reported on the news apparently. All the directors currently have a ? mark over them.

Apparently the root of all this was that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry had told a certain New Komeito Party representative that there will be a meeting held on the 2nd of June where the EOCS will review their PC game software regulations.

This information somehow changed after the NKP representative passed the information to a TBS reporter, which resulted in the news article.

Chinese whispers game?

We had a request from TBS for an interview yesterday, and we rejected them, but this probably doesn’t matter anymore, lets report our news properly.

Anyway, we’ll decide on the direction that we’ll take in regards to the regulations during the emergency meeting that was planning on the 2nd of June. We hope it won’t become what TBS has reported about, but tighter regulations is probably something that is unavoidable.

I’ve written about this several times before, but it’s important to accommodate and get along with society. Lets move on quietly while being careful and seeing how society feels about everything.

*the post has been deleted and this site appears to have kept a copy of the post, and a google search verifies that the post had definitely existed on the blog a few hours ago

This isn’t the first time that TBS makes up news either, somebody do something about them. I guess this explains why no other Japanese news organization has reported about this.

Update: Yomiuri on the game censorship situation
Related: Rape games will be banned in Japan

TBS news reports that all rape games will be banned from sale or production in Japan. It has been decided. It is estimated that this particular genre takes up about 10% to 20% of the entire industry but the PC software independent review committee has made the decision to ban all these games.

The PC games review committee had originally not seen it as a problem, but now it has come to the point where the entire game software industry has to comply to the new restrictions.

The news article reports that the reason for doing so started with the campaigning efforts of the International woman’s rights organization Equality Now which had started due to the problems found with the sale of Rapelay in other countries.

Related: Eroge is being in focus by the Japanese media

Edit: I accidently left this out, but they will change their judging criteria starting from the 2nd of June, and the approximately 200 member companies will be restricted from the production and sale of rape games.

I wonder what the brands focused entirely on rape games will do now, and all the other games currently in production. Or maybe they’ll just call it forced transfer of magic powers or something. I sure hope they end this here because eroge is dead if they go through every genre! And then they’ll move on to other media like film and books.

Update:
Rape games not really banned and I hate TBS
Yomiuri on the game censorship situation

The new issue of Dengeki G’s magazine has revealed that Angel Beats! is actually an anime. The story will take place in the afterlife and all characters in the story are dead. The character shown on the cover is an angel. One of the highlights of the anime will be the battle scenes.

The character that looks like Haruhi is called Yurippe and she’s the leader of the SSS group which is some kind of group that battles in the afterlife world. The overall story and the individual plots for each ep has already been written and Na-Ga has completed the character designs for 30 characters already. The theme of the anime is 人生 (life).

Maeda likes to kill all the characters but this time all the characters are already dead! Everybody will be crying from the first episode!!!

Also SSS seems like a parody of SOS and 人生 sounds like a parody of the famous Clannad quote. It almost sounds like a gag anime now.

Aniplex will be producing the anime, but the studio that will be making the anime is yet to be announced. Also there’s a 99% chance that Tomatsu Haruka will be voicing some character in the anime since Sony Music and Aniplex are involved.

Dengeki G’s: 1, 2, 3

Jump has announced that a TV drama for Kochikame is being made and Katori Shingo from SMAP will assume the role of the main character Ryoutsu Kankichi. I sure didn’t believe it when the info was leaked a few days ago! This is crazy.

Pic: 1

The latest Famitsu has revealed that a DS version of Idolmaster called Idolmaster Dearly Stars is in development as the first part of their new “Project im@s 2nd Vision” project. Dearly Stars will be about 3 new idols in 876 Production (pronounced BanNam Production) instead of the old cast from 765 production.

The new characters are Hidaka Ai who’s the daughter of a super idol, Mizutani Eri who’s an ex-hikikomori, and Akizuki Ryo who’s the cousin of Ritsuko.

The game actually supports DSi functions, but basically the camera will only be used to read QR codes that will give new items in the game.

They also revealed that a new sequel for 765 Production is also in development, but doesn’t reveal what console it’ll be on.

From Famitsu: 1, 2, 3
Bonus: 1, 2

Jump had already released the “kanzenban” version of Dragonball some years ago, but apparently with the new HD rerun of Dragonball Z they’ve decided to reprint the original Dragonball tankoubon with a new cover design and logo (shown above on the right).

This new version has the same ISBN number as the original Dragonball tankoubon so it basically replaces the old version which will probably only exist in old bookstores now.

Via: 狷介庵無聊雑録

Morning Two magazine has recently started an experiment where they would put up all the manga from their magazine online for free viewing on the same day that the magazine goes on sale, and this will continue for the next 12 months, unlike the last time when they had a 3 month run where they would put up the manga chapters for free viewing a month after the magazine has hit the stores.

But while they now allow everybody to read everything that’s in the magazine, they have also started putting special booklets with side-stories that come with the magazine. The first one is Saisei Sentai Holy Men where Jesus and Buddha are sentai fighting off the evil demon Mara who is demanding to be invited into Mixi.

Morning Two will continue to have side story booklets for other manga in the next two issues of the magazine. The next one being for Ono Natsume’s COPPERS and the one after will be for TAGRO’s Henzemi.

Via: Comic Natalie

Suddenly I realised I have to buy Morning Two because there’s a chance that the side stories aren’t going to be in the tankoubon.