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Why there's so much time span between OVA episodes?

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Sep 22, 2016 1:27 PM
#1
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Oct 2015
107
Hello
Why do you think there's so much time span betweeN OVA episodes?
for example, an OVA of 2 episodes can take up to half year, sometimes even a year to get fully released.
Sep 22, 2016 1:32 PM
#2

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Feb 2013
17583
no pressure to have a fixed release schedule like tv series

possibly also smaller team
Sep 22, 2016 1:37 PM
#3

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Jan 2008
18445
These days, OVAs are usually bonus bundles for purchasing manga, light novels, games, etc. So you're gonna have to wait til the next volume of a specific series comes out before you get the next OVA.

Hentai on the other hand is just random as hell with their schedules.
Sep 22, 2016 1:41 PM
#4
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Oct 2015
107
romagia said:
no pressure to have a fixed release schedule like tv series

possibly also smaller team
So, it's possible that the team who worked on the Anime series might not end up working on the OVA? I mean they can have a completely different story, and some exist for the sole purpose of fanservice H.O.T.D and KissxSis are live example of this.
Sep 22, 2016 1:43 PM
#5

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Aug 2014
1425
Those first two comments nail it.

OVA's aren't scheduled unless they're bundled with something else as an extra; usually OVA's of adaptations release with the next release of the source material, but that's no given.
Translators also don't immediately jump onto subbing an OVA (either because they don't know it's out or are too busy to care about an OVA), so there'll be a delay there as well (like usually only a week tho).
Sep 22, 2016 2:47 PM
#6

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Oct 2014
15752
OVA series are released for a number of reasons and depending on what they're for they have different airing schedules. The Angel Beats! Specials had a full 5 year gap in between episodes, which could have been to test the viewers' loyalty to the series. LoGH had around 10 episodes released every year and it was simply intended as an adaption to the novel series. With a slow airing schedule they were able to make a nice long adaption without having to worry about needing any filler episodes to fill the schedule. Hellsing Ultimate and Uchuu Senkan Yamato 2199 were both intended to replace the disappointing TV adaptions of their manga and both are around the same length (roughly 10 hours), but Ultimate took 6 years to air while 2199 only took 6 months. The reason why they took such different amounts of time to air is unknown to me. Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari is a series with double length episodes (45 minutes each instead of the standard 24) and although it was released as an OVA it took a year to air its 13 episodes, the same amount of time that double length TV series like Katanagatari and Figure 17 take to air. Black Jack is a 12 episode double length OVA series that took 18 years to air, although it took a long hiatus in the middle.
Sep 22, 2016 3:19 PM
#7

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Feb 2013
17583
zombie_pegasus said:
OVA series are released for a number of reasons and depending on what they're for they have different airing schedules. The Angel Beats! Specials had a full 5 year gap in between episodes, which could have been to test the viewers' loyalty to the series. LoGH had around 10 episodes released every year and it was simply intended as an adaption to the novel series
wew lad you have the weirdest views over the database..

1. The MAL entry "Angel Beats Special" was for the longest of times a single ova; some 4 years after the initial release, they announced a re-release the show as a boxset with one more special episode. And since it didn't have a clear subtitle, it was put under the same entry because of database rules. No loyalty test there unless you mean the (hopefully minority of) people who bought the whole thing twice. It's similar to the Zetsubou Sensei Special which was also part of a boxset re-release some years after the show ending.

2. The 4 seasons of LOGH are pretty well defined by their release dates ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Legend_of_the_Galactic_Heroes_episodes ). All seasons were roughly 26 weeks of releases, followed by ~2 years of break.

Cant speak for the other examples since i havent seen them
Sep 22, 2016 3:25 PM
#8

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Oct 2014
15752
romagia said:
zombie_pegasus said:
OVA series are released for a number of reasons and depending on what they're for they have different airing schedules. The Angel Beats! Specials had a full 5 year gap in between episodes, which could have been to test the viewers' loyalty to the series. LoGH had around 10 episodes released every year and it was simply intended as an adaption to the novel series
wew lad you have the weirdest views over the database..

1. The MAL entry "Angel Beats Special" was for the longest of times a single ova; some 4 years after the initial release, they announced a re-release the show as a boxset with one more special episode. And since it didn't have a clear subtitle, it was put under the same entry because of database rules. No loyalty test there unless you mean the (hopefully minority of) people who bought the whole thing twice. It's similar to the Zetsubou Sensei Special which was also part of a boxset re-release some years after the show ending.

2. The 4 seasons of LOGH are pretty well defined by their release dates ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Legend_of_the_Galactic_Heroes_episodes ). All seasons were roughly 26 weeks of releases, followed by ~2 years of break.

Cant speak for the other examples since i havent seen them
Generally I don't know where to find extra information about things so I just make shit up that makes sense to me. Thanks for the information. Are OVAs released one episode a time on DVD?
Sep 22, 2016 3:29 PM
#9
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Jul 2018
561867
A lot of the time, OVAs are bundled with volumes of manga or light novels

Sometimes it takes awhile for volumes to come out, and production might be slow, so there's a large gap between the release dates.
Sep 22, 2016 3:36 PM

Offline
Feb 2013
17583
zombie_pegasus said:
romagia said:
wew lad you have the weirdest views over the database..

1. The MAL entry "Angel Beats Special" was for the longest of times a single ova; some 4 years after the initial release, they announced a re-release the show as a boxset with one more special episode. And since it didn't have a clear subtitle, it was put under the same entry because of database rules. No loyalty test there unless you mean the (hopefully minority of) people who bought the whole thing twice. It's similar to the Zetsubou Sensei Special which was also part of a boxset re-release some years after the show ending.

2. The 4 seasons of LOGH are pretty well defined by their release dates ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Legend_of_the_Galactic_Heroes_episodes ). All seasons were roughly 26 weeks of releases, followed by ~2 years of break.

Cant speak for the other examples since i havent seen them
Generally I don't know where to find extra information about things so I just make shit up that makes sense to me. Thanks for the information.
I do with the things i watch at least p= It's a combination of the "More Info" panel on MAL, the anime's MAL forum, Wikipedia, Anidb, and if all else fails, Google. Usually just one or two are enough though.

The Angel Beats thing came as a surprise because if a completed entry in your list gets its episode number changed, it goes automatically to your watching list. So naturally i was curious to see what caused Angel Beats Specials to get bigger.

A short google reveals that Yamato 2199 is also not really an OVA (or rather movies), though technically initially released as such.
"Although Space Battleship Yamato 2199 was produced as a twenty-six episode television series, it was initially released in a series of seven weekend theatrical releases across Japan beginning on April 7, 2012, with each release consisting of two to four episodes each. Following each of these releases, the episodes were distributed on DVD and BluRay. The seres began its television run on Family Gekijo exactly one year after the first episode's theatrical debut"

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It’s time to ditch the text file.
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