Who's next?

We have to talk about the yen. If you like yours truly have been taking advantage recently of the slumping rate of the Japanese currency there is always an unfortunate entity on the other side who will experience the exact opposite effect. In my case that would typically be Mandarake but in this case we are talking Bandai's Gashapon division. With the advent of ephemeral social media we don't get a whole lot of updates on the Bandai Gashapon blog but here is an interesting read where the development lead lays out some interesting facts - regarding how they have been hit by the recent industrial apocalypse that is riding across the world right now.

As usual, trying to decipher Japanese with an online tool is like trying to understand fully the ravings of a mad man but although the machine translation becomes very verbose and sometimes disjointed I find it is usually worth skimming through for the interesting bits. As so I have left the text coming out of the translator intact, the highlights and colouring are the writer's own (and help draw attention to several interesting bits). The original text is published here.

While this text concerns itself with the Gashapon side of things - for us this translates to Mobile Suit Ensemble and Gashapon Warrior Senshi Forte - you can be sure that the Shokugan division (Gundam Converge, Gframe and Mobility Joint Gundam) are sweating through a very similar situation and all of them are competing for that lonely crumpled bill at the bottom of your wallet...


So there you have it. I considered putting in some poignant remarks in between but you know what; Bandai doesn't concern itself with input from outside Japan anyway and so why waste your time? Everything will be hand-waived with the "oh we mass-produce these things and so your input is not that helpful, just continue to pre-order our stuff, thank you". At least this time around the people who pre-ordered the summer's Ensemble EX items unexpectedly insured themselves for the failing currency. :)