While Bandai Entertainment is not free of problems, as any new solicitation sheet from the company invariably shows a new delay or two of a title, the company is definitely improving in the eyes of fans as the summer season wears on. With their primary titles this year initially being the second season of Haruhi and its related properties, the initial speculation about Bandai being in trouble came from Bang Zoom Entertainment and even had Bandai publicly responding to the statements by the company indicating that if Haruhi's second season didn't do well, that'd essentially be game over for Bandai.
At Anime Expo, Bandai came out with the announcement of the first season of fan-favorite, K-On for release. San Diego Comic-Con followed-up and they brought out license announcements for Turn-A Gundam and Tales of the Abyss. And now Bandai Entertainment his hinting at their Facebook page that we may expect some news come Otakon from the company, a convention that they've not been too strongly involved with at times over its life:
Speculation is also a bit rampant after SDCC regarding the announcement of the Turn-A Gundam series. The show was airing during the heyday of Bandai's arrival in the US in the late 90's, which was also when DVDs were just starting to get going, and many fans thought we'd get that show right from the start. Word was that they wanted to focus on the main Universal Century storylines and then branch out. What caught fire was the Gundam Wing series, which lead to G-Gundam and the Gundam SEED series before Gundam 00 came out.
So what changed? It's hard to say since license windows can be so varied, but the seemingly solid success of Gundam Unicorn has possibly shown Bandai Japan that there is interest in Gundam series that go beyond just the most current since U.C., new that it is, is so heavily tied to the U.C. material, may mean it's time to mine the few remaining licenses. With the Zeta Gundam movies having arrived earlier this month, Turn-A Gundam is definitely one of the more interesting ones to pull out due to the people behind it, including the Yoko Kanno soundtrack, though they should have hit that much earlier in the decade when she was immensely popular with US fans due to Cowboy Bebop and Escaflowne.
So what could Bandai have in store at Otakon? They've shown a bit of variety this year in what they're pulling from so far, so there's definitely options for them. And with the ties to the parent company, there could be a surprise in there as well.
They haven't been improving at all in my eyes. Just getting worse and worse as time goes on as far as I'm concerned. And instead of being happy that they picked up K-On, it only pisses me off instead, as I know that they're just going to screw it up like they do with everything they touch lately.
Hopefully the rest of the gundam seires we dont have here zz, x, victory,the orignal gundam seires and maybe some these realsed on blu-ray that be awesome.
I'm with metroid on this one. I actually posted on the bandai facebook page that if K-on wasnt released in dub form that a handfull of people I know would stop buying bandai titles all together. I also said that they should use funimations Beck Mongolain Chop squad as an example to do K-On the right way. I really hope bandai doesnt screw this up
I have an idea, Chris:
How about waiting until we get DVD boxsets (with English dubbing) of Kurokami, Unicorn, and Turn-A. (For the sake of the otaku-tachi; I'll also include K-on, Haruhi, Abyss Tales, on down.)
THEN, and only THEN, can we talk about "improvement in the eyes of fans."
And no. I still have that symbolic knife wound from what Bandai Visual USA did to me, and many others, many years ago. So Bancolding$ need to do have a lot more than a loud PR campaign.
Any bets on the announcement starting with "We're announcing that the following titles are being delayed"?
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*hopes for Lucky Star OVA dub*