#this is premium bandai merch

[overthattwilight]

Everyone is smiling here

Except for Lilia

[iristial]

Part of me hopes Geats gets the adorable chibi acrylic standees Revice did, but...these...

If these acrylic charms were double-sided so you get the character and Rider in one then they'd be even more perfect

[jadeazora]

A large Snorlax plush cushion and Pokeflute will be available via Premium Bandai, with preorders starting today and shipping in July 2023.

Here's the MecchaJP link.

[ship-garbage-pile]

(Looks at underwear)

Wow a Kamen rider OOOs reference! :)

[niyin]

Upcoming Bravern merch coming from Premium Bandai. for sure bravern's chibigurumi are going to be crane prizes, fuck bamco COSPA also announced new merch in their store i'm respectfully looking at that tricolor smith

Animage upcoming issue wcover with interviews and illustrations done by the characters designers yes, i'm going to get this along with pash! and animedia

[taperwolf]

Anime merch alert: Bandai is releasing (no pun intended) a premium version of the Clow Sealing Wand from Cardcaptor Sakura.

It's 60 cm (24 inches) long and is going to sell for 7,480 yen.

[pochqmqri]

I was reading an article from Unseen Japan about the controversy last year where a little boy in Japan was unable to cosplay as Cure Wing because the "transformation corner" at this one PreCure event didn't have a Cure Wing costume. The outcry eventually led to the companies announcing that such events would provide a costume, and that Bandai would be selling a Cure Wing costume on their Premium Bandai service.

I'm doing some research on a topic I plan on uploading soon, so I read the article a bit more in-depth, and I found this one section very interesting.

This was not the first time this happened.

Back in 2017, for "KiraPre," Cure Chocolat's costume was also sold solely through the Premium Bandai service. The reason why this is so important for both Wing and Chocolat is that, Premium Bandai is a service where you can pre-order a certain product for a limited time only, in contrast to how these costumes are usually sold, on the shelves of stores like Toys R Us in Japan.

This basically means that, a significantly less amount of Cure Wing and Cure Chocolat costumes were made and sold through a more restrictive market. Given the controversy, it feels like Bandai was just reluctant to make these costumes in the first place for some reason.

What's even wilder is that, several years before, during the airing of "Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GoGo!," Cure Rouge didn't get an updated cosplay costume alongside her peers, in stores. From what the article implies, it was never sold at all, not even through a service like Premium Bandai.

So this has happened three times now: Cure Rouge, Cure Chocolat, and Cure Wing. What do those three characters have in common? In the case of Cure Rouge and Cure Chocolat, they're both boyish girls, and Cure Wing is outright a boy Pretty Cure. This has led me to believe that Bandai just does not like boyish/actual boy characters in Pretty Cure, and in the case of Cure Wing, there's even more evidence to back that up, as he still never got a "PreCure Style" doll like the other HiroPre characters.

PreCure is a franchise that is managed by several different companies, the two most notable being Toei and Bandai. Toei has its fair share of problems, but it seems like Bandai is the more socially regressive one, given how they've treated these characters in merchandising. In that same Unseen Japan article, the author mentions how Toei had to plead with Bandai to allow Cure Soleil from StarPre, the first and only brown/dark-skinned Pretty Cure, to exist. And even so, the merchandise Bandai produced generally did not properly reflect her skin tone, making her orange or even outright whitewashing her. Cure Chocolat is also the most masc girl we've gotten as a Pretty Cure and really the last one since, which I also feel like is tied to Bandai's views.

To step away from PreCure for a bit, the Kamen Rider franchise, which Bandai also releases merch for, also has a similar problem. For "Kamen Rider Revice," one of the main characters, Kamen Rider Jeanne, is operated by a woman. Yet her transformation device toy was limited to being sold on Premium Bandai rather than at retail like the rest of her male peers. Or even in "Kamen Rider Gotchard," where the secondary main character, Kamen Rider Majade, another woman, also only had her transformation device limited to Premium Bandai. From these examples it shows that Bandai believes PreCure should only appeal to (girly) girls and Kamen Rider should only appeal to boys, and that they're digging their heels in with those gender norms.

There's a highly likely chance that the upcoming Wonderful PreCure will have another boy Cure appear midseason. If that does happen, will Bandai also treat him the same way they treated Cure Wing? They seriously need to do better, and people need to hold their feet to the fire.

[md-guel]

drumming up to the opening of the chara pop store on november 3, the original goods have just been revealed by the official site! there's about 14 kinds of merch total but here's what the guel ones look like!

sold on the store and through premium bandai

top to bottom, left to right: acrylic stand set, square badge, long strap (looks like a phone charm), mini tapestry, clear file, iPhone case, motif wrist band, pen

physical buyers who come away with 3000 yen worth of goods will also get to take home a randomly-assigned student ID illustration sheet! this one is guel's:

lottery goods

there'll be a mini-game in the store where the players will have to interact with a haro bot who will then determine their winning kemomimi prize! from A to D, guel's designs are:

top to bottom, left to right: acrylic board standee, acrylic standee, can badge, illustration sheet

gashapon

finally, to be released on December are three new gashapon prizes to be sold on all official bandai gashapon shops and gashapon department stores!

left to right: a guel standee, a darilbalde standee, and a kemomimi guel charm

[yyh4ever]

Yu Yu Hakusho Running Deformed Series

Bandai is releasing this Yu Yu Hakusho "Running Deformed Series" Apparel and Miscellaneous Goods. Each character appears running in a cute caricature (deformed) design! 🤣 This series is cute, I've seen merch from Naruto before.

Goods include acrylic stands, acrylic key-chains and T-shirts.

Pre-order: December 27, 2022 to January 29, 2023, on Premium Bandai

Shipping: March 2023

Goods:

Acrylic Stand

Price: ¥770 each (6 types)

Material: Acrylic

Sizes:

Pedestal (common size for all types): approx. 61 x 25mm

Yusuke Urameshi: approx. 55 x 67mm 

Kazuma Kuwabara: approx. 55 x 79mm

Hiei: approx. 60 x 67 mm

Kurama: approx. 57 x 74mm

Youko Kurama: approx. 54 x 77mm

Koenma: approx. 53 x 76mm

Acrylic Keychain

Price: ¥770 each (6 types)

Material: Acrylic

Sizes:

Yusuke Urameshi: approx. 49 x 62 mm

Kazuma Kuwabara: approx. 50 x 72 mm

Hiei: approx. 46 x 63mm

Kurama: approx. 51 x 67mm

Youko Kurama: approx. 49 x 70mm

Koenma: approx. 49 x 69 mm

Long-Sleeve T-shirt

Price: ¥6,380

Material: 100% cotton

Sizes:

M: Length approx. 70, Width approx. 52, Shoulder width approx. 47, Sleeve length approx. 58 (cm)

L: Length approx. 74, Width approx. 55, Shoulder width approx. 50, Sleeve length  approx. 59 (cm)

XL: Length approx. 78, Width approx. 58, Shoulder width approx. 53, Sleeve length approx. 60 (cm)

T-shirt

Price: ¥3,850

Material: 100% cotton

Sizes:

M: Length approx. 70, Width approx. 52, Shoulder width approx. 47, Sleeve length approx. 20 (cm)

L: Length approx. 74, Width approx. 55, Shoulder width approx. 50, Sleeve length about 22 (cm)

XL: Length approx. 78, Width approx. 58, Shoulder width approx. 53, Sleeve length about 24 (cm)

[shihalyfie]

From one Appmon enjoyer to another, do you know what this series' standing with Bandai/Toei is? It really feels like the Appmon's inclusion and exclusion with the rest of the franchise is constantly pinballing. It's included in stuff like the anime anniversaries, the Digimon museum and is at least acknowledged in the questionnaire for the upcoming 25th anniversary book, but then it's a no show for the vote for best anime opening and the manga is missing from the manga competition PV. Any idea?

I've noticed this too, and this is only my personal observation and take on the issue, but the way I've been seeing it is like this: the Toei side (Digimon Partners, Kizuna website timeline, aforementioned museum, basically anything that has a stronger emphasis on anime production) has  been showing no restraint about treating it like another Digimon anime and including it proudly in the lineup with everything else, whereas the Bandai side (Digimon Web, card game, Premium Bandai, etc.) has been waffling on whether to consider it as part of the franchise or not and has been more flip-floppy on it, probably leaning more on the side of excluding it.

I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that part of this is another of the Digimon franchise's usual "right hand not talking to left hand" issue. Toei produced the Appmon anime and thus understands very well that it's pretty much the same as any other Digimon anime in terms of substance, writing style, story concept, and even production pipeline (the Appmon staff list is full of people who worked on older Digimon anime too, after all). So to them, Appmon really is the same as any other Digimon anime and is another part of their portfolio they should be proud of.

However, Bandai has a much weaker relationship with the anime, and things get much more complicated when you start taking into account all of the Appmon-related things that are not anime. When you consider the Appmon "IP" as a whole, it is true that at first glance, it looks more like a spinoff branch than anything (it has its own website portal too, so someone giving it only a cursory glance could easily assume that there's no point putting Appmon things on Digimon Web because the dedicated Appmon site takes care of that), it had its own card game, it had its own trademark registrations, and its monster lines and evolutionary systems are somewhat more incompatible with the main Digimon lines than even the Xros Wars lines used to be. I imagine someone working with Digimon-related stuff at Toei is probably going to have a much higher likelihood of understanding how close of a relationship Appmon had in practice with the mainline series than someone at Bandai who only got a list of all the relevant merch lines and naturally jumped to the conclusion "yeah this is a spinoff branch, ignore it for now." Most of the people reading my blog here are probably coming from the anime fan perspective, but it's important to remember that the anime is only one part of the entire IP's branding.

In other words, it's basically the inverse of that really awkward period between 2014 and 2019 when the Bandai side had no problem treating 02 as normal while Toei was treating it like some kind of cryptid.

Another thing to consider is that, as much as it breaks my heart to say this, it is true that there is a certain not-insignificant branch of the Japanese fanbase that absolutely loathes Appmon with all of their being, or at least wants it to stay as far away from their precious Digimon franchise as much as possible. This attitude is much less pronounced in the Western fanbase (or at least, if you do have a condescending attitude about it you'll easily get a whole crowd of fans treating you like a laughingstock) mainly because to be this hardcore of a Digimon fan at all means you really need an extra level of dedication, but I have definitely seen an entire Japanese Digimon fan camp that cares more about the Digimon null canon and species/evolutionary lineup than they really care about any anime or anime story at all. To them, it doesn't matter how close the anime was in style to the traditional Digimon style, it doesn't even matter if the anime was good or not, Appmon was still that weird thing that threatened to dismantle all the existing Digimon lore they'd built up over the years and turn it into something unrecognizable, so they want nothing to do with it.

Even ones who aren't downright condescending about it still clearly don't want to see them mixing; I was watching a Japanese YouTube video recapping the history of the Digimon franchise, and once they got to the 2014-2018 period, they labeled it "heaven and hell" due to the rather turbulent period that was and labeled different parts of it "heaven" or "hell", but Appmon was branded "not sure if it's heaven or hell" because the YouTuber's attitude was basically treating it as a financial and branding failure that attempted to completely go off in a weird direction, and although he did acknowledge "people who watched the anime said it was actually pretty good, though" it was treated like a comparative footnote. And unfortunately, this part of the fanbase is responsible for funding a good chunk of the franchise in terms of merch, especially the card game, which is the franchise's current effective life support and is a reason I'm particularly apprehensive about whether Appmon will ever be able to get any representation there.

But on the flip side, things like Digimon Partners don't have to worry about that -- because anything that selects for the anime-loving part of the fanbase is therefore also likely to be more closely targeting people who care about the anime, and therefore are more likely to care about Appmon. Like for instance, the fact Offmon actually was a winner in one of the merch polls; I'm not too surprised that happened on Partners, but I'm definitely not as confident that would have happened on Digimon Web. Digimon anime fans are generally the ones who are most consistent about wanting to see Appmon included in the lineup (and, I mean, really, I don't exactly know anyone who actually liked the Appmon card game, and very few people played the 3DS game, so the anime and to a lesser degree the manga based directly on it are honestly the only parts of that entire IP branch that actually got any significant following), so it's understandable that the Toei side would be more likely to pick up on that and be more proactive about it. Which, mind you, is still something that's only specific to the last few years; after all, it wasn't even that long ago since they were in that phase of everything besides the original Digimon Adventure being unworthy of note, so it's really thanks to their attempts at restoring their relationship with the fanbase and improving their PR that they've been making headway at since 2020.

[10th-vongola]

actually we got the boxes!! earlier this year they released the Sky, Cloud and Mist Vongola boxes with their respective ring in a set (exclusively through Bandai Premium’s Japanese website) and then rereleased them in general to other websites due to the popularity (releases in December) as well as the Storm, Rain, Lightning and Sun box and ring sets! after that they then announced a Varia box set for Xanxus and Squalo as well! the boxes have speakers so when you open them with the ring, it plays voice lines lol

these new rings are just Bandai making a new set, but out of proper jewellery silver (925 silver) so it’s actually quality jewellery, while I haven’t opened my 3 boxes yet so idk what the other rings are made out of tbh lol. the sets were ¥5k+ so about $55+ AUD each, so to get all 7 would be ¥35k+ while to get all these new ones, it’d be nearly ¥150k dkjdkcjdns

SCREEEE you have ur finger on the pulse of khr merch i love it. Now that i have adult money i can 'seriously consider' buying the rings

[obstinaterixatrix]

what is the FUCKING POINT of the english premium bandai store they never stock the new kamen rider merch and they barely make anything available AND they region locked the jp site so we can’t even LOOK. I WOULD’VE SAVED UP FOR THE FOURZE SHOES. YOU BASTARDS

[what-the-fuck-khr]

adding to this; so usually these kinds of things are only available through Bandai Premium’s JP site which requires you to be in Japan to access it, so you would need a VPN to actually purchase them. I preordered the first three using a proxy by just adding the website and hoping for the best bc I could not actually See the goddamn website. obviously. and I’d have done the same thing with the new four. HOWEVER!!!! I come with good news!!!!

AmiAmi, one of Japan’s largest merch and figure stores (online and physical) has actually got all 7 of the boxes available on their website! the preorders open at 00:00 June 22nd JST, and they release December this year. I’ve used AmiAmi for years now so if you need help with the website, you can ask for help! they’re ¥4,950 which isn’t the Cheapest, but that’s likely due to the fact that it has a speaker in it to play the voice lines

I’ll link all seven separately, though if you go to one listing you’ll be able to view all 7. just easier I guess

Sky | Cloud | Mist | Storm | Rain | Sun | Lightning

after the popularity of the Sky, Cloud and Mist Vongola boxes from Bandai, they’ve now announced a Sun, Storm, Rain and Lightning Vongola box as well! Along with preorders opening June 15th, they’ll be reselling the first three as well (which were initially slated for July, but were delayed to august; I wouldn’t be surprised if this was why)

[jadeazora]

A new, giant Garchomp plushie from Premium Bandai. It's about 6ft/180cm and ships in Feb2023!

[hunterxhell]

FINALLY SOME MERCH I KNOW EVERYONE WAS HOPING WOULD BE MADE!!!!!!!

[highdio]

Jojo suits are back, Diamond is Unbreakable versions this time: Kira Yoshikage’s 3-piece business suit features a Killer Queen motif lining. 53,900 yen, info at p-bandai.jp/item/item-1000153155. Josuke suit here, Rohan here.