You can now pre-order the June 29 Fist of the North Star box set on rightstuf.com. Rightstuf has a history of “unintentionally” sending items to people who pre-order anime well in advance of the actual street date, so if you want to get your Hokuto on a week or two before anyone else, you will have better odds of that happening if you pre-order from them.

The information on the rightstuf listing corroborates everything we knew from Discotek’s blog post.  It’s still unknown how many discs these 36 episodes will be spread out on, and what master of the show will be used.

PS: The rightstuf listing says the only extras included are “trailers.” Pre-order listings can always have unconfirmed data,  but if this is correct, it is a new piece of information about the release.  A box set light on bonus features isn’t very surprising or interesting, but I wanted to make a note of it.

Since my last post on the subject, Discotek has updated their blog posting announcing the first boxed set.  Here are all the details we have:

• Release date: June 29th
• Cost: $59.95/36 episodes
• The cover art
• Includes the Manga Entertainment English dub, as well as English subtitles
• Includes the original Japanese Op/Ed, as well as episode previews

Let’s go through this one bullet at a time, shall we?

Release date: June 29th

The date has been finalized since the first blog post.  Great news.  While it’s not at all uncommon for the actual release date to change as we get closer, the fact they have a specific date in mind is a good sign.  I will be monitoring amazon and righstuf.   Once the product appears in either of those places for pre-order, I’ll feel even better about this going down as planned, though again, it’s no guarantee.

With the recent news that the Fist of the North Star video game Hoktuo Musou will be released in Europe in the “summer of 2010”, it seems that this DVD couldn’t come out at a better time.  Summer isn’t very specific, but in Europe that covers the months of June, July, and August.  I expect that the video game will draw additional interest to the boxed set, because a lot of people know about Fist of the North Star only peripherally.  Here’s hoping for an American release date for the video game soon.

Cost: $59.95/36 episodes

Fair enough.  That’s about $1.70 an episode.  I think that fairly-priced boxed sets cost no more than 2 bucks an episode, and this boxed set falls within my general rule, for whatever that’s worth.   Crunchyroll sells Fist of the North Star episodes at 2 bucks a pop, so this is already a better deal than that.  Factor in that most online retailers will have a discount on top of that, and the video quality is guaranteed to be better than what you can get from Crunchyroll.

As you may already know, the Fist of the North Star television series is actually divided into two separate anime series, while the manga is one complete story (sort of like the way the US divided Dragonball into Dragonball and Dragonball Z).  Part 1 of Fist of the North Star ran for 109 episodes, while Part ran for 43.  Part 1 is by far the best part of the anime, as it’s the story which series writer Buronson had planned to tell from the beginning.  It includes all of the epic pathos covered in the 1986 movie, which is what the series is best known for.  Part 2 is what Buronson found himself writing after being encouraged to continue the story due to its popularity (the way Toriyama intended to end Dragonball with the Freeze/Goku fight, but got persuaded to drag things out).  You won’t hear me praise Dragonball for much, but Toriyama did a far better job extending Dragonball than Buronson did extending Fist of the North Star.  In Fist of the North Star Part 2, character archetypes and plots are rehashed to absurd levels.  We even get long-lost twins.  The entire affair was so botched that the anime got cancelled, even though the manga staggered on!  That’s right, if you want the full story, you’ll have to read the manga.

This is a long was of saying that Discotek is probably planning to release Part 1, the best part of the story, in a total of 3 boxed sets.  36 is a somewhat unusual number of episodes to include on a boxed set, but it makes sense when you think 36+36+37=109, the length of Part 1.  I actually have an additional reason to believe this is the plan, but more on that later.

It makes you wonder though… is the release of part 2 going to be predicated on the success of part 1?  When Discotek announced they acquired the license for Fist of the North Star in October 2009, they said the plan was to release it in 4 boxed sets.

The cover art

Not much to speculate.  Here is the posted cover art.  While it surely might be tweaked or given a complete overhaul, why bother?  It looks fine.  It’s actually the same cover art as the 2003 volume 1 release of Fist of the North Star, by Manga Video, with a less obnoxious background color (a cropped version was also used for the 1999 VHS release).   It’s a nice throwback on that level, and it also parallels nicely with the cover art for Discotek’s release of the 1986 movie.  What else is there to say?  They could have used some beautiful Tetsuo Hara artwork, or some of the hyper-detailed promotional artwork from the 1986 movie, but this serves as an honest representation of what the animation looks like in this part of the series.

Includes the Manga Entertainment English dub, as well as English subtitles

The first 36 episodes were dubbed by Manga Entertainment, so this will be the first and only boxed set Discotek releases with a dub included.  I suppose it’s a nice gesture for completists, but the dub itself isn’t very good.

On to the subtitles!

In a lot of ways, when Discotek released the remastered version of the 1986 Fist of the North Star movie, we got the best product imaginable.  Comprehensively reviewed at Kentai’s Films, the video quality was at the exact same level as what was released in Japan.  This is extremely rare when in comes to licensed anime in the US.  I apologize for all of the Dragonball comparisons, but Dragonball Z has been released countless times in countless forms in the US, and it has only just begun to be released in the quality that it has been available to the Japanese all these years.  Getting the remastered version of Fist was quite a boon.

The problem, which the above-linked review enumerates, was that the subtitles weren’t very good, and they bordered on flat-out bad at times.  To someone who knows the series through and through, this isn’t a major problem, but it’s definitely disappointing.

Now the plot thickens.  That Kentai’s Films blog I linked to earlier?  Well, the writer of that blog works for Discotek, at the very least on a freelance basis.

And he’s heavily hinted that he’s working on cleaning up the Fist of the North Star subtitles.

This can be nothing but great news, considering how detail-oriented he comes across in all his blog posts, as well as his passionate love for the 1986 movie, and all the minutia therein.

Closing Thoughts

If you made it this far, congratulations.  You have more endurance than Rei after he got hit at that critical pressure point.  There is one big question that’s still looming…

What DVD master will they use? There have been two different boxed sets in Japan.  The first came out in 2002.  In 2008, the 25^th Anniversary DVD Premium Box came out, and it looks far better than the original.  I really hope that’s what we get.  In an ideal world, we would get that master, unaltered, the same way we got the 1986 movie in full Japanese quality.