sunniedesi

[sunniedesi]

Growing up, I had one of those paper fashion books where they'd give you the stencil of a doll and you could draw clothes for her. Normally, you'd use the stencils and prints provided in the book to create the fashions... but thirteen-year-old me was in her peak otaku phase and had different plans.

Behold, Deus and MurMur paper dolls! lol.

I used to be obsessed with making as many original designs as possible, though I sadly never completed the book (there's still three dolls waiting to be painted </3). I also never did any inspired by Yuno or Yukki, surprsingly enough. But I did do one loosely inspired by Yui from Yousei Teikoku, and also a Pierce the Veil one, which is probably my favorite because of all the little easter eggs.

I wasn't beating the weird kid allegations.

[sunniedesi]

Sigh... so, this information appears on the Japanese wikipedia for both Future Diary and Hanako and the Teller of Allegory, but it also appears on the atwiki (which is the Japanese version of wiki, and in my experience, also a more reliable source). From the information available on both sources, it seems that there is in fact two parts to this crossover, but they weren't released equally:

Part 1 had three releases:

Its original release on Shonen Ace's issue of May 2007, which is most likely the source for the scans that are available online.

A standalone release (more on this later).

And according to wikipedia, it was included in the completed version (完成版) of Hanako and the Teller of Allegory, volume 1.

Part 2 had two releases:

The standalone release.

And again, according to wikipedia, it was included in the completed version (完成版) of Hanako and the Teller of Allegory, volume 2.

This is important to know, because in case part 2 is real, it would explain why it is more difficult to find. It's not hard to find raws of Shonen Ace's issues if you know where to look, especially considering that this same issue included a chapter of Future Diary. It wouldn't surprise me if an FD scanlator came across the crossover while trying to get this chapter, which is why I'm assuming the scanlations of part 1 originate from there.

The other sources are a bit trickier to get, starting with the standalone release: only 190 copies exist of this version, as it was made exclusively for a raffle. Here's a very pixelated image of what the cover art looked like:

Given that this is incredibly difficult to find, it only leaves us with one feasible source for part 2: the completed version of Hanako and the Teller of Allegory, volume 2. It's important to note that I'm only referring to the kanseiban (completed version). For context, manga can have different release styes: tankobon, bunkoban, kanseiban, etc. I'm not going to get into the details, but basically, tankobon is a "standard release," while kanseiban is a "completed release," as in a more polished, cleaner version. Hanako had both a standard and a completed version, but only the completed one contains the crossover as far as the information in wikipedia is concerned. And I can also attest that the standard version doesn't have it (I have the raws and it's not there).

In fact, I believe the completed version is exclusive to both a Japanese and a physical release, as its covers are different from the ones in Bookwalker, which has the standard. For comparison, left is volume 2 on bookwalker, right is volume 2 of the completed version.

Besides the difference in covers, the completed version only has 3 volumes, as opposed to the standard version that has 4. Anyway, if we want to find part 2 of the crossover, this is probably where we should look for. So, if anyone owns the kanseiban and is able to verify, please let us know!

Hanako x Future Diary, Part 2??

According to Japanese Wikipedia, there is actually a second part of the Hanako and the Terror of Allegory x Future Diary crossover story that you can read over here.

In Part 2, they say that Murmur and Hanako somehow do a Freaky Friday mind-body swap. Hijinks are then presumed to (briefly) ensue.

Japanese Wikipedia claims this this second part was eventually included in later Japanese reprints of the collected Volume 2 of Hanako, so... I guess that's now the next thing I need to get my mitts on so we can scanlate it.

Mind you, the Wiki page doesn't provide any source links for these statements. So I could just be throwing money away.

But dammit, we MUST know.

[sunniedesi]

Rare Future Diary Merch Art (Part 3!)

Time to finish the t-shirt trilogy! As I mentioned in the last part, the two designs that were left to cover were the DEAD END Shirt and The Live World Deus Shirt. I’ll start with the latter, since it’s the quickest to explain. This design was made solely for the Live World Concert, being featured in three concert-exclusive items: a shirt, a drawstring bag and a waterproof phone pouch. The logo itself portrays Deus Ex Machina sitting in his dilapidated throne with the name of the concert written above. We don’t have any product images of the actual items, though we do have flat mock-ups of what they were meant to look like:

Like the previous designs, I redrew the logo from the flat mock-ups to upgrade the quality. Due to the grainy nature of these images, my recreation is probably not very loyal to the original design, but I don’t really mind since we have nothing else to compare it to :p

The DEAD END shirt was perhaps one of the trickier designs, not so much due to its complexity, but because I had to get a little more creative with it. You see, there’s barely any information about this product online. The one website that advertised it back in 2013 only showed a flat image of the design that is meant to go on the back of the shirt, while claiming the front is supposed to have a “DEAD END graphic.” What this graphic looks like, we have no clue!

Now, I could’ve just googled a graphic of the DEAD END phrase, slap it on a shirt and called it a day, but the perfectionist demon that eats at my brain would’ve called me many names if I did that. On one hand, it would look sloppy, and on the other, it wouldn’t even match the back design. So… yeah, I created my own. My sanity be damned. Firstly though, this is the flat design that we originally had:

And this is my recreation:

I'll be honest, this is my least favorite graphic of all the shirts. The concept is cool, the font of the text is nice and the silhouettes could make for an interesting idea, but the overall composition looks strange to me, especially with the random blood splatters and the wall of text. Regardless, I'm trying to remain as loyal to the original as possible, so I decided against rearranging the elements in my recreation.

As for the front design, since I wanted to remain loyal to the original motif, I decided to keep the theme of the gothic letters and exaggerate them a bit. I still can’t decide whether it’s just right or if I went a bit overboard with the details, but I’m pleased enough with the result:

And lastly, for shits and giggles, here’s a mock-up of what the shirt would look like with this design:

[sunniedesi]

New Official Future Diary x Big Order Art

Recently, there's been a Reddit post circulating around the Future Diary community showcasing some never-before-seen artwork at a recent exhibition. I initially didn't think too much of it, since I'm aware there's plenty of older Esuno artwork that's been lost to time and has never seen the light of day on this side of the globe. That said, it was brought to my attention that it could be one of the lost artworks that appeared on Esuno's defunct blog, which made me want to look further into it.

Now, the artwork is currently being displayed at an exhibition in the Animate Ikebukuro store. According to the description of the Reddit post, the exhibition is part of a sale held in celebration of Shonen Ace's 30th anniversary. So, I went into Animate's official website to read more about it, and there's a ton of artwork being sold as part of this promotion. Here's a clean version of the FD art displayed on the site.

Interestingly enough, it seems all of the artwork featured was made solely for the 30th anniversary sale. Which made me think this crossover artwork might actually be recently drawn by Esuno!

I reverse searched the image to see what else I could find, and sure enough, there is one auction listing that confirmed my suspicions.

If you look carefully, it says 30th in the back! So it is safe to say, this is Esuno's most recent Future Diary artwork! Strangely enough, he hasn't posted anything about it on his twitter, but the trademark from the image in the official site confirms that this is his original artwork.

A few things to note is how much his art style has changed since Future Diary. The style we see in this artwork is much closer to the style in Detective Akechi is Berserk and his adaptation of Reign of the Seven Spellblades. So seeing his older characters in this new style is very interesting and refreshing! Also, did anyone else notice Yukki's eyes are brown instead of blue? I wonder if this was done to differentiate him from Eiji (or maybe Esuno forgot Yukki's original eye color? T-T).

Lastly, I believe this was a limited time sale (a.k.a. it's over now), but knowing that it happened only a month ago, we might start to see some resellers in the future. So, in case you're interested in buying this, look for stuff like 未来日記 BIG ORDER アクリルスタンド少年エース30周年 (Future Diary Big Order Acrylic Stand Shounen Ace 30th Anniversary) (kinda sounds like a wish listing lmao)

Anyway, if you need me I'll be in the corner of my room fangirling about this.

[sunniedesi]

Happy (fanon) birthday to the yandere queen herself!

Fun fact: the majority of sites that have information about Sakae Esuno (the author of Future Diary) mention that his birthday is on November 17th. I feel like that is a big reason why Yuno's fan-appointed birthday falls on November 16th.

Another less fun fact: I actually had forgotten that today was Yuno's birthday until tomodachi life reminded me lmfao

(Look Yukki also came to celebrate! And Akise is the one wearing the mask, the little weirdo.)

[sunniedesi]

Rare Future Diary Merch Art (Part 2!)

In case you haven’t seen my last post on this topic, I’ve been working on recreating rare art only seen on obscure merch from Future Diary, namely T-shirts. The first post focused on a T-shirt that was part of a raffle, which featured a design I fondly call “meditating Yuno.” This time around, I’m working on the designs of four shirts that were sold in the Live World Concert. I recommend you read that post first if you want more context. To make things easier to explain here’s a list of the shirt designs I’m referring to:

Purple/Gray Yuno Shirt (Brand: MARS SIXTEEN)

Rock Minene Shirt (Brand: MARS SIXTEEN)

DEAD END Shirt (Brand: MARS SIXTEEN)

The Live World Deus Shirt

As you can see, three out of the four shirts were made by the brand MARS SIXTEEN. This brand no longer sells those shirts nor has any images of them available, so we can only rely on the very few, poor-quality photos found on some older Japanese blogs. The fourth shirt isn’t associated to any particular brand and was made/sold exclusively for the concert. The first two highlighted shirts are the ones we’ll be covering on this post, leaving the last two for a separate part.

Firstly, we have the Purple/Gray Yuno shirt, which features a stylized view of a cityscape on the front, and a unique graphic of Yuno on the back. We can see none other than Tomosa Murata (Yuno’s VA) wearing the gray iteration of this T-shirt in a recording of The Live World concert.

As I mentioned earlier, finding images of these designs was pretty difficult. In terms of this design, I only had a flat image of the Yuno graphic, which I upscaled and redrew for better quality. The cityscape design I only managed to find in listings of the shirt, which I took as reference and completely redrew. It was probably one of the more complex designs of the bunch, so hopefully the final result turned out decent. Here’s the front (I made two purple versions because I couldn’t decide which one I preferred).

And here’s the back design

Next, we have the Rock Minene shirt. This is a purple top inspired by Minene, which has a graphic of speakers blasting on the front along with the title of the series, and an exploded view of a grenade on the back. It also features a small graphic of Minene and the text “9th” on the sleeves. A large amount of the cast wore this top in the concert, as you can see by the following images.

I fortunately had flat images of every graphic, though I still had to redraw them because the image quality was very, very low. The design of the exploded grenade on the back had a little text attached to it, which due to the grainy pixels was difficult to read. Our little community over here came to the rescue and helped me figure out a text that’d match the original. Very special thanks to @syrpai for coming up with a paragraph that looks very similar to the original (I only had to tweak it a bit to fit the frame). With all this yapping out of the way, here are the results:

Lastly, we have the design of the sleeves. Minene’s silhouette goes on the left sleeve, while “9th” goes on the right.

[sunniedesi]

Here's another random inquiry for the Mirai Nikki community. Even though there isn't that much official Future Diary merch, there are a few rare gems we can find here and there, such as this cool Minene inspired T-shirt.

I bring this up because the back of the shirt has a little bit of text at the top that is illegible due to the low quality of the image.

Since there is no better picture of this shirt, it's anyone's guess what's written on there. I imagine it's a description of the exploded view of the grenade... but that's boring! So, I was wondering what text you guys think should go on there. For no particular reason, just wondering...

[sunniedesi]

Rare Future Diary Merch Art

If you're familiar with my posts, you might've seen me mention one specific t-shirt a couple of times in the past.

This Yuno t-shirt is perhaps one of the rarest pieces of merchandise once available for Future Diary. The shirt was part of a raffle and only a very limited quantity was manufactured. As a result, we don't have any listings or images of it, meaning this illustration card drawn by Esuno is the closest we've gotten to a proper image of the shirt. I personally love this graphic and would kill to have it on a t-shirt. So, I've been looking around for any methods (ai, resizing tools, etc) to upscale and recreate the graphic from this image, none of which yielded quality results.

So... as per request of my nagging Future Diary brain worms, I said fuck it and made it myself. It's not perfect, but it's probably the closest we'll get.

In case you're curious, this illustration of Yuno comes from the 3rd volume of the manga, where she's meditating to figure out where Reisuke's diary is. I tried looking up where the circle and symbols where from, but found nothing close to it, so I'm pretty sure it's just a made-up sigil wheel. (Hopefully I didn't invoke any demons by drawing it lol)

I found over the years that it is very difficult to clean and upscale images while retaining their quality. I've tried such methods before for other graphics (also Future Diary shirts) and they never came out quite right, so I think recreating them myself was not a bad approach. I might do this for other FD shirts, but I don't think it'll be as easy as this one, since a lot of official FD merch has original art that is not seen anywhere else. It's worth a try though, given how difficult it is to find even images of the official FD merch.

[sunniedesi]

Fuck it *turns Deus into gothic lolita*

[sunniedesi]

when u get this, list 5 songs u like to listen to, publish. then, send this ask to 10 of your favorite followers (positivity is cool) <333

I've answered this before, but I don't mind making an updated version xd

1. Violet! - Waterparks

2. Eat It Up - Lucy Loone

3. I'm So Sick - Flyleaf

4. Rash Decision - Ice Nine Kills

5. How Does It Feel - Citizen

[sunniedesi]

Bacchus' character is quite complex. As you say, he isn't entirely good (I mean, the guy was okay with whatever human casualties it took to reach his goal), but he isn't a complete monster as seen in Redial. Though, I think it's important to point out that part of his desire to see the society of Sakurami evolve with the future diaries coincides with him having much more control over the city, by monitoring the citizens and all that jazz. I interpret him to be like, a corrupt politician with a God complex on steroids, who, after falling for Kamado, gains a different perspective in life and much more humanity lol.

As far as nationality, I'm pretty sure Esuno didn't have anything specific in mind, but it's always fun to theorize. I looked up where his last name was most popular in, and it turned out to be... Guyana? I honestly can't come up with a good backstory from that, since the only conflict I can think of from there is Venezuela and England having a petty fight over who originally owned that territory, so I'll stick to believing he's a European growing up in the post-war lmao. I don't think he's Jewish though, since he does bring up Germany as one of his inspirations during his unhinged monologue in episode 20 :p

Mirai Nikki Fragments Official Guidebook: John Baccus & Yomotsu Hirasaka + Column 4

Heya everyone! It's been a while! My apologies for the delay in posting these, unfortunately one of the pages had been incorrectly scanned and I had to buy a printer to re-scan it. That's also why you might notice a bump in quality from page 2 to page 3 of John's profile (sharper lines, whiter tint,... now I'm kinda regretting not getting a new printer sooner, sigh). In any case, below you can find John Baccus and Yomotsu Hirasaka's profiles + Column 4 (the last one).

You can find all the pages posted so far in this Google Drive folder or/and on Postimage.

Translation credits: @sunniedesi

Scans, cleaning and typesetting: me (@yunocre)

I have the remaining characters pages already scanlated so there should be no further delays. As for the scans quality, I *might* rescan the next chapter's pages but I am still not quite sure as I have already cleaned some of them and it took me quite a lot of time to do so. I might find a way to replace the background without impacting the changes done to it too much, we'll see!

Please reblog this post so it can reach as many people as possible. This is all for now!

[sunniedesi]

Well... there isn't a very satisfying answer to this. I tried compiling the more interesting parts of his blog in one of my posts, but the reality is that a lot of his older blog entries have been lost to time or are otherwise inaccessible, as well as the majority of the art he posted in his old blog. And, of the things that we do have access to, a big portion of them aren't super insightful. It's more like, updates on workflow and publishing dates. That's why I only translated very few entries in that post, mostly things that I found were interesting or insightful in terms of how he developed Future Diary.

Rereading the manga of redial and wtf it's totally different from the anime??? And better if I might add.

The main story's manga also was much better with no unnecessary fanservice (the kids at the resort, Ai's rape and her talking to Marco on the balcony afterward and Yuki with Wakaba Moe in the illusion world).

Redial's manga has so much more cool stuff like the future of Marco and Ai in the 3rd world (they deserved so much better fr) and Yomotsu's involvement in the Omekata cult. And they erased all these all some guy could draw 14 year old girls in swimsuits smh

[sunniedesi]

aaaaaaa I love that you mention this, because this is something Esuno has brought up before! I don't know if he's said it elsewhere, but in Fragments (especifically in the character design section), Esuno says that the hardest part of designing Yuno was getting her facial expressions just right. He originally intended to make her a serious, more mysterious character, but settled for making her an otherwise normal, cutesy teenage girl with darker intentions. When this part of Fragments gets translated you'll see more details about it, but it's clear that he put a lot of thought on how her character came across.

Rereading the manga of redial and wtf it's totally different from the anime??? And better if I might add.

The main story's manga also was much better with no unnecessary fanservice (the kids at the resort, Ai's rape and her talking to Marco on the balcony afterward and Yuki with Wakaba Moe in the illusion world).

Redial's manga has so much more cool stuff like the future of Marco and Ai in the 3rd world (they deserved so much better fr) and Yomotsu's involvement in the Omekata cult. And they erased all these all some guy could draw 14 year old girls in swimsuits smh

[sunniedesi]

Adding to this, in Esuno's older blog posts, he mentioned that Kadokawa had initially approached him with the idea to release a short manga story about the third world, and shortly afterward, he was also approached by the anime production team for the same reason. According to the blog, he wrote a basic premise with both the manga and anime in mind, so that the stories would end the same, without contradicting each other. That said, he wanted to do his own thing with the manga, and let the screenwriters come up with their own plot for the anime, since he thought it'd be more interesting for both stories to be slightly different. The art has to adapt to the medium sort of thing.

I will say though, I'll always prefer Esuno's approach to Future Diary, especially when it comes to Redial. The fan service is an issue in and of itself, given that these character are supposed to be middle-schoolers, but it's made worse when you realize how much of Yuno's personal conflict and scenes of the rest of the diary owners in the third world were left out in favor of the fan service. It shows you where the screenwriters had their heads at... which was certainly the bottom of the gutter. It kind of reminds me of a conversation I was having with a friend the other day, about the fact we both barely watch anime anymore, and it's mainly due to the oversexualization. Not saying this isn't an issue with manga as well, but generally speaking, anime adaptions tend to be much, much heavier with the fan service. Some studios probably think that they can hook more audiences with it so... there's that ig.

Rereading the manga of redial and wtf it's totally different from the anime??? And better if I might add.

The main story's manga also was much better with no unnecessary fanservice (the kids at the resort, Ai's rape and her talking to Marco on the balcony afterward and Yuki with Wakaba Moe in the illusion world).

Redial's manga has so much more cool stuff like the future of Marco and Ai in the 3rd world (they deserved so much better fr) and Yomotsu's involvement in the Omekata cult. And they erased all these all some guy could draw 14 year old girls in swimsuits smh

[sunniedesi]

It's my 4 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

What do you mean it's been 4 years??? 😭😭 It feels like I started this blog yesterday but here we are. I feel old now

[sunniedesi]

Future Diary x Detective Akechi Crossover TL

Before anything, I want to thank @syrpai for providing screenshots and information about this crossover after my first post regarding the subject (seriously, you're the goat). I was correct about this story not being in the original manga, though I made the glaring mistake of assuming Shonen Ace didn't digitalize their releases. Turns out they do! And this crossover was featured on their March 2018 issue:

So in conclusion: the crossover between Future Diary, Detective Akechi and Esuno's other works was made after ending volume 2 of Detective Akechi, to commemorate its release, and it was featured directly on Shonen Ace's next issue. With this in mind, I'll leave you with the TL.

Though first, I have to share some important context to understand the story: "Detective Akechi is Berserk" follows the story of Mayumi, a high-school girl who is being possessed by the spirit of acclaimed detective Akechi Kogorou to solve mysterious crimes involving "phantoms," who are criminals from a gang that Akechi is pursuing. The end of volume 2 (the volume that precedes the Future Diary crossover) introduces a new character named Grimoire, a kid and member of the phantoms who lost her dad to a murderer, and later lost her mother to an illness while walking with her in a mall. Grimoire lost consciousness during this tragic event, so her mother got taken away from the scene before she could say her last goodbye. Grimoire used to roam the mall, searching for the place where her mother passed away, until Mayumi helped her find the spot, thinking that Grimoire was nothing more than a lost child. From this point on, her and Mayumi became acquainted, though Akechi doesn't seem too fond of Grimoire... (Mini-spoiler: we also learn at the end of volume 2 that Detective Akechi was likely the one who killed her dad, meaning Akechi is probably more of a villain than a hero). Btw Grimoire is a girl but people refer to her as a boy because she looks more boyish.

The eeeeend!

A few things to note before ending this post:

The quality of page 2 is a little wonky because I accidentally did the cleaning for that image on a version that was a lower resolution, and since I had to redraw a great portion of it in order to clean it... I didn't wanna redo it (sorry!).

The ending here is certainly a bit... confusing. Considering Esuno's three magical girls are, well, magical, it makes sense that they'd dodge bullets with ease. So I guess that explains that part of the ending. Everything else is left a bit more open-ended, which isn't too surprising considering this is probably more of a gag story than something to take as canon. Still, my favorite chapter of Detective Akechi lol.

I know that the majority of people reading this have not read Detective Akechi, so sorry if me dissing this series comes out of left field. I'm not planning on reviewing it, because to be quite frank, I don't think I totally understand the plot lol. So, instead, I'll leave you with my personal thoughts: It's just... incredibly bizarre, and the fan service didn't help. I originally stopped reading after volume 2 because of a particularly distasteful scene where Akechi possessed Mayumi to assault another girl (because he's a huge creep btw), and essentially assaulted both of them in the process, which is just... I think my brain genuinely tapped out after reading that, like how the hell do you come up with that? I decided to read over the series again to write this post, and it just gets weirder and weirder. Including, but not limited to, Mayumi having an Eiji and Sena moment with her brother (iykyk). Out of complete nowhere too. As I mentioned in my previous post, I generally don't have an issue with nsfw topics in stories, in fact, some of my favorite stories do cover nsfw and unhinged plots. As long as it's done with a purpose and isn't mind-numbingly dumb, I don't necessarily mind. Detective Akechi though is just weird, horny, and weirdly horny in ways that detract from the story. This is a personal opinion of mine, but I think it's quite funny that Esuno's favorite topic to write about, which is supernatural detectives, isn't exactly his forte. Something about the Future Diary formula, which probably wasn't intentional, managed to combine his bizarre plot points with the broken psychology of his characters in a way that just worked, though he unfortunately hasn't been able to recreate it since :/

[sunniedesi]

A little update: someone very kindly reached out with screenshots of the crossover and information about where it was originally posted. I'm currently working on TLs and a proper post to update this story, so everything should be clear soon. For now, I will say it was a March 2018 issue of Shonen Ace. Although I was originally confused about the chapter 10 thing, I did figure it was probably a mistake, due to the story coming out after chapter 9 (so technically we could say the crossover is chapter 9.5 of the manga). That said, your original post was very helpful (it was basically the only source I had when researching this). It gave me a basic outline of how the story went, which is important because it led me to realize that I was unfortunately missing the last two pages of the story in the screenshots...

To make a long story short, the story was first released for free on WebAce/bookwalker (which is where the screenshots come from), only caveat was that it was missing the last two pages. Cuz god forbid they give out the last pages for free, am I right 🙄? I really don't understand why bookwalker would go out of its way to publish the story for free, but leave out the last few panels, like ??

Thankfully though, I have my ways and managed to acquire the raws for the March issue, so the complete TL is on its way! Big thanks to everyone who helped me out on this search, I'll try to have everything done as soon as possible ♡

Searching for a Future Diary Crossover

Calling out to the Future Diary community 🗣🗣I’m asking for help once again.

In today’s installment of things that keep me up at night, we have yet another piece of Future Diary media that has yet to be translated. For context, the author of Future Diary, Sakae Esuno, has written four original mangas in the following order: Hanako and the Terror of Allegory, Future Diary, Big Order and Detective Akechi is Berserk. The latter of these is the only one that hasn’t had an official English translation, and the only fan translations available are for chapter 1 alone. With that out of the way, let's get into the subject of this post.

The Future Diary x Detective Akechi crossover is a side story that was written after the release of volume 1 and 2 of Detective Akechi. It features the main characters of not just the two aforementioned stories, but all of the four mangas created by Sakae Esuno, making this his second and biggest crossover work. I found out about it through this post a couple of years ago and kept it on the backburner, until I decided to add it to the list of future translations I wanted to tackle. I thought it wouldn’t be too big of an issue since it seems like a short story that will be easy to find… oh my naivety.

According to the post above, the story seems to be situated in chapter 10 of Detective Akechi is Berserk. However, when I go into that chapter of the manga… it is nowhere to be found. In fact, it is nowhere in the manga. So, we have two options here: either the story is in an updated version of the manga (one different from mine), or it was published somewhere else. The first crossover Sakae Esuno wrote, which involved Future Diary and his first manga (Hanako and the Terror of Allegory), was originally released as a standalone piece, so maybe that’s the case for this story as well. That theory seems to be backed up by this tweet I found from Shonen Ace’s account.

The photo in the post is the first page of the crossover, and the bubble on the top-left corner claims that this is a special project to celebrate the release of volumes 1 and 2. If we take a look at the bottom-left corner, we see that this is page 103… of what? This is clearly a digital scan, so it’s not a regular Shonen Ace magazine issue (since those aren’t released digitally). It’s also important to note that in each volume of Detective Akechi, the page numbered 103 does not have this story, and in fact, that page is always situated in the middle of a chapter. This means that we’re dealing with a digital release that isn’t in the original manga.

Another confusing thing is that chapter 10 is the first chapter of volume 3, which would not coincide with it being on page 103. It would also be a discrepancy for the dates, since that tweet was from January 31st, 2018, and volume 3 was released in September 2018, meaning that the crossover was released before volume 3 itself.

More evidence for this would be the fact that I found a blog from someone who owns a physical release of this crossover, as seen in the following pictures.

The blog entry was from February 2018, so the crossover had to be released, both digitally and physically, before volume 3. Another thing to note is that, while the blog doesn’t contain much information, it does say at the end that they “unexpectedly came across the crossover while thumbing through the pages.” Pages of what exactly? We don’t know. What we do know from this is that the crossover was released between January and February 2018, before Detective Akechi finished publication, and it was probably featured in an unrelated issue of something (like a magazine) according to the blog entry.

So my question is then… where was this released? Shonen Ace? Another magazine? An updated version of the manga? I can’t seem to find the answer anywhere, as there’s practically no information about it online. And I’m still confused as to why the original poster mentioned chapter 10. I feel like I’m probably missing some information here, and that’s why I wanted to ask the community: does anyone know where this crossover was originally published?

PD: While the blog had plenty of images, it’s missing a few pages and the picture quality leaves a lot to be desired. So even with those images, I can’t create a proper TL. Anyway, I’ll keep this project on the backburner until I find more information about this. And also… I’m not planning to translate all of Detective Akechi, just the crossover because of Future Diary. I’ll be honest, Detective Akechi is by far my least favorite series of Esuno’s. It is practically an ecchi with the sheer amount of fan service that it has. And while normally this wouldn’t upset me… there’s a lot of scenes where the female characters are being straight up assaulted. It’s so heavy-handed at times that it really takes away from the story. I’m not a puritan by any means, after all, Future Diary has some questionable scenes too, but not to the point where it’s basically softcore porn. When it comes to my work (whether it be art or translation), I like keeping it SFW. So, even if it’s Esuno’s, it’s not something I’m inclined to work on.