Sorry to give some slight false hope, but it is too good to pass up! According to Marbridge Consulting:

In an article posted on his blog, Li Yanqing, president of online gaming firm China Game, has claimed that Chinese online game operator 9You has signed an agreement with Korean developer CJ Internet to license the Mainland China operating rights to Dragon Ball Online. CJ Internet owns the world-wide development and distribution rights to Dragon Ball Online. Li didn’t reveal any details of the agreement.

That certainly creates a massive amount of potential players. We will, of course, keep you up-to-date with any additional information regarding licensing outside of Asia.

In other gaming news, as expected, “Burst Limit” took a beating on the Japanese sales charts due to the release of “Metal Gear Solid 4”. Selling a mere 18,000 additional copies on the PS3 (with the 360 version not even charting this week… surprise, surprise), the latest DBZ game has fallen to the number seven slot for the week. I would expect it to fall off the charts entirely within the next two weeks.

“Burst Limit” has been doing well over in Japan, selling 92,298 copies on the PS3 last week, making it the top-selling game. This is, of course, until the next figures come out, which will include “Metal Gear Solid 4”. Also on the list down at number twelve was the 360 version of the game, though no sales figures are reported past number ten.

In comparison, “Sparking! METEOR” sold a whopping 243,536 in its first week back in November (203,828 = PS2; 39,708 = Wii).

A 17-year-old “man” has been issued a citation down in Texas for trying to steal DBZ season four from his local Wal-Mart.

Another typical example of you damn kids and your smug sense of entitlement! Get off my lawn!

Just a reminder for all of you that “Burst Limit” officially shipped to stores in the US yesterday (all you Japanese and European fans have already been playing for a couple days, though).

I picked mine up at GameStop today. If you pre-ordered the game, you received a t-shirt and either a DVD of the first seven episodes of DBZ (360) or a Blu-ray of DBZ movie 1 (PS3). Interesting, the DVD for my 360 version was packed right inside with the game in the flip-style dual-disc case. The front cover has a golden bar at the bottom showcasing this, though the instruction book on the inside has the standard cover image. Yes, the DVD is the exact same disc that comes with FUNimation’s faux-“remastered” DBZ season one; no additional branding is present.

The t-shirt was a very shoddy-looking standard large:

Note that the front is printed on crooked. Yep.

It would appear that Hironobu Kageyama’s fantastic “Power Live ’98” CD is going to be re-released. Of the sixteen tracks on this CD full of live performances, there are five Dragon Ball songs:

• “Mind Power …Ki…”
  (DBZ episode 139 insert / Trunks flashback)
• “Unmei no Hi ~Tamashii tai Tamashii~”
  (DBZ episode 184 insert / Super Saiyan 2 Gohan)
• “Boku-tachi wa Tenshi Datta”
  (DBZ 2nd ending)
• “CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA”
  (DBZ 1st opening)
• “FOR EVER~”
  (image song)

Note that all of the live DB songs from the “Power Live ’95” CD were included in the recent so-called “Chōzenshū” set. In other words, if you do not already own this CD, you will want to pick it up!

As was reported back at the end of April, a “Jump Super Anime Tour” will visit 10 cities in Japan this fall with some new anime specials. The full line-up has finally been announced in the latest “Weekly Shonen Jump” (2008 WSJ #28) and includes the following anime: Dragon Ball (Akira Toriyama), One Piece (Eiichiro Oda), Bleach (Tite Kubo), Letter Bee (Hiroyuki Asada), Gintama, Blue Dragon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s. The most exciting news for us is that the Dragon Ball special will be based on an original concept by Akira Toriyama!

Anime News Network has also put up a two-part documentary about Toei Animation Studios, the studio that animated Dragon Ball. This is definitely worth watching if you are curious how animation is done these days. It also gives you a little history of the company and anime in general.

Toei has put up a release schedule for the upcoming “Dragon Ball The Movies” individual discs, which gives us the order in which they will be released, beginning with the Dragon Ball Z movies (as opposed to starting with the three original Dragon Ball movies and/or the 10th anniversary movie). In addition, it has also been confirmed that these individual discs will contain the bonus features that came on the original Dragon Box discs. All-in-all, it appears we will be getting an exact copy of the Dragon Box discs.

The movies will begin their release on 08 August 2008 at the rate of two per month.