[Project Announcement] Ordinal Scale manga v2

After a gruelling June of exam hell and a similarly busy July of working at a hospital, as of yesterday, I can finally enjoy the mystical thing called summer... for like a month before uni starts again and the cycle repeats itself. Anyway, since I'm finally on holiday for what little remains of summer, I'll finally have the time to work on translations. I had hoped to work on something on July, but hospital work turned out to be more exhausting than I had anticipated (probably because I was already pretty exhausted after my exams and didn't have much of any break after them), which resulted in me feeling too tired to work on anything when I actually returned home (ah, the joys of an afternoon nap...).

Now, since Yuna's birthday is around the corner (29 July) and Yen Press has, strangely, not yet licensed the Ordinal Scale manga for some reason, we decided to continue our work with volume 2 of the manga. We hope (!) to have a chapter ready for Monday to commemorate the birthday of SAO's best idol. The chapter had been translated and mostly typeset for a while now, but we couldn't find the time to finish up with the final touches due to RL being a bitch, so it's about time we actually released it. The volume consists of chapters 5-8 and covers up to the scene where Kirito learns that Asuna has lost her memories of SAO. While most of the volume is basically a manga version of the movie's scenes, it does add a few extra stuff here and there (such as the coloured illustrations at the beginning or a visual for Fuka for those who missed the reference in the movie itself), plus the manga's art is pretty nice, so we do hope you'll enjoy it.

As for our other projects, as some of you may have heard, the 32/33 story from the latest MEs will be turned into a Blu-ray story and will be released at the end of August. Although it's a shame that the promised BD story won't be original material (seeing as half of it will just be MEs 28-29; poor Kawahara must be swamped if he has to reuse material to save time like this), this means that 32/33 will have a conclusion sooner than expected (and we might get some good illustrations from abec as a bonus). Seeing as we did ME28, we will probably be translating this BD story once it comes out. Till then, my next focus will be translating ME29, as translating it will mean that I can finish up the BD story faster. Rough ETA: hopefully done in the next week or two. Maybe I'll work on another character book afterwards (while working on our manga projects on the side), since there doesn't seem to be anything else to work on? I was hoping to have a new side story to work on, but guess dreams don't always come true... Oh wait, there's still Clover's Regret... guess I could also work on that if there is interest in it? Next GGW release is still TBD, since it depends on when our typesetters have the time for it (hopefully, soon). I guess that covers everything? (totally haven't forgotten about the Comic Anthologies... because we just don't have any hands free for those atm) If I missed anything or if you guys have any requests, feel free to leave a comment below (disclaimer: no promise that I'll work on it if it doesn't interest me (or our typesetters, if it's a manga request)!).

Hope to see you all on Monday. Cheers!

-Gsimenas