2020 has been a very busy year for Patch Café with all of the Shaman King news that has occurred around the world. While the website hasn’t had too many articles, the twitter account (@ShamanKingNews) has been very busy. We’ve still averaged about one new article on the site a month, but the length and scope of those have significantly increased. With new licenses and new series coming out there has been some more pages created to help connect fans to the latest information, such as the English Shaman King Digital Manga Purchasing Guide. Looking ahead to what’s coming with the new anime series in Japan and even more updates from around the world… it looks like we are just ramping up from here!
The long standing goal of Patch Café was to be a blend between a news site and long-form knowledge for Shaman King that wasn’t being captured elsewhere on the internet. Not too many anime/manga-fandoms have a dedicated site or resource for gathering that information. Often it’s formatted into wikis, which can have their purpose, but may not work in all cases. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the content on this website and from our Twitter in 2020.
So with all of that in mind, you might be wondering what improvements we have planned for this website in 2021. While still subject to change, since who knows what new things will come our way, we have some stuff being worked on for the near future.
More Video Content
Earlier this year we asked which style of content our readers would be interested in seeing. The winning vote was for video-style, which works for certain types of content. Earlier this month we launched our first video, Shaman King: The Super Star – Story Arcs – Explained!. It was a good starting point to figure out how to go about this. We have a bunch of other video ideas lined up and will be working on them soon. To help spread this knowledge around the world, we will also continue to try and provide subtitles to the videos for accessibility. No specific release dates/cycle for more videos yet, but we wanted to start off with smaller scale videos first and work up into more longer form video essays.
Language/Regional Updates for Upcoming Product Releases
With the Shaman King manga being licensed around the world, the number of product releases has really jumped up. We’ve tried to keep it up to date on our Upcoming Releases calendar, but it could get a bit confusing with multiple releases that have similar names.
To help fix this, we’ll be adding in new separate calendars by language in the near future. For example, if you want to just see all of the upcoming French-language releases, they’ll all be on the same page. There will still be a calendar for all international releases too.
We’ve updated the page a bit more within the last 2 months, but we will continue to improve it and add more information.
Updates to the Product Catalog
Continuing with the updates to the Release Calendar, more updates to the Product Catalog will be added. Sadly the updates to this feature on the website has fallen behind over the last year or so. Coming in 2021 we will have a renewed focus to fill in the missing releases since our last update. New categories and filters will be added for sorting once all of the new products have been added. We also hope to have these be directly linked to the Upcoming Release Calendar so that you can flow directly into more information about all of these releases. We have hundreds of releases to add, and we already had over 1700 products listed from around the world. So this will take us a little while, but hopefully it will be worth the wait! We know that even more products are planned to come out in 2021 so we’ll want to close that gap.
Redesign for Upcoming Manga Chapter Releases
Our Shonen Magazine Edge Chapter Listing page has started to become a bit troublesome to navigate. With new series coming out monthly (Shaman King: The Super Star, Shaman King: Marcos, & Shaman King: & a Garden) across two separate magazines in Japan the current layout just doesn’t work as well.
We’re going to rebuild that page to be more useful and more expandable based on all of the series currently running in Japan. This should hopefully provide an easier resource to see at a glance what chapters came out in Japan this month and in previous months.
Restructuring of Old Articles/Pages
With the new anime series, multiple new manga series, and a resurgence of the classic manga around the world… some of our older content on this website can be a bit harder to find. When new content is added, it may be harder to find some of the older long form articles we’ve worked on (such as the roughly-English translated interviews).
We will be going back through some of the older content and retagging/categorizing the articles to make them easier to find. So if you are a new reader to Patch Café you can more quickly jump into and find depth of content we’ve collected over the years.
New Website Layout/Design
Speaking of over the years… This website is now over 9 years old and hasn’t really changed its layout or design all that much. But with the focus on some longer form content, a more rich backlog of articles, new types of content like videos, and even more focus on mobile/on-the-go reading, it’s time for a new coat of paint. The same content that you’ve enjoyed over the years isn’t going anywhere, just going to try and make it easier to get to. “Blog post” style of posts make it a bit challenge to read and slow down the loading of the site quite a bit.
With the new design, we will be looking for ways to better integrate some of the content posted onto Twitter back into the website. This may include weekly/bi-weekly/monthly “news round-up” type posts and including the monthly product releases images. With the restructuring mentioned for the older content, this should hopefully fit into that news round-up structure as well. So if you don’t follow us on Twitter there will still be an archive of data that you can search and access.
More Data-Articles from the History of Shaman King
While it’s great to look forward, sometimes collecting information about things you’ve missed is good too. Maybe sometimes about hindsight. Either way, in addition to all of the stuff listed above and continuing the stuff we have been doing, there will be some more pages of new content that we will be adding to the site. Similar to the Manga License table, we will continue to add in content to these pages as part of our ongoing research in the history of the Shaman King series from around the world. While the Shaman King fan community may not be the biggest one out there, hopefully we can help separate it apart from other communities and strive to have one of the most detailed recorded history of its expansion around the world.
Again, thank you for all of the readers who have come by to this website or followed us on Twitter. We will keep on doing what we have been doing into 2021 and add on a bunch more to make it even better. Please look forward to our next article coming soon which is our annual tradition of predicting the headlines for next year!
