Good day, gentle viewers in today's news.
Crunchyroll teams up to help teach you Japanese, KamiKatsu gets a delay and
a whole bunch of new entries into existing franchises are announced this week.
So without any further ado, I am Tristan Gallant
And welcome to Glass Reflection.
Let's jam.
Crunchyroll comes into the news as of late in two separate ways.
Firstly, the company has announced a partnership with language app Duolingo,
integrating with their Japanese language course
and adding in 50 anime specific words and phrases.
Now you too can be absolute crap at japanese because let’s face it you ain’t finishing this course.
Even more so than before. 50 phrases.
It doesn't actually seem all that much to me,
but then again, most of the information I've ever read regarding
using anime as a way to learn Japanese has always boiled down to just don't.
It is in many places said to just be a bad idea.
So perhaps these 50 words and phrases don't do much on their own
and they're just there to potentially add a bit of flavor
and keep some people on track with their language.
Learning by adding in some, you know, things that they recognize
and gets them back to being energized and wanting to learn Japanese.
runchyroll has also stated that they are adding a small number of their easy
to understand anime series to essentially free viewing with ad support.
These anime include Bananya, Free, Nichijou and Laid Back Camp,
which you know is a nice gesture that I remember of time
when all of these shows would have been available for free with ad support.
Regardless, and not just because of some weird promotion with a language app.
Remember the days when Crunchyroll had the majority
of their library available for ad supported viewing?
Those were the days.
Now Crunchyroll is also in the news because they release a whole slate
of upcoming home video releases.
You remember that thing that I was worried
they were just going to forget about while honestly looking at this list.
Honestly, they still might have like attack on Titan
and Dragon Ball are here, but those might just be continuing.
What Funimation was doing in the past.
Just, you know, now with a different set of logos on the spine.
So it's going to look real weird on your shelf.
In fact, in many ways, a lot of things on this list just seem like funimation
holdovers in one way or another.
With only a few exceptions,
like Spy Family is getting a DVD Blu ray combo release in July.
And then there are also things
like Devil as a part Timer getting its second season release as well.
I mean, even if I could say that, like Devil is a part
Timer is only getting a second season release
because the first season was released
by Funimation back in the day and did really well.
So why not do season two?
Spy Family getting a home video release is the most unique thing out of the bunch.
But I mean, it's also like one of the most popular shows
that Crunchyroll has had in the last number of years.
So it almost makes sense for them to try and milk it for all it's worth.
Like these days, streaming rights and home video rights are two
separate things that the company needs to negotiate for.
And since streaming is, you know, the thing that Crunchyroll is its bread
and butter.
Most of the time when they negotiate for things, I very much doubt
that they even bother to put the home media license on the table to begin with.
So a lot of times they license things for streaming
and don't really care about their the DVD or Blu ray releases.
And even looking at this slate of upcoming releases,
I still think that this is the case.
Perhaps someone in a boardroom somewhere is looking at this whole thing
and really hoping that the Spy family released does well enough so that they can
justify it to the brass to do more home media releases. But
I don't know.
I'd love it if they did more home media releases.
It's been a long time since I've had large expansions to the shelf behind me,
but even with this trickle of info, I am still discouraged.
Moving on to a brief PSA
for fans of the currently airing anime series KamiKatsu
It has been announced that the eighth episode of the series
originally set to release on the 24th of the month, has been delayed
to the 31st due to various circumstances.
Nothing really else on what those circumstances are, but they just say
that they want to deliver better work to the viewers of this show.
And I'm finding this hilarious because it's KamiKatsu,
the series that decided, Hey, let's narratively have our God
bring over modern day farming equipment to this old medieval fantasy town.
And we visualize this in the adaptation by taking live action footage
of actual farming equipment and use throwing a really shitty Photoshop
filter on it and then rotoscoping out
the head of the farmer with one of the secondary characters.
It looks real weird.
Like this series is already riding the line of being completely slipshod.
So something tells me that an additional week
ain't going to help that,
though This marks the second time that one of the airing shows for
this season has been delayed, though at least in KamiKatsu’s case.
We're not getting a recap episode or anything of the sort.
We're just flat out skipping the week, unlike when Witch from Mercury
did it a couple of weeks ago.
But with luck, that will be all of the delays for this season, all of them,
because we were already like halfway through the spring season and starting
to get ever closer to the end of the season and the start of summer.
So with any luck,
we're not going to see any more delays, at least until that we can hope anyways.
Now, before we continue, I wanted to give a shout out to supporters
of this channel over on Patreon because yes, this video is not sponsored
and the more support that we get over there,
the less sponsors that Glass Reflection will need at any given time.
So an immense thank you, especially to patrons like:
We can't continue this without you guys support.
So however much you are able to help, I am eternally grateful.
In the realm of upcoming anime,
manga and light novels, we have three things worth mentioning.
First up, attack on Titan.
The final season Part three.
Second half gets a new visual.
Why is this noteworthy?
Well, arguably it's not.
Personally, I can't keep passing up the chance
to make fun of its name at this point.
You know, with how many divisions of parts and seasons
that we've been getting. It’s so monumentally stupid to mean that this is even a thing.
So I'm going to continue to pointed out while it is relevant.
Beyond that, though, we got two franchises from the 2000
that are coming back into the spotlight.
First, after 11 years, the light novel series
Shakugan No Shana, is receiving a new volume.
Now, technically, it is not a mainline story volume and instead
is going to be the fourth short story volume.
Like a lot of times, light novels
series have a lot of short stories that are written for a variety of reasons.
Sometimes if it's like a new anime comes out or something else that is worth
promoting Alongside the main light novel series, an author
might come out with a short story to commemorate this event.
Those short stories are then combined and released in one volume on their own.
It's a little hard for me to get a precise
read on when all of the short stories for Shana have come out
and how much of this new volume is actually going to be new material.
Because like Kadokawa did release a Shana a short story back in 2017.
But that's kind of all I've been able to find
since the ending of the mainline story back in 2012 until now.
Either way, even if this is just kind of a bit of a supplemental hurrah,
it is still good to see more of Shana.
Like Shana was one of the very first anime series that I ever watched
when it was airing back in 2005.
That was the thing.
And then I watched its follow up series in 2007 and 2011.
Oh, I didn't really like some of the massive changes that the adaptation did
to the source material because, you know, it like skipped the entire volumes.
Shana is one of those, I want to say like mid-tier
popularity, anime from the 2000,
the kind of show where people that were already into anime probably picked up
and enjoyed, but it didn't really drag new people into the fold,
at least over here in the West.
Needless to say, it was one of my favorites from the time.
And as much as I would love for Shana to get like a redo anime adaptation,
I just don't think that's ever going to happen or be in the cards.
It just plainly has too much content to be worthwhile for an anime adaptation
or re-adaptation in this case.
Plus, if they did a re adaptation, they might try to recast Shana
and that would just.
Well, it would just make the whole project dead to me.
Moving on though, the second series from that period of time
that is getting more content is Full Metal Panic.
FMP is set to launch a brand new volume,
a brand new series in celebration of its 25th anniversary.
Now, unlike Sean, and that is just supposed to be
a short story collection, Full Metal Panic is instead releasing a brand new story
set a whole two decades after the original.
So like instead of high schoolers, our main characters are now
what in their mid to late thirties.
It has now been confirmed by the series author that it will contain
some amount of slapstick that full metal panic is known for, but not to the extent
of the very well-received full metal panic Fumofuu, which still to this day,
I will say is like one of the best comedic anime put to screen ever.
So you can also imagine that this is extremely depressing to me.
Like while I am mostly an anime watcher with full metal panic and haven't really
read the The Light novels, the slapstick has always been one of my favorite parts.
I once described the first season adaptation of Full Metal Panic
as being this perfect blend of action and slapstick only for then
The two seasons that followed it Fumofuu and Second Raid to be like
weird separations of those two aspects and then perfected
in each individual season.
The most recent anime work, however invisible Victory, seemed to just continue
on the very serious action heavy focus path,
and I don't think it was anywhere near as good because it just felt like
such a downer in comparison to the rest of the franchise.
Hopefully the author can get back to striking a good balance
between the two again, but really, who knows?
I will say the author already has
probably a little too much high hopes for this new series.
He is on record musing that while this new series could just end
in the single volume, depending on how things go, this could last
a whole epic saga of like 20 volumes, which personally,
I think that statement right there is a death flag for the whole thing.
Any time a creative has come out and publicly stated
that we have plans for like X amount of films
or X amount of content before anything has even been released,
like it never then becomes popular enough to warrant any of it.
So in this particular case, I think that the author is getting way
ahead of himself by even contemplating that
this new series could get 20 volumes
when the original Full Metal Panic that he released only got 12.
Like, perhaps he has some serious lightning in a bottle.
To think that this new series is about to release is going to be that good
and that popular.
But I doubt it.
Like I want to see Slash.
Read more Full Metal Panic.
I love the series. Honestly.
And like the idea
of having those characters, the main characters from the show aged up
appropriately to basically be the same age as the original audience
that followed along with the series back when it first came out.
That sounds great to me, but I have yet to see
even a proof of concept that this new series will be anything more
than like a big Memberberry romp for fans of the original.
Hope for the best.
Expect the worst.
I mean, they didn't even announce that there
was going to be a cameo by Bunta-kun.
So that's like the travesty in and of itself.
But that's it for our video today.
So subscribe if you haven't hit the like button, if you enjoyed the video.
And until next time, as we continue to sit here
in the closet of anime.
Watch more of it.
Watch more anime and stay frosty.