After all of the inconsistent details, canceled releases, new catalog numbers, and wild speculation… we finally have some concrete information (we think…?) on this month’s upcoming two-disc Dragon Ball Kai Original Soundtrack Collection (previously listed as Soundtrack IV), courtesy of CDJapan’s posted track listing.

As we began to fear, it is mostly a collection of previously-released material, with the tiniest amount of unreleased music — by “tiniest amount”, we mean approximately six tracks (of 76 total). Yes, you read that correctly: six. We say “approximately” because some of the given names are a little ambiguous; they may be the same versions as previously-released music (but with an extra word in the title), or they may be as-of-yet unreleased, stripped-down versions of those songs. Regardless, we are absolutely looking at a single-digit number in terms of new tracks. The rest of the material comes from the prior three soundtracks for the series.

Our buddy kenisu3000 thinks that one of the new tracks is the (woefully underwhelming) piece used recently for Gohan’s Super Saiyan 2 transformation, so hey… that is something.

The full track listing has been revealed for this week’s Dragon Ball Kai: Complete Song Collection, so we have added that in to its respective section in our “Music Guide”.

Next up is another head-scratcher. The so-called Dragon Ball Kai: Original Soundtrack IV has a fun little release schedule going on, and its cover art really is not helping:

The disc’s title seems to be in flux if you look around retailer sites, but the cover art seems to finalize it as Dragon Ball Kai: Original Soundtrack Shū (the same shū from daizenshuu, meaning “collection”) — the number four is nowhere to be seen. So what on Earth is this going to be? Will it truly be music from the series that has not yet made its way to CD, or like this week’s Complete Song Collection and its vocal tracks, will this be a last-gasp collection of previously-released material?

It has been a couple weeks since FUNimation debuted their online streaming initiative for our favorite franchise. No schedule was set ahead of time, but the company recently announced that Dragon Ball Z TV episodes 16-27 (picking up where the first batch left off) will be available this coming Saturday via all their usual channels. It would seem that a batch of ~10 episodes every couple of weeks may wind up as the norm.

As a reminder, the episodes are indeed available in their original Japanese format, but are the video masters from the orange brick sets released from 2007-2009. An English dub (with the original Japanese musical score) is also available for the same episodes. The streams are available to US residents only.

Over in the realm of home releases, RightStuf has recently updated their online listings with “Part Five” of FUNimation’s release of Kai. Due out 03 May 2011, the prices have been substantially slashed from prior sets’ MSRPs: $29.98 for the DVD set, and $34.98 for the Blu-ray set (with RightStuf’s own prices being slightly lower than MSRP). No reason has been given yet for the reduced prices.

I have seen a couple rumblings that FUNimation may be dropping the price on all Kai releases in the near future, so some of the prices in a current sale going on over on Amazon may be an indication of this.

• PART ONE: $23.99
• PART TWO: $23.99
• PART THREE: $24.99

If you are interested in the home release and have not yet grabbed some of the volumes on Blu-ray, now is a good time.

Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate Butōden was released for the Nintendo DS in Japan exactly one week ago, and the sales are in. In its first week of release (reporting from January 31st to February 6th), the game moved 31,108 copies, making it the fourth-best performing game of the week.

As a bit of comparison in the portable arena:

• Dragon Ball DS sold approximately 70-80,000 copies its first week in Japan back in 2008
• Dragon Ball Kai: Saiya-jin Raishū (also for the DS) did 73,915 copies its first week in 2009
• Dragon Ball DS 2 moved 17,494 copies its first week in 2010
• Dragon Ball: TAG VS on the PSP sold 19,080 copies its first week in 2010

Sales figures are all over the place when you compare portable to console games, but at the end of the day, there is an exponential downward trend going on — so much, in fact, that no Dragon Ball games were reported on Namco-Bandai’s most recent quarterly figures, the first time in a while during their release window.

Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate Butōden has still not been announced for distribution outside Japan. We heard rumblings of Dragon Ball DS 2 coming stateside about two months after its Japanese release last year, which still leaves a window of opportunity here, even with the 3DS on the horizon. It is interesting to note, however, that Ultimate Butōden was not shown off in any capacity at Namco-Bandai’s recent “IGNITE” event in San Francisco last week, where other new announcements were made.

I am actually somewhat glad I held off on updating about Dragon Ball Kai Original Soundtrack IV, since the updates keep coming one after another and negate whatever came prior!

Originally scheduled for release later this month, a fourth soundtrack for Dragon Ball Kai was delayed exactly one month until 23 March 2011. Within the last week or so, folks started noticing that its entry on retailer sites like CDJapan listed it as “canceled”.

Soon after that, a completely new listing popped up for the soundtrack with a new catalog number (COCX-36748) and the same March release date… but now as a two-disc set!

A prior description noted that the fourth soundtrack would contain around thirty pieces of unreleased music from the show, but our music sleuths have noted that there are not even twenty pieces from the show that have not yet made their way to disc. With a bump in disc-count, what is going to fill up this space? There are certainly some unused pieces and perhaps new “synth” versions of vocal songs like on prior soundtracks, but even that is a stretch when you consider two discs.

Namco-Bandai has posted a ¥5.6 billion (approximately $68.6 million) profit for the third quarter of fiscal year 2011.

For the first time in quite a while, the Dragon Ball franchise did not perform well enough to show up in the top five-to-six franchises to allow for more extensive net sales figures.

In terms of general toys and hobby merchandise (non-video games), the franchise dropped in net sales from ¥2.6 billion the first three quarters of fiscal 2010 to ¥1.7 billion this year, and the company is still forecasting a drop down to ¥2.7 billion (same as forecast last quarter) for the full year compared to ¥3.3 billion in fiscal 2010.

No individual Dragon Ball video game sales were noted in the report — both TAG VS / Tenkaichi Tag Team (PSP) and Raging Blast 2 (PS3/360) were released this past quarter (the latter having a first week that could be spun as either “good” or “bad”, being the best-selling game that week, but selling 10,000 less copies than its predecessor).