“Hi Score Girl” Visual © Rensuke Oshikiri / SQUARE ENIX
It looks like this one’s ready to enter its initials in the annals of history again.
Earlier today, news broke that Rensuke Oshikiri’s Hi Score Girl manga will receive an anime TV series. The show is set to air in July.
As of press time, no further details have been announced on the project.
The eighth volume of the Hi Score Girl anime hits Japanese retailers on March 24. An anime adaptation was originally announced in 2013, though progress was stalled due to legal concerns.
The Hi Score Girl manga was pulled from publication in 2014, following an incident in which the Osaka police department’s Consumer and Economic Crime Division searched the offices of Square Enix’s headquarters, as well as locations linked to the publisher.
Game publisher SNK alleged that the Hi Score Girl manga contained over 100 instances of unauthorized uses of characters from various SNK-Playmore properties. The King of Fighters and Samurai Spirits were among the named properties. Moreover, the end notes of compiled volumes contained a copyright notice that includes SNK, complete with the © mark, which implies that some form of consent was granted for the characters’ usage.
SNK alleged that they found out about the infringements in the summer of 2013, when a Tokyo-based production company approached SNK for permission to use their properties in an anime adaptation of the title.
SNK Playmore formally filed a formal complaint in May 2014. According to Article 119, Section 1 of the Copyright Law of Japan, such a filing required the company to press criminal charges. According to SNK, the company repeatedly requested that Square Enix stop publishing the title, both in collected volumes and in print, though Square Enix never gave a real response to the matter.
In October 2014, Square Enix filed counter-suit against SNK Playmore, claiming that Square was willing to reveal that SNK’s claims were invalid. The charges were officially settled between the two parties on August 24, 2015, when SNK Playmore officially filed documents in the Osaka District Court dropping its criminal charges.
The Hi Score Girl manga returned to publication in Square Enix’s Monthly Big Gangan magazine in July 2016.
Rensuke Oshikiri’s Hi Score Girl launched in Monthly Big Gangan in 2010. To date, seven volumes have been released, with volume 8 hitting stores on March 24. Manga resource Baka-Updates describes the title as:
The year is 1991 and 6th grader Yaguchi Haruo only has video games to live for. He’s not popular in school and he’s neither handsome, funny, nice nor even friendly. The only thing he has going for him is that he is good at video games. One day at the local arcade, he plays Oono Akira, a fellow classmate but who’s popular, smart, pretty and a rich girl that absolutely destroys him at Street Fighter II. Not only does he lose to her 30 times in a row, he can’t beat her at any game. Haruo can’t seem to shake Akira off as she follows him from arcade to arcade everyday after school and beats him every time. As weird as it sounds, the odd pair begins a strange bond and friendship.
Source: Otakomu, Ryokutya 2089
