Ask John: Slayers Questions.

Question:
I have a few questions I hope you can answer:

1. Is there going to be another Slayers series after Try?

2. Is Slayers going to be on the Sci-Fi channel?

3. Will the “Slayers Royal” RPG game ever come to America? My guess is if slayers comes on the Sci-Fi Channel then it will gain enough popularity to bring over the RPG.

Answer:
1. There have been rumors for several years now of a fourth TV season to be titled Slayers Again, but so far nothing has come of that. The latest Slayers anime, the Slayers Excellent OAV series, came out around the beginning of last summer, so it’s now been quite a while since there was any Slayers anime released in Japan. That’s usually not a good sign. Anime shows that go for more than a few months without new episodes made in Japan often simply don’t get new episodes at all.

2. There have been rumors of Slayers airing on either the Sci-Fi Channel or the Cartoon Network, but presently I can’t provide any concrete information. The Cartoon Network has not made any announcements of acquiring Slayers, and the Sci-Fi Channel has recently ceased airing anime entirely.

3. Honestly, I don’t expect to ever see any of the three Slayers Playstation games come to the US, although there have been rumors of Working Designs looking into the property. Sailor Moon has a large following in the US, but never saw the PS game come the the US. Dragonball also has a large audience in the US, yet the domestic version of the Dragonball Final Bout Playstation game went out of print unusually quickly. As Pokemon has proven, an anime title really has to have much more than just fan-support to see its video-game counterparts come to these shores. A series has got to have broad, mass-market appeal and licensing opportunity to support its video game versions coming to the US. This is my own impression, though. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures for the Playstation and Berserk for the Dreamcast are coming to the US, even though their anime predecessors are relatively unknown in the US. I think that these are titles under different circumstances from Slayers, though, because Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures is a Capcom release (which virtually guarantees its success) and Berserk is a very recent release for the hottest system on the market right now. We can always hold onto hope.