Jump Festa, an annual anime and manga convention hosted by Shueisha, will be held this weekend in Tokyo, Japan. Amongst the event schedule is a 30-minute “Dragon Ball Kai Special Talks Stage”, which will be hosted by voice actors from the series on Sunday (12/19) at 1:00pm. With the recent news of the new Toriko anime adaptation taking the franchise’s time slot, we may finally find out something about the fate of Kai. Unless the question is listed as completely off limits, I can not imagine that we would not find out at least a little bit about it.

Last year the talks were hosted by Masako Nozawa (Goku) and Ryūsei Nakao (Freeza), as that is where the series was at that point. Unfortunately it has not been announced who will be speaking this year, but I would not be all too surprised if it were Masako Nozawa (Goku) and Norio Wakamoto (Cell). Regardless, we will be sure to try and keep tabs on what happens this year.

The cover art for the Battle of Omega CD single has been revealed:

“Battle of Omega” is performed by Hironobu Kageyama and is the opening theme to the franchise’s most recent video game, Raging Blast 2 for the PS3 and Xbox 360. Check out our review of the game, and expect a review of the CD single in the new year.

Hot on the heels of episode 82’s new insert song inclusion last month, this past weekend’s episode 85 of Dragon Ball Kai featured not one, but two new insert songs.

“My 18th Magic”, performed by cAnON., played on the radio in the background of a scene with the Son family and Kuririn driving along, shortly before it is announced that the army is about to take on Cell.

“Seru Gēmu no Oshirase” (“News of the Cell Game”), performed by Kenji Ōtsuki, played during Cell’s retaliation against the army.

Both songs recently appeared on the new album Dragon Ball Kai Soundtrack III & Songs, though (like “Tatta Hitori no Senshi” before them) there was no hint that any of the three new vocal songs would eventually end up in the show. Check out our review of Soundtrack III & Songs back on Episode #0237 of our podcast.

The new Dragon Ball manga spin-off, Dragon Ball SD, made its debut today in Shueisha’s new magazine, Saikyō Jump. You will recall that this spin-off comes from mangaka Naho Ooishi; however, original series author Akira Toriyama is listed as supervising the manga — in fact, the credits are the same as the Jump Super Anime Tour manga adaptation.

The spin-off consists of 12 full-color pages and follows an alternate telling of Goku and Kuririn’s training with Kame-Sen’nin. If you would like a copy for yourself but live outside of Japan, you can actually grab it on Amazon Japan for ¥580 (~$7.00).

The cover art for the upcoming Nintendo DS fighting game, Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate Butōden, has made its way online:

A few sites are reporting that the upcoming arcade game ZENKAI Battle Royale will run on Namco’s own PS3-based System 357 hardware (similar to how Super Dragon Ball Z ran on the PS2-based System 246 hardware), meaning an eventual home port is more likely. The game’s official website has also revealed that it will be on-location for testing from December 10th to 12th (almost all day long at each) at Namco Land Umeda in Osaka, Namco Nakano in Tokyo, and Wonderpark Hakuta in Fukuoka. Even more exciting is the news (by way of Shoryuken) that the game is indeed Internet-based and will run with the GGPO netcode to handle latency and communication.

ZENKAI Battle Royale just gets more and more interesting, so stay tuned for even more information after its test run!