The latest and third installment in the Valkyries book series by Hidetaka Tenjin will be released this September in Japan. Like the first and second books, this one will contain new Macross related art by Tenjin featuring a variety of variable fighters from the series. This new book will also be fully bilingual and feature English text. Considering that Macross Delta is the latest series in the saga, it’s clear this new book will focus on this more readily but it will be interesting to see what other pieces of art turn up. Valkyries Third Sortie is released on September 14th in Japan by Kobunsha and you can pre-order it over on Amazon. In the meantime, make sure to check out my review of the second book.

Great news non-Japanese speaking Gundam fans! Bandai Namco have announced they will be localizing Gundam Breaker 3 with English subtitles for Asia in June this year! This has become a growing trend lately with Bandai Namco bringing English localized games to the territory with Gundam Extreme VS Force being one of them. Interestingly, this might open the floodgates for future Gundam games to come to the West as well since the previously mentioned title has been confirmed to do so late last year. Needless to say, those who were on the fence about getting a Japanese copy Gundam Breaker 3 and dealing with the language barrier won’t have to wait too long for their preferred version. But for those who were planning on playing the game on their PS4 with their Vita, it’s been recently revealed that remote play has been disabled. As always, we’ll let you know more as new info drops!

In a tantalisingly short video (shown below), Bamco have shown off the much talked about kit bashing customisation element in Gundam Breaker. In a funny sort of way it’s somewhat similar to classic Armored Core in a way and this is no bad thing. In addition to the video below there have been some nice updates at both 4Gamer and Famitsu. The important thing to note is that the Vita version is still being advertised again.

Following on from our previous Revoltech Jehuty and Revoltech Jehuty (Anubis Version) reviews, our good friends at HobbyLink Japan have sent us the Revoltech Jehuty with Vector Cannon. This being the special super weapon of sorts that Jehuty acquires towards the end of Anubis. Due to the fact it already uses the base Jehuty figure, we’ve only covered the new Vector Cannon elements. In addition, we’ve also included some game footage at the end of the review.

Over at AmiAmi they have a lovely preview of the soon to be released Revoltech Jehuty with Vector Cannon. What’s especially interesting is that there is a nifty mechanism for dropping down the Vector Cannon into firing mode (as shown here). To be honest we were thinking of passing this one by, as we’ve already covered the last two Revoltech Jehuty toys but this looks too cool to pass by. The toy is released on the 15th July for 4,980 yen.

What seems to be the entire newly animated opening movie for the Zone of the Enders HD Collection is now available online for everyone to see. Animated by Sunrise, it was specially commissioned for the new HD collection. There’s also a brief interview with Kojima online too, though this more importantly shows the new HD gameplay in action. Both videos are linked below.

Famitsu has a nice new update showing in-game screenshots for the upcoming Zone of the Enders HD Collection. The most impressive of these, we think at least, are for the original game. In many ways playing that will be more interesting than Anubis (which already had many silent revisions and a special editions). Fingers cross crossed that they’ve helped to excise the suck out of the first game.

In a recent Tweet, Yuji Korekado posted a new screenshot from the Zone of the Enders HD Collection. From the second game Anubis it shows the early boss fight with Ardjet. As you can see above, it looks pretty good. This is also from a forthcoming demo meant for the event on the 25th and they are almost trying to recreate the same setup as was seen in the TGS 2002 demo (this was later included in the very nice Anubis artbook). It’s also worth clarifying that this version of the game is not really the same as the one we reviewed. Whilst a few people think our appraisal of the second game is a tad harsh, the review was done back in 2003 on the initial Japanese release. This was a very badly balanced version of the game and suffered lots of problems. Multiple silent revisions followed, culminating in the Special Edition. The latter is a very different game functionally and one day we’ll hopefully get around to covering that version in a new review (as we like it a lot more).

A new event has been announced for the forthcoming Zone of the Enders HD Collection. Called “Zone of the Enders HD Night Fastest in the Universe Reboot Preview” it will be held on May 25th at the Shijuku Wald 9 theatre. Most of the key staff will be there too. Tickets for the event will cost 3,000 yen and will be purchasable through Konami Style starting May 2nd at 10am. Following on from this, more places have started to show off the upcoming Jehuty HD Edition kit from Kotobukiya. As always, the sculpt looks utterly spot on. Considering that over ten years have passed since the original game was released and the only models available were hideously expensive garage kits, it’s nice to think that we’ll actually have a choice now. You can pre-order the HD edition kit here.

For a third week running, the suitably awesome Super Robot Wars Z 2 Saisei-hen is in the top of the Japanese charts yet again. This isn’t wholly surprising but it is testament to the fact that the game is genuinely very good indeed. It also illustrates another fine point; that no hardware is truly dead and software is all important in a platform’s success. Listening to all the hardware naysayers over the years, it’s now very clear that much of their outlook is desperately parochial.

That aside, we’ve subsequently done numerous repeated playthroughs on the game since our review and it gets better with each sitting. Our favourite unit, by quite a large margin, is also the suitably godlike YF-29 Durandal. Admittedly it’s only available towards the end of the game and then only via a secret unlock, but even so it’s just so damn awesome. The animations are also pretty amazing too. We cannot stress enough how much this game needs to be in your life right now, so buy it already.