Majokko Daisakusen -Little witching mischiefs-: Wars May Be Fought with Magic, but They Are Won by Girls

Founded in 1989, Toys for Bob came about via the meeting & collaboration of Paul Reiche III & Fred Ford, two UC Berkley grads (though they didn't actually know each other during that time) who had already worked in the gaming industry for a while beforehand, with Reiche previously working on D&D over at TSR, while Ford come from the now-defunct Magicsoft, which actually developed games for the Japanese market. While it wouldn't get the "Toys for Bob" name until 1993, the studio would make itself known almost instantly with its first game, the action/strategy PC game Star Control in 1990, which was followed up by an all-time cult classic sequel, 1992's Star Control II, but today most people would be familiar with the studio via its later work. Particularly, Toys for Bob would achieve mainstream notoriety with the toys-to-life Skylanders franchise from 2011 to 2016, before helping remake the first three entries for both Crash Bandicoot & Spyro the Dragon, only for eventual owner Activision to put the studio on Call of Duty support duty alongside the occasional Crash Bandicoot title... oh, and then Toys for Bob's physical office closed down earlier this year (& some employees were laid off), resulting in an initial worry that the studio itself was getting shut down. Luckily, this was a planned move by the studio, which will now work fully remote & has even managed to become an independently run studio.

However, as you can see from the title, this is NOT an Obscusion B-Side review, so that means that this is related to anime and/or manga! Yes, I am serious!!

In late 1998 Crystal Dynamics & Eidos Interactive released The Unholy War for the PlayStation, a game by Toys for Bob that fused together a turn-based strategy game with a 3D arena fighter; I remember playing a demo for it back in the day, and it was instantly memorable. According to an interview with Matt Barton in 2011, Reiche & Ford regretted not being able to include a proper "Story Mode", so the pair thought this concept would make for a perfect SD Gundam game, as they were fans of the more traditional turned-based strategy RPGs that Banpresto released in Japan at the time. With help from Crystal Dynamics the pair were able to get into contact with Bandai, which had published the altered Japanese version of Toys for Bob's Pandemonium! (titled Magical Hoppers) & actually loved what it had seen of The Unholy War, but felt that it had an "even bigger" license to go with the concept. Reiche & Ford decided to make a deal before knowing what property they'd be working with, so imagine their surprise when they started getting faxes from Bandai... only to see production sketches of magical girls from the 60s & 70s. Yep, Toys for Bob accidentally signed on to produce a combat-focused strategy game/3D arena fighter starring a bunch of Toei Animation's old magical girl anime! The end result is early 1999's Majokko Daisakusen/Operation Magical Girl -Little witching mischiefs-, and since The Unholy War never saw a Japanese release this was effectively that region's equivalent.

Twelve(+2) Anime with "Missing" Portions Yet to be Licensed for English Release Part 2

In theory, licensing an anime is actually an extremely straightforward process, and all one needs to do to get started is contact a licensor, of some sort; actually producing a satisfactory product from said license is the hard part. Anime Midstream admitted that they literally just cold e-mailed various companies when they got started in the late 00s, and eventually Sunrise bit & decided to give them a chance, despite having no prior experience to guarantee that they'll actually release a finished product. Hell, way back when I once sent an e-mail to dentsu USA as a lark, acting like I was looking into starting up a company, and I got a response back from dentsu USA, complete with an entire digital catalog as an attachment! (No, I don't have that digital catalog anymore, sadly) For the large amount of anime out there, licensing is rather simple... until it isn't. Last week we looked at six(+1) examples of anime that can be considered "missing" portions for official English release, whether it was because they were just separate licenses from the "main" portion we did get, they simply didn't exist back when we first got the "main" portion, they were part of a prior production that's since been superseded by a later production that now takes precedence, or they're currently associated with a company that no one really wants to work with, if possible.

However, to start things off for the second half of this list, we have another reason why a portion could go "missing" for English release: It was originally released via video game!

Debuting back in 2001 in the pages of Monthly Shonen Jump, Dragon Drive by Ken-ichi Sakura told the story of kids who are into the titular VR game where they fight alongside mystical dragons... only for the game to actually have a connection to an actual fantasy world, Rikyu, where said dragons come from. The manga itself wound up being split into two halves, with the first starring Reiji Oozora as he & some friends (& enemies) find themselves in Rikyu, while the second starred Takumi, the little brother of Makino (one of Reiji's supporting cast), & sees the Earth ruined when the dragons of Rikyu come to the players' world. Though the manga itself would run until 2006 across 14 volumes (split roughly evenly across both storylines), it was seemingly meant to be a media mix from the start, as the companies Bandai, Chan's, & Org were credited as "In Collaboration With" below Sakura, so it's no surprise that there were video games & even a collectible card game based on Dragon Drive, as well a TV anime adaptation by Madhouse that ran between 2002 & 2003 for 38 episodes. While Viz would eventually release the manga in English from 2007 to 2009, though it never received a digital re-release (so it's not in the SJ Vault today), Bandai Entertainment was actually first to bring the series over via the anime, releasing all 38 episodes across 10 dual-audio DVDs in 2004 & 2005, followed by two boxsets in 2006. I actually included the Dragon Drive anime in the 2016 license rescue list, as some of the DVD singles & boxsets have since gotten rather expensive, especially the second boxset.

However, back then I had no idea that Bandai Entertainment's releases were technically "missing" something... an entire episode, in fact! That being said, though, it's not like Bandai Entertainment willingly skipped over it, and in fact the people there may not have even known of this episode's existence, since (to my knowledge) it was only ever released once, and as part of a video game release. As I mentioned before, Dragon Drive had some video game adaptations, three to be in fact, but we'll be focusing on the final, GameCube game, Dragon Drive: D-Masters Shot, a 3D aerial combat/rail shooter developed by Treasure! Released on August 8, 2003, D-Masters Shot came out roughly five months after the TV anime had finished airing in Japan, so it was decided that the game would actually include two GameCube mini-discs. The first was the "Game Disc", which contained the game itself, but the second was the "Anime Disc", which contained an episode-length OVA, Shinku no Himitsu/The Secret of Evolution, which was effectively Episode 39 of the TV anime & acted as an epilogue to the show! Now, to be fair, it's not like the TV anime had an unfulfilling finale or anything like that, but when I realized only a few years ago that this (mostly forgotten, despite the developer) GameCube-exclusive video game contained a bonus epilogue episode for Dragon Drive, one of those early anime I watched when I first started getting into the medium in the mid-00s, my mind was absolutely blown away.

Twelve(+2) Anime with "Missing" Portions Yet to be Licensed for English Release Part 1

As simple as we, as fans, might think it is, actually licensing anime can sometimes be a tricky thing. If it's an older production there can be situations like needing to reunite a production committee, figuring out who has the rights if a company is no longer in business (& then seeing if the seeming current owner even has the paperwork to prove it, for legal reasons), and if there are multiple parts to an anime then each of those individual parts could have their own licensing situations. That last one is what I want to focus on, as there have been multiple examples of an anime getting licensed for English release, only for it to not truly be "complete" due to there being other productions related to it in some fashion that weren't also licensed. Sometimes it's simply because said other productions weren't made yet, sometimes it was made by a completely different set of companies (& because of that it might purposefully be made unavailable for licensing, so as to prevent market confusion), sometimes there's just one change in companies that makes it a completely different licensing situation as everything else, and sometimes it's simply a case of "no one really wants to work with that company". Therefore, which anime are "missing" from English release, i.e. we got part of it, but not all of it?

I tried my best to include just 12 for this two-part list, but in the end I wanted to include all of the ones I could come across (though this is not a "complete" list, I'm sure), so I'm cheating & adding in a "(+2)" for this list! What is this, 2012?!

Debuting in early 2000, Kino's Journey -the Beautiful World- by Keiichi Sigsawa (story) & Kouhaku Kuroboshi (art) is a novel series detailing the travels of the titular Kino & her talking motorcycle Hermes as they visit various places in their world, staying no longer than three days so as to not feel like they'll ever "settle down", with the concept of the series being to showcase the different cultures & customs of the world's inhabitants; it's still running to this day & currently totals 23 volumes. In Spring 2003 a 13-episode TV anime adaptation aired on WOWOW, with animation by A.C.G.T. & direction by the late Ryutaro Nakamura (Serial Experiments Lain, Sakura Wars TV [2000]), and in early 2004 ADV Films started releasing it on dual-audio DVD. The reason why the release happened so quickly was because this anime was one of the handful that ADV actually managed to be part of a production committee for, with co-founder John Ledford even being listed in the Japanese credits as a producer. Because of this, ADV essentially has a perpetual license for this 2003 anime (there would later be a 12-episode reboot in 2017 that FUNimation/Crunchyroll currently has), which has resulted in it being both available via streaming over at Hidive & as well as the occasional modern re-release, most recently in 2019. While the 2017 reboot went on to receive a more mixed (though overall still positive) reception, the 2003 series is still considered an all-time classic, though maybe today it's probably more of a cult-classic.