RightStuf is far from being the biggest release company in R1, but they have brought out a few things that were good. Of course, I'm eternally grateful to them for bringing out Shingu, one of the best titles of the last five years, and the only title in the last two years that I felt deserved four stars.

Said gratitude is tempered a bit by their dismal marketing of the title; I hadn't heard anything about it before I ordered it on a whim.

So though I don't buy from their retail arm any more (because of their policy of "We ship at our convenience, not at yours") I still am interested in their announcements of upcoming titles. Right now they're playing "I've got a seeecret and I bet you can't guess!" with four announcements. Or at least they were.

Well, silly as it is, maybe it's a good way of generating buzz. God knows it can't be any worse than what they did (or didn't do) about the Shingu release.

Accidentally or on purpose, their new titles are now public, and it's a big deal. The first is Aria, the Animation.

The Aria series is, so I've heard, the ultimate non-action series. Fans of it love it, but no one claims it has any kind of story to speak of. The point of watching the series is to spend time with the characters, in the place where they work and live, because it's a neat place and they're really neat people. Girls, of course; late teenagers, mostly. (That's OK; I've been known to watch anime featuring teenage girls once in a while. Just for variety, you understand.) Apparently this is the all-time champion day-in-the-life series.

There are several interesting things about this. One is that the licensing faucet is beginning to turn on again. At least a little. Two is that by all accounts it really is a top-notch series.

But for me the most interesting thing about this is how they're going to release it: all at once, all 13 episodes, all in a boxed set. No trickling out 3 or 4 episodes at a time once every couple of months.

This is another experiment the industry has considered. I've heard that the R1 release companies have wanted to go with this but the Japanese were reticent. I wonder how difficult it was for RightStuf to convince Hal Film Maker to do this? (I wonder how difficult it was for RightStuf itself to decide to give this a try?)

Anyway, this is a good start. If it sells well, then there's also 26 eps of Aria, the Natural, a one-ep OVA, and then 13 eps of Aria, the Origination, which I believe ends it. Did RightStuf license the rest?

ANN seems to think so; all four series listings now have links to RightStuf's web site for the series. And that says "Future Releases -- Coming Soon!"

They were hinting at there being four announcements, and the four Aria titles seem to have been them. There's certainly been worse news.

UPDATE: Gad. I haven't visited the RightStuf home page for a hell of a long time. As I look at it right now, "Last Week's Top Five Manga Titles" are Eiken 3, Eiken 4, Eiken 5, Eiken 6, and Eiken 7.

For crying out loud! And I thought I had low tastes! Even I won't sink that far.

UPDATE: Well, maybe I will. Long ago I bought a copy of the Eiken DVD, watched about three minutes of it, and stashed it in the closet. I just dug it out and ripped it. I won't watch the damned thing, but I'm scanning through it to take frame grabs, just for the heck of it. I just now noticed this particular picture, which is uncharacteristically un-raunchy:

Notice anything unusual?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in System at 05:51 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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