Twelve Older Anime That Deserve License Rescues XIV: What Once Was New is Now in Need of a Rescue Part 1

Time is never ending, always moving, and we are helpless against it. When it comes to anime fandom it means that those who stick with the medium for the long haul will only get older over time, while new & younger fans get created & discover things for themselves. Simultaneously that also means that what was once a brand new release will, inevitably, become old, outdated, & even go out of print, possibly never to be seen again once it sees release (or even re-release). I bring this up because at the end of this year The Land of Obscusion will turn 15 years old, i.e. this place (like myself) is oooooooooooooooooooooold... at least in terms of fandom, because I'm not even 40 yet. However, that also means that there are now anime releases that while I was writing stuff for the blog in its earliest years were "new" are now long out of print... which means that they're now eligible for the license rescue list! Therefore, let's look at 12(-ish) anime that were last released in North America between 2010 & 2015, i.e. the first five years of the blog's life, that are now out of print (& on the more expensive side to get, if not absurdly so), could benefit from a new release in some way beyond simply being easily available & affordable again (new content to be offered, upgraded video quality, etc.), and (aside from three) aren't even available via streaming right now.

Do any anime fans 15 years or younger even read this blog? Maybe, maybe not, but it's time I make the majority of the people who actually do read my ramblings feel old!

The mangaka collective known as CLAMP is one of the most beloved groups in all of manga, and while the members of CLAMP have changed throughout the decades the quality of their work has (for the most part) remained relatively high. They truly made their name throughout the 90s with titles like RG Veda, Tokyo Babylon, Magic Knight Rayearth, X, & Angelic Layer, so by the early 00s they were already essentially legends when they debuted ×××HOLiC in the pages of Weekly Young Magazine in early 2003. Pronounced simply as "Holic", as the x's are meant to represent the various "holics"/addictions that people can be found as having, the manga follows Kimihiro Watanuki, a high school student who can see various spirits & the like, something he finds very intrusive in his life. After finding a mysterious shop run by Yuko Ichihara, a seeming witch who can grant wishes, Watanuki asks Yuko to grant his wish of removing his ability to see spirits. Yuko accepts, but only if he works for her as her assistant, which in turn results in Watanuki being sent on various jobs involving the supernatural. ×××HOLiC is also strongly connected to another manga CLAMP debuted in 2004, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, mainly by way of the latter's deuteragonist, Syaoran. The ×××HOLiC manga technically ended in 2011, after 19 volumes, but in 2013 CLAMP debuted ×××HOLiC Rei, a sequel that hasn't gotten anything new since Volume 4's release in 2016, though CLAMP seemingly still considers ×××HOLiC Rei as simply being on hiatus, not outright halted; both manga series have been fully released in English, initially by Del Rey Manga, & later by Kodansha Comics.

Souten Kouro: “Speak of Cao Cao, and Cao Cao Arrives”

Born sometime in 155 AD/CE in Qiao County, Pei state (now Bozhou, Anhui), Cao Cao was a purported descendant of Cao Shen, a Western Han statesman, & the son of Cao Song, who had managed to buy himself into the position of Grand Commandant for less than half a year under Emperor Ling, with some accounts stating that buying political offices with money was a policy that Ling had allowed during his reign. Growing up Cao Cao was known to be very perceptive & even manipulative, though some also didn't regard him too well as a child, due to his habit of roaming about on his own & not caring much for what others hand in mind for him. At one point Cao Cao visited Xu Shao, who was known for his ability to "appraise" others, and while Xu Shao initially refused to appraise Cao Cao he eventually relented, with there being two versions of what he said: Either "You're a treacherous villain in times of peace and a hero in times of chaos," or "You'll be a capable minister in times of peace, and a jianxiong in times of chaos," with a jianxiong being one who is willing to do anything to succeed (or, in literary terms, an antihero). This assessment would effectively describe the man Cao Cao would become in life, especially during the events that would lead to the creation of the Three Kingdoms of China, as while he was immensely loyal to those who trusted in him he was also one who showed no hesitation in screwing over others if it meant he could find benefit from it. As Cao Cao is quoted as saying in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, "I'd rather betray the world than let the world betray me."

In the end, though, Cao Cao would not live to see the actual era of the Three Kingdoms, as he would pass away on March 15, 220 at the age of 66, having been promoted by Emperor Xian as "King of Wei" four years prior, though still working as a vassal of the Han dynasty. It would be Cao Cao's second son, Cao Pi, who forced Xian to abdicate the throne a little less than a year after his father's death, resulting in the creation of Cao Wei, which in turn would lead to Liu Bei & Sun Quan announcing the official formation of Shu Han & Eastern Wu, respectively. Wei's ultimate fate would come in 266, when Cao Huan (the fifth & final Emperor of Wei, & Cao Cao's grandson) abdicated the throne to Sima Yan, resulting in the formation of the Jin dynasty that eventually reunited China.

When it comes to Romance, Cao Cao is always portrayed as the primary antagonist of the story, as while he's not a "villain" his actions & worldview make for a direct clash with Liu Bei's more idealistic & benevolent nature, or Sun Quan's focus on honor & family. However, it is important to remember that Romance is a fictionalized take on the actual historical source text for what happened back in the day, Records of the Three Kingdoms by Chen Shou... so how would the story of the Three Kingdoms work out if one was to rely more on Records than Romance? In 1994 that would come about when the editor-in-chief for a manga artist calling himself "Gonta" asked "Why don't you try to depict Romance of the Three Kingdoms as a Broadway musical?", and while Gonta was a fan of stories detailing Chinese heroic legends, & knew of ancient China, he knew nothing about Romance. Gonta decided to give Romance a read but was put off early on by all of the embellishments, deciding instead to read Records, upon which he essentially decided "If you're going to embellish, then at least make it interesting". Therefore, with help from Korean writer (& former film director) Hagin Yi, the now King Gonta debuted Souten Kouro/Beyond the Heavens in the pages of Kodansha's Morning magazine in late 1994, a manga adaptation of the life of Cao Cao that took primarily from Records of the Three Kingdoms, but also some elements from Romance as well as the occasional original embellishment by Gonta & Yi; Gonta has admitted that making Cao Cao the main character was Yi's idea. Sadly, Hagin Yi would pass away from liver cancer on September 22, 1998, leaving King Gonta to continue making Souten Kouro on his own, and in late 2005 the manga came to an end after 409 chapters across 36 volumes, winning the Kodansha Manga Award for General Manga (alongside Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji) in 1998, the same year Hagin Yi passed away.

On April 8, 2009 a TV anime adaptation of Souten Kouro done by Madhouse debuted on NTV, replacing baseball/gambling anime One Outs, and in fact was produced by the same companies that had produced Madhouse's unofficial trilogy of gambling anime, i.e. VAP, NTV, & D.N. Dream Partners (Kaiji & One Outs only for that last one). The Souten Kouro anime would also be the final production ever directed by venerated animator Toyoo Ashida (Fist of the North Star, Vampire Hunter D OVA), & be Ashida's penultimate anime in general, before passing away in mid-2011 at the age of 67. So, after having reviewed various anime adaptations of Romance of the Three Kingdoms throughout this year, with the majority putting the focus on Liu Bei as the primary focal point (and one technically focusing on Wu), let's bring it all to an end with the sole anime Romance adaptation that dared to look at things from the perspective of probably the most divisive man of the era, Cao Cao of Wei. Yes, I know that there's one other direct anime adaptation of Romance, but there is no complete English translation for it yet... and I honestly feel like I've experienced more than enough anime Romance in a single year.

Oh Me, Oh My, OVA! θ: Press Start Button

When I first started really getting into anime in the mid-00s, and even in the years prior to that to some extent, there was no avoiding the symbiotic relationship between video games & anime. If I really think about it I may vaguely recall seeing the rare ad in a magazine like GamePro or EGM promoting the VHS and/or DVD release of an anime "movie" based on a video game property, like Panzer Dragoon, Tekken, Samurai Shodown, etc., and it made perfect sense why anime companies would license those titles. After all, anime fans & video game fans have long been a strong Venn diagram, and the two industries have been connected in some form since the 80s. The first video game based on an anime is generally agreed to be Lupin III for the arcades by Taito in 1980 (though most feel that the license was added on late into development), while the first anime based on a video game are the duo of Running Boy: Star Soldier no Himitsu & Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!, which both happened to come out on July 20, 1986; they'd be followed up on October 3 by Bug-tte Honey, which was the first TV anime based on a video game. Now, to be fair, anime based on video games also wound up having a poor reputation for the longest time, but if there's a subject for OM, OM, OVA! that sounds only natural to go with it's video game anime; I honestly have wanted to do this for a while, but got pre-occupied with other themed subjects first.

So let's get into the first video game-themed Oh Me, Oh My, OVA! with a quartet of my choosing, two of which are very well known among older anime fans & saw official English release, and two of which you might not have known even existed!

Debuting back in 1991 for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, Sonic the Hedgehog was Sega's response to Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. games on the NES/Famicom & would become a massive success in its own right (due, in part, to Sega of America's Tom Kalinske managing to convince his Japanese bosses to make the first game the Genesis' pack-in game, in place of Altered Beast). By the mid-90s the series was on the verge of entering a tumultuous time (the game intended to be the next main entry was starting to enter true "development hell", & would eventually be cancelled), but was still more than successful for Sega to greenlight the production of a two-episode OVA adaptation in cooperation with Taki Corporation (now Odessa Entertainment) & General Entertainment (which went defunct in 2011), the same companies Sega would later work with for the (absolutely terrible) Panzer Dragoon OVA. Released in early 1996, & animated by Studio Pierrot, the Sonic the Hedgehog OVA would eventually get licensed for international release by ADV Films, which combined both episodes into a single "movie" & initially released it on dubbed VHS & dual-audio DVD in 1999 before re-releasing it on DVD in 2004 under its short-lived ADV Kids label. In modern times Discotek Media (which has released a number of anime based on Sega IP, including Sonic X) has admitted that they'd love to re-release "Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie", and Sega is more than happy to license it out, but unfortunately it's currently stuck in legal limbo due to Sega losing the paperwork that clarified how international royalties would get paid when it comes to the music & voice work; Sega is able to continue offering the OVA in Japan, but international licensing is not doable at the moment. However, is the Sonic OVA even still truly worth all this effort, nearly 30 years after its original release?

Obscusion B-List: HD Games That Were Backported to SD on PS2 & PSP

As video game technology advances the prior generation of consoles eventually becomes old hat & is put to pasture so that the new/current generation can take the lead (or, at least, that's how it used to be... Hi PlayStation 4 & Xbox One, which are both nearing 12 years of continued support!). Still, sometimes a prior gen piece of hardware continues to see strong hardware sales, which in turn makes companies feel that said console is still worth releasing new games on, or there's a handheld (which follow their own set of "generations", to some extent) that simply finds itself more or less caught between console generations & continues to need new releases. That's what happened with the PS2 & PSP once the Xbox 360 released in late 2005, but it was especially true once the PlayStation 3 released in late 2006, and both of those consoles added in an extra wrinkle: They were the first consoles to be all about high-definition visuals, i.e. 720p & (ideally, but not always) 1080p. In comparison, the PS2 was designed around 480i that was ideally meant to be played on a CRT TV (it could also do 480p, & with some trickery higher interlaced resolutions, but 480i was the main intention), while the PSP's 16:9 screen had a resolution of just 480x272. Nintendo's Wii was also an SD-exclusive console, but that was contemporary to the "PS360", and often would receive its own unique versions of games also released on the HD consoles (&, sometimes, the PS2 would receive a port of that Wii version).

Though the GameCube & Xbox eventually both died out in place of their successors, the PS2 remained too hot to ignore, while the PSP's successor (the Vita) wouldn't come out until late 2011. Therefore it made too much sense to continue releasing games on both pieces of hardware, which included games that were also releasing on the newer consoles. For the most part these "HD" games also came out with "SD" versions at around the same time, but there were some examples where the PS2 and/or PSP version wouldn't come out until a fair amount of time after the initial HD version came out; in other words, they were (as some would say) backported from HD to SD. So let's go over some examples of games that were designed for the PS3 or 360 first, only to later get backported to the PS2 and/or PSP; i.e. no simultaneous releases here!

We start off with a batch of titles, mainly because if I had included them individually it would have made up 2/3 of this entire list, and since they're all part of the same overall franchise it's better to just put them together; also, it was these games that inspired me to make this entire list. While the first entry in Koei's iconic Dynasty Warriors/Musou franchise was actually a 3D fighter for the PS1 back in 1997, it wasn't until the second entry in 2000 (which is technically the first in the Shin Sangoku Musou spin-off series, hence why they're always a number higher outside of Japan) that the concept of it being a 3D hack & slash taking place in various open battlefields was truly established. In 2004 developer Omega Force introduced the first true offshoot of the series with Samurai Warriors, which traded in the Chinese Three Kingdoms setting for Japan's Warring States era, and since then the franchise has spun off to include the likes of Fire Emblem, The Legend of Zelda, Fist of the North Star, One Piece, & many other licensed IP. In 2006 the Musou franchise started getting released on HD consoles with Xbox 360 ports of both Samurai Warriors 2 & Dynasty Warriors 5, though the latter was only released in Japan, and in 2007 saw the release of both Dynasty Warriors: Gundam (which was based on Sunrise's iconic mech franchise) & Warriors Orochi (a crossover between Dynasty Warriors & Samurai Warriors), which launched on HD consoles. However, the PS2 & PSP still saw love from this franchise, with Warriors Orochi being released on both Xbox 360 & PS2 at launch worldwide, which in turn made a PSP port natural since it could be based on the PS2 version. The same is more or less true of 2008's Warriors Orochi 2, so neither of those count for this list.

Koutetsu Sangokushi: Lu Xun Would Strew the Very Ground with His Liver & Brains to Requite His Dear Master's Love

Of the three sides that made up China's Three Kingdoms era, the origin of Eastern Wu is probably the most interesting, mainly because it was very heavily based around family. Allegedly claiming to be a descendant of the legendary general Sun Tzu, the attributed author of The Art of War, Sun Jian was the patriarch of the Sun Family when the Yellow Turban Rebellion started in 184 AD/CE & was also part of the later coalition that formed in an attempt to dethrone Dong Zhuo from his tyrannical reign. During the attempted coup Sun Jian found the imperial seal, which had been hidden away after Dong Zhuo's forces left then-capital Luoyang, and felt that this discovery was proof that it was his family's destiny to eventually rule over the land. Unfortunately, Sun Jian would later be killed by the forces of Liu Biao in 191 via an ambush, upon which his oldest son Sun Ce took command at only the age of 16. It was Sun Ce who would conquer the lands of Jiangdong & Wu throughout the 190s, which is where his nickname of "The Little Conqueror" would come from, before he himself would be killed in 200, though the exact circumstances of his death are debated; Romance would take a more supernatural path via the sorcerer Gan Ji. Command would then go to Sun Ce's little brother Sun Quan, who would eventually go on to found Eastern Wu in the region that Sun Ce had taken control of. Decades later Wu would be the final kingdom to fall when the Jin dynasty conquered it in 280, at this point (poorly) ruled by Sun Quan's grandson Sun Hao, bringing an end to the Three Kingdoms era itself. While Sun Quan is technically the central figure of Wu & is contemporary to Liu Bei & Cao Cao, in truth Wu is very much a story about the Sun Family as a whole, and the friends, family, & allies they accumulated to get to that point.

In that regard I can sort of see why, whenever anime adaptations of Romance were made back in the 80s & 90s, the focus was put primarily on Liu Bei & Cao Cao, as those two made for the perfect "protagonist/antagonist" pairing, and Wu would only really get involved when it came to the iconic Battle of Chibi (& Sun Jian discovering the imperial seal, before that). Also, despite their importance in the overall story of the era itself, Wu was kind of doing its own thing for the most part, as once Sun Ce found a proper home for his people before his death they were essentially an uninvolved third party until Cao Cao started encroaching on their territory & Zhuge Liang decided to use Wu to help hold back Cao Cao's ambitions, in order for Liu Bei to properly establish his own kingdom of Shu. Still, there is an interesting story to be found within Wu, and in 2007 a TV anime would be produced that finally put the focus on the seemingly oft-ignored third kingdom. Co-produced by NAS and (of all companies) Konami Digital Entertainment, Koutetsu Sangokushi/Steel Three Kingdoms debuted in late-night on TV Tokyo on April 5, 2007 & was part of a larger multimedia "Koutetsu Sangokushi Project" which included a manga version by KYO that actually came first in late 2006, as well as a radio program that debuted the prior January & aired throughout the entire year, two light novels that acted as both a prequel & collection of side stories, a trio of drama CDs, and even a stage show in June of 2008. Oddly enough, considering that Konami's literal video game division was a co-producer, there was no Koutetsu Sangokushi video game... and this was back when Konami was still very much active in the video game business, as seen the last time Konami was related to an NAS-produced TV anime.

Anyway, I remember when Koutetsu Sangokushi first debuted back in the day & I was admittedly a bit curious about giving it a go, since I super into Dynasty Warriors 5 & felt that it was cool to see Wu be given the focus in an anime, for once. So I gave the show a try via the fansubs as it was coming out, but after a few episodes just never got back to it, partially due to how... different it was; I'll get to that in a bit. However, this show would wind up being the first (&, to this day, only) TV anime adaptation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms to ever see an official English release when it was added to Viki's catalog for streaming in May of 2012, alongside Don Dracula, The Three-Eyed One, & Marvelous Melmo; yeah, one of these is not like the others, for sure. However, unlike the modern Rakuten Viki that exists, this was back when Viki almost exclusively relied on crowd-sourced translations for all of its offerings (the first 19 episodes of Koutetsu were subbed as of the ANN news article, but I can't vouch for the rest), and the site itself wasn't really known that much by anime fans in the first place; regardless, it's definitely not streaming anywhere officially in English anymore. Despite how I wound up trailing off of the show back in the day I still always have had some curiosity about Koutetsu Sangokushi, and since this year I decided to watch & review a bunch of anime adaptations of Romance I might as well include this series in the festivities, mainly because it's the de facto Wu-focused adaptation... even though it's easily the loosest "adaptation" of them all.