Price Per Episode — The Great Devaluing of Anime

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Jamie Spong in the field of Anime.

I am angry again.

The second series of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is being released in the United States. This is a good thing. The licensees, Bandai Entertainment USA, are giving it the same care and attention that the first series received, including a proper, full-cast English translation. This is a great thing.

And the whole 14-episode series can be had for under £40.1

This is a brilliant thing.

There are some people, however, who have chosen to throw a wobbly over this last point.

If you’ve seen the series, you’ll be familiar with the Endless Eight storyline. The characters are trapped in a time loop for eight episodes. Instead of running the same episode eight times, the producers handed the same source material to eight different teams, who each produced a similar yet slightly different episode. These were broadcast over a period of two months. Viewers complained that it was a waste of schedule. Now, people are complaining that it’s a waste of money.

I used to measure the value of anime videos in terms of “price-per-episode”: the price of the video divided by the number of standard 25-minute episodes included. Overall, this isn’t a fair measurement system — it doesn’t take into account bonus features, quality of translation or distribution medium — but for the purpose of this blog post, it’s as good an indicator as any.

So. £40 for 14 episodes. That’s about £2.85 per episode. “But Endless Eight was just the same episode over and over again,” you cry. No it wasn’t, I reply, but let’s go with it anyway. The Endless Eight are now one. £40 divided by seven episodes. £5.70 an episode. That’s not too bad, I reckon.

But it is here that we discover the problem. Apparently, £5.70 per episode is too bad.

All of a sudden, anime is just too expensive. People are up in arms about the recommended retail price of Haruhi series 2 — how DARE they charge this amount of money for this amount of content! — despite the price of anime in the UK and the USA now being cheaper than ever. It was just a few years ago, in fact, that I bought my first four-episode volume of My-HiME for £20. If people are complaining about spending more than a quid or two on a single episode, English-speaking anime fandom has surely lost its way; for years, £5 per episode was considered a fair asking price for a professionally-produced anime translation. (I’m sure that older fans will tell me how it was “even worse” in their day.)

But even that’s not enough.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I bought copies of the Magipoka boxsets. As it doesn’t have a proper English release, I had to import them from Japan.

4 episodes to a set, plus one DVD-exclusive bonus short episode each.

All together, I got about 13-or-14 episodes’ worth of content. All together, it cost me £242.70.

£242.70. That’s £18 per episode.

Let’s look at a more contemporary example. The first volume of the popular new anime series Angel Beats! just went on sale in Japan. It’s done incredibly well; even in its first day on sale, over fifteen thousand copies were sold.

The first volume contains 2 episodes and costs ¥5250. Assuming that you don’t want to splash out on limited-edition bundles or Blu-ray discs, you’re looking at £20 per episode. No translations. No bonus features beyond an equally untranslated commentary track. No frills.

Angel Beats! isn’t even that expensive. K-ON! is dearer. Haruhi Series 2 is dearer still. Don’t believe me? See for yourself.

You see, in Japan, when you buy an anime DVD for the domestic market, you’re not just paying for the right to watch a couple of episodes on your television. You’re funding the series. Next to sponsorship deals, domestic DVD sales are the main source of income for anime producers.

Some English anime consumers complain that the prices of anime DVDs should be brought in line with the average costs of locally-produced television series sets before they’d consider buying them. This point of view doesn’t take into account the fact that British and American television shows tend to be commissioned by a broadcasting corporation or suchlike, while anime producers have to pay the Japanese TV stations to get their shows on the air. It’s only through merchandise and DVD sales that the average anime series can break even, let alone make a profit.

Needless to say, with English-language anime DVD prices as cheap as they are, the anime producers themselves don’t see overseas earnings as being particularly significant. Don’t get me wrong — every officially-licenced English-langage DVD purchase results in royalties going back to the original producers — but your purchase also subsidises license costs, translation costs, marketing costs and so forth on the English-speaking side. Imagine how the revenue shares for each purchase are split. Imagine how little each party must receive.

Sadly, this undervaluing of anime is happening among the licensees themselves. Companies like FUNimation release slim boxsets for peanuts and dump anime series on their website for viewing at no charge to the consumer. While you may think that a copy of Kanon for £13.03 (54p per episode!) is a good thing, consumer demand for cheap-as-free anime will soon cause the major companies to stop making profits, declare bankruptcy and cause the Great Cheap Anime Bubble to implode spectacularly. That’s my theory, anyway.

Let’s step back and take this all into account. A 14-episode series can set you back up to £300 if you live in Japan. In North America, however, you get the same content for only £40; maybe even less. Even in the glory days of £5 an episode, you were paying 25% of the original asking price. Now the English price-per-episode is less than 15% — or, in the case of the 54p-per-episode Kanon, less than 4%2 — of what a Japanese fan would pay. And that’s not even taking into account all of the lovely extra features, like, for example, a full English translation, that you don’t get in the Japanese release.

So, Haruhi fans, what’s it going to be? £320 for the regular edition of series two? £382 for the limited edition of series two? Or £40 for a special, English-language 14-episode collection with bonus features, lovingly put together by people who love the series just as much as you do?

If you’re still not convinced, I can’t force you. If you don’t think that it’s worth the asking price, don’t watch it. If you’ve got better things to spend your money on, spend your money on them instead. You don’t have to watch anime, you know. ㋼

Prices for Japanese DVDs were taken from CDJapan. XE and Wolfram|Alpha were used for currency conversion and calculation.

  1. At time of writing, the complete series set can be pre-ordered from RightStuf for $58.74 (postage inclusive), which comes to about £39.24. [↩]
  2. Eight Japanese DVD volumes at ¥6300 each ≈ £375. Incidentally, the Blu-ray disc edition is ¥62580, or £466.83. [↩]
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MangaGamer Revisited — Oral Stage

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Jamie Spong in the field of Visual Novels.

I’ve had it. I can’t take anymore.

MangaGamer, as you may know, sprung onto the scene about a year and a half ago, offering a variety of poorly-translated hentai-style novel games. You may remember that I was less than impressed at the time, but I had hope that, with time and the support of fans like me, they would improve.

They got worse.

I should point out that I have continued to support MangaGamer with my money. After Da Capo (which I played the grand total of one-and-a-half playthroughs of), I purchased Kira☆Kira (which held my interest for several sessions of several hours before I started playing something else) and Shuffle! (I only got as far as this screen before closing it in disgust). If you’ve had a conversation with me in the past few months, you can probably tell where I’m going with this post.

One of MangaGamer’s translators updated their staff blog a month or two ago, responding to concerns about their translation quality. In their words:

…we are taking much more time in editing and proofreading than we did before. Because our resources are limited right now, we are putting more emphasis where it’s needed, but changes are steadily being made.

This is all well and good, you may think. They’re clearly making an effort. Why get so upset over the odd spelling mistake here or there? While the presence of spelling mistakes in media in this day and age of digital spell checkers warrants a blog post of its own, this isn’t why I hate MangaGamer’s translations.

In order to better explain this, let’s look at a counter-example; another visual novel lucky enough to be translated into English. Ever17: [The] Out of Infinity, now sadly out of print, is a seminal title that any fan of the medium should try.

Sora is the one on the right.

Unfortunately, the English release suffers immensely from lack of quality control. Words are misspelled, dashes and other characters are replaced with question marks, some of the sentences have awkward phrasing, the English interface is inconsistent. There are parts of the script that one can tell were the victims of an overzealous find-and-replace job — it’s annoyingly obvious that the Kid was going to be called the Youth at some point in the translation process.

And yet the translation of Ever17 is far superior to any MangaGamer title.

Take another look at that screenshot. The player character, Takeshi Kuranari, is referred to by Sora as Takeshi. Not Kuranari-san. Not even just Kuranari. Takeshi. Because this is how we greet people in English. We use first names. The people translating this understood this fact. They understood that calling someone Lastname-san in this context is equivalent to calling someone by their first name in English. It’s familiarity. It’s simple. When he is called Mr. Kuranari in the script, it’s in the context that an English-speaker would refer to someone in that way. It’s natural. It never feels awkward.

MangaGamer doesn’t follow this school of thought. Instead, it leaves all of the Japanese honourifics intact. Characters are called by their last names with the suffix of -san, -kun, -chan or -whatever. Playful nicknames are left alone without explanation of why they’re playful. Characters with meaningful names are robbed of their meaning. But it’s not all doom and gloom; if ever you see a term that you don’t recognise, all that you need to do is shatter the verisimilitude and alt+tab over to the handy dandy translation notes, free with selected purchases!

It’s not just names. Occasionally, you’ll see words like, ooh, say, ‘mangaka’ (comics artist) inexplicably left to float without a life jacket in a sea of mostly English words. It’s bad enough that there are few translators out there who have the integrity to translate character names. In the context of MangaGamer, the Shuffle! translation notes have some really silly examples. ‘Sempai’. ‘Sensei’. ‘Nekomimi’. Sure, one could argue that the average Shuffle! player would already be familiar with these terms, but what’s really ridiculous about this is that some of these ‘translation notes’ just list the English word next to them. Example: “Otoh-sama: Father; Otoh-san: Dad”. See, what you’ve done there is explain that there are perfectly good English equivalents for the Japanese terms! Why didn’t you just use them? Your current method is pointless!

The defenders of this practice (yes, there are people out there who deem this to be acceptable) say that removing the honourifics also removes the mood/feel/emotion of the work, and that their inclusion helps the end user better understand the character’s relationships/motives/social standings. But it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. Here’s why.

To properly understand the significance of honourifics in the Japanese language, you have to be a Japanese person. You have to have been immersed in the language from a young age. You need experience. You need fluency. A sheet of translation notes isn’t going to help you truly understand the meaning behind these terms; you need to speak the language, meet the people, know the culture. Even if you’re a student of the Japanese language (or have watched enough subtitled anime episodes to convince yourself that you are), Japanese honourifics in an English work or an English translation are out of place. They have no context. Japanese is a highly context-sensitive language. By removing the context, you’re removing the point — the significance — of the honourifics. A visual novel isn’t a lesson in Japanese, nor (in the case of MangaGamer’s titles) should it be. Translations exist so that one doesn’t have to learn a foreign language to appreciate a work of art. Yes, there is no one correct way to translate. This, however, is an incorrect way.

Using Japanese honourifics in English translations doesn’t “make the experience more authentic” or “maintain the proper atmosphere of gameplay”. All that it shows is a lack of care, understanding and respect on the part of the translator.

In short: The problem is not the quality control (or lack thereof). It’s the translation policies that MangaGamer have put in place. No amount of proofreading can fix a broken script if you ignore the very reason that it’s broken.

But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is that it’s not MangaGamer’s fault.

Back in 2008, a representative posted a forum poll on behalf of MangaGamer asking fans whether or not their releases should ignore Japanese honourifics.

The results were horrifying.

There aren’t that many things in this world that I care about. When it comes to politics, there’s not a lot that gets on my nerves. The results of this poll, however, make me truly angry. This poll implies that there are more people out there who would rather spend good money on an inferior product than those who favour quality, accuracy and appreciation for the work in question.

These misguided ‘fans’, desperate to protect their prized franchises from redaction, are instead pushing them towards an equally catastrophic opposite extreme.

Forget the parliamentary election. This is where we need radical change. ㋼

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