Viz Media

Viz Media
Welcome to Viz Media!
Founded: July 2, 1986 Industry: Entertainment Founder(s): Seiji Horibuchi Headquarters: San Francisco, California, U.S. Key people: Ken Sasaki (President and CEO) Hidemi Fukuhara (Vice-President) Owner: Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions/ShoPro Divisions: Viz Productions (film and television) Website: www.viz.com

Viz Media is a manga, anime, and entertainment licensing company founded in 1986 by Seiji Horibuchi.

Why They Rock

1. Along with Funimation, Viz Media dubs anime with talented voice actors who put emotion, care, effort, and love into their character roles.
2. Aside from anime, Viz Media also translates manga, including manga books from various franchises such as Fushigi Yugi, Splatoon, Super Mario-Kun and The Legend of Zelda manga series. They even distributed the entire Legend of Zelda: "A Link to the Past" comic series that appeared in Nintendo Power into one big comic book.
3. They are both an anime and manga licensing company. That itself is usually rare and is an awesome business concept since they can localize both mediums that are popular in Japan and made from Japan.
4. They have licensed many acclaimed anime series such as Hamtaro, Inuyasha, Dragon Ball (manga only), Naruto, One Piece (manga only), Bleach, One Punch Man, Nepos Napos, Kirarin Revolution, Death Note, and Monster.
5. Most of their dubs are very well done.
6. Most of their subtitle translations are faithful to the original Japanese versions of the anime they have acquired.
7. Same with Funimation, they stopped censoring their acquired licenses and improved for the future.
8. Their Sailor Moon dub has not only been shown to be a huge improvement over the godawful DIC/Cloverway dub, it was the dub that brought the entire 5th season to the west.

Bad Qualities

1. On most of their Blu-ray releases, they lock subtitles onto place when the audio setting is changed to Japanese. This is intended to prevent Japanese fans from importing their releases (Japan and North America have Region A-coded Blu-rays, and American sets are cheaper than Japanese sets), but is a huge and complete disservice to people who understand Japanese without the need of subtitles. Even Funimation and Sentai Filmworks are guilty of the same practice.
2. They recently hired D.J. Kirkland, who is infamous for supporting political censorship and insulting anime fans, which caused massive backlash.
3. They can often translate bad such as Beastars.
4. Some of their DVD's and Blu-ray releases get the overpricing treatment. But most commonly with the complete season Pokémon DVD's as examples. The Master Quest (Series 5) and Indigo League (Series 1) re-release DVDs cost almost up to $40 (for Indigo League) or $50 (Master Quest), which are really unfair prices for any DVD.
   • Even the Champion's Edition release gets the highest price ranging up to almost $70, mainly due to the amount of episodes Series 1 had.
5. When they put their releases on streaming services like Tubi TV, they tend to put the subbed versions instead of the dubs for reasons unknown.

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