Category: Favored Topics

The Beginning is the Most Important Part of the Work – Fate/Complete Material Artbook 1: Art Material

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hisui_icon_4040 Type-Moon fandom always feels like the fandom for a popular band in a niche musical genre. If you meet someone who is into the genre you would be surprised if they did not know the band. But anyone outside of fans of the genre is more likely not to know them then to recognize them. If anime and manga fandom is rock, and visual novels are progressive rock, than Type-Moon is Pink Floyd. With that analogy it says a lot about the release of Type-Moon merchandise in English. At first if you wanted anything Type-Moon it was all through word of mouth and bootleg trading. They were a popular enough company in Japan that the hardcore English fandom was aware of them but it was really the Tsukihime anime, and more importantly the Fate/Stay Night anime, that made them more of a well-known name. (I will admit it was mainly Ayako Kawasumi being in the Fate/Stay Night anime as Saber that interested me in the series.) Over the years as the fandom has grown the amount of legitimate material available in English has increased. Type-Moon anime mostly gets licensed outside of Carnival Phantasm which is even too niche for anyone outside of Japan. The main manga series seem to get licensed but the more esoteric manga falls into Carnival Phantasm territory. With Fate/kaleid liner Prisma ☆ Illya Drei 3!! even being simulpubed on Comic Walker and Fate/Zero streaming it seems like while you can’t assume you will get everything from Type-Moon legitimately it does seem like there is little that is off the table.

But two of the crown jewels have always seemed completely out of reach. The visual novels that spawned everything are the grand prize but any conversation with companies that license games makes it clear that they are far to expensive and risky to license. So unless there is a major shift your just going to have to learn Japanese if you want to buy a copy of Fate/Stay Night. But the much more reasonable dream was getting the Type-Moon art books. They are loaded with original information and are not outside of the realm of profitable licensing. Thankfully UDON Entertainment recently released the first Fate/Stay Night art book.  Fate/Complete Material Artbook 1: Art Material is not their first foray into video game art books. If anything they seem to be picking up quite a few titles lately. But Udon is wisely just dipping their toe in the water  with this book and letting sales determine if they pick up more Type-Moon art books.

This post is mainly going to look on if UDON Entertainment is a good fit for the license. Should we be secretly hoping that this is the last Type-Moon artbook they do or are they going to deliver what we have always wanted?

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Type-Moon Weekly News Roundup: The Three Amigas

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This Saturday post is the weekly Type-Moon news in addition to the regular APB post on Sunday. If you have any suggestions for what to highlight on the Type-Moon Weekly News Roundup drop me a line via email or Twitter.

Murder, Magic, and Madness: Kindaichi Spin-off Manga

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narutaki_icon_4040 It has been a long, long time since TokyoPop released some (nearly all of it actually, 22 volumes worth out of 27) of the original Kindaichi Case Files by Youzaburou Kanari and Fumiya Satou manga stateside. This was in their early days, with 100% Authentic emblazing the covers. In Japan, long has Kindaichi reigned alongside Detective Conan as an institution.

Still, in the last year it feels as though there has been an extra resurgence for the Kindaichi franchise. A new anime has premiered, more live action has been announced, and two spin-off manga series have debuted. In a shocking twist, those spin-off manga have been made available for English-speaking fans via Kodansha’s MangaBox App.

hisui_icon_4040 I always felt like Kindaichi Case Files was Green Arrow to Detective Conan‘s Batman. Batman and Green Arrow are similar enough that they get constantly compared to each other but different enough that you can’t call them carbon copies of each other. The thing is Batman has always just been a major tier above his fellow billionaire superhero. As the current Arrow TV show proves the Green Arrow character is hardly forgotten but at the same time he is just always one step behind the more popular character. But let’s make it clear: Kindaichi is still a popular manga detective character. It is not like Detective Conan is Transformers and Kindaichi is Gobots. That is just an insulting comparison. It is just that any big anime fan has probably heard of Detective Conan but you would not be super surprised if American fans were unaware of Kindaichi.

So this Kindaichi renaissance is a bit unexpected but not utterly surprising. The main benefit of this recent surge is that we are now getting a lot of this new material in this era of simulcasts and simulpubs. When Crunchyroll picked up The File of Young Kindaichi Returns it was pretty hard to miss the announcement if you watching anything streaming but MangaBox is not anywhere near as high-profile. So as manga bloggers and detective aficionados we felt it was our duty to talk about these two titles that you can read for free.

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