January 2009

Dogasu's Backpack | Old Updates Archive | January 2009

"Primeape Goes Bananas"
January 20th, 2009

Dogasu @ 06:47 JST -- These long gaps between updates are really getting out of hand. So sorry, guys.

I've got the revamped comparison for the twenty-fifth episode of the first TV series, "Primeape Goes Bananas." One of the reasons this one took so long to do was because of the video I made; I had forgotten a lot about video editing and therefore had to re-train myself to figure out what I was doing. I was going to do another video, but if I had waited until that was finished then the comparison would have been delayed even further. I'll just finish it later.

I've also got a couple of more Japanese and English episode titles up on the List of Anime Episodes. I've also added the cover art for those last two Diamond & Pearl DVDs that are scheduled to come out in March.

Finally, I've updated the Video Games section with information on the Virtual Console release of the Nintendo 64 Smash Brothers game, which will be celebrating its tenth anniversary on Wednesday. I've also added stuff about the third Mysterious Dungeon game on the Nintendo DS page.

So here's my plan for the next few weeks. After I finish the Episode 026 comparison, I will have finished a half a year's worth of episodes. So, I'll take a little break from the whole "doing comparisons" thing. I'll go back through those first 26 comparisons and tweak a few things here and there, making sure everything's consistent across the board and adding some little things I may have left out. I'll also do a "comparison" for the first opening theme; I'm not quite sure how I'll do it yet, but I'll figure something out. After that, I want to go through and update some of the sections of this site that have been neglected for far too long; I'm particularly looking forward to revamping the CD Guide and getting that all up-to-date as well as making some additions to the Recycled Characters page. After a few updates like those, I'll go back to doing comparisons again.

I know that the episode comparisons are the main reason a lot of you go to this site and that a lot of you couldn't care less about the other stuff. And I really enjoy doing them...for now. I have this big fear that I'll eventually get burned out on them, though, so I feel it's necessary to take these breaks every now and then. I plan to be in this for the long haul, so there really shouldn't be any harm in that, I think.

I know that saying that the "Pokémon Scent-sation" will be up in x number of days thing is pointless, so I'll just say that it'll be up sooner rather than later.

"Haunter versus Kadabra," New Year's stuff
January 7th, 2009

Dogasu @ 18:03 JST -- Happy New Year everyone! Hope you guys had a good winter holiday and all that. I've been out of town for the past few days, but now that I'm back I can start with the regular updates again.

First up..."Haunter versus Kadabra." The big delay on that comparison was me trying to do a translation of the Rocket-Dan scene in the episode. I was going to do a line-by-line translation, but there were parts here and there that I just couldn't make out that really prevented me from being able to do that. So, I had to settle for a general gist sort of thing. Sorry. Please give me some feedback over on that Bulbagarden thread.

Since it's the new year and all, I thought it would be fun to look back at the predictions I made back at the end of January 2008 and see which of those have come true:

The anime will continue as Satoshi goes through his third and fourth Gym Battles. I also, for no real reason, think that Satoshi will actually make it to his fifth Shin’ou Gym Battle before the year’s end. I think Pinpuku will evolve at some point, and I think that something major with Shinji will happen.

Satoshi actually ended up getting his sixth badge in 2008, so I was a little off there. Pinpuku didn't evolve, and, now that I think about it...Takeshi's roster didn't really change at all over the course of the year. Ouch.

The major thing with Shinji? Um...does us meeting his brother count?

Pokémon Puzzle League will probably show up on the Wii Virtual Console sometime in 2008. I won't download it, though, and will wait for the eventual release of Tetris Attack on the SNES. Simply because that version's better :P

Score one for me. Realistically, Puzzle League is the only N64 Pokemon game, other than Snap and the original Smash Brothers (which is showing up on the Japanese VC later this month) that could feasibly show up on the Virtual Console without any major reprogramming going on.

As for the Tetris Attack thing...I ended up downloading Panel de Pon on my Japanese Wii :D

Pokemon Ranger Batnage will show up in the U.S. before the end of the year.

That's two. The game showed up at the end of the year, weird translations and all (really...Team Dim Sum?!?). I would have actually been surprised if the game didn't show up by the end of the year.

After the fans finally figure out that TAJ no longer working on the dub will have no effect on the show, they'll forget that they ever freaked the hell out about it in the first place. I know I've been wrong before, but trust me this time.

This partly came true. The only effect that the new studio had was the volume of some of the background music (which, from what I've read, seems to have been fixed by now) and some of the voice actors from the 4Kids days coming back (which really would have had more to do with clauses in their contracts expiring more than anything). But other than that, the amount of freaking out that was going on when it was announced that DuArt was going to be taking over seems absoutely silly.

I think there will be another Pokemon Wii game in 2008. Maybe an RPG, maybe another boring Revolution-type game, maybe a sequel to Snap…something.

Wrong-o. And no, I'm not counting Everyone's Pokemon Ranch.

As of this year, Nintendo said that they're not going to overhype games like they used to *coughSmashBrotherscough* and will only let us know about them a month or two before they're released. So it's kind of difficult to be able to predict what will come out from now on.

I think “Pokémon The Rise of Darkrai” will either be packaged with a dub of the second Mysterious Dungeon anime special or a dub of the ANA short "Pikachu's Rescue Club" (ピカチュウたんけんクラブ).

That didn't happen. Pokémon USA doesn't really seem to have any interest in dubbing those ANA shorts anymore (I guess nobody really liked the one that was packaged with the Manaphy movie?), which is kind of a shame because they are some genuinely fun shorts. Ah well.

The Mysterious Dungeon special would eventually find itself on a DVD packaged with some special Nintendo DS Lite bundles, though.

I predict that we won’t see Pokémon Battle Frontier released on DVD.

I was way off on this one. My rationale for making this prediction was that it had already been over a year since the season premiered on TV and there wasn't so much as an announcement for a DVD release, so I had just assumed that PUSA had no interest in releasing it. Guess I was wrong.

I think it's pretty likely that we’ll see the third version of Diamond & Pearl come out on the DS later in the year.

Yup. But that was a pretty safe prediction to make, wasn't it?

How about you guys? Did you make any predictions last year that ended up coming true? That didn't come true?

I'll make a fresh batch of predictions when I do my ninth anniversary write-up at the end of the month.

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