GANGSTA. (Collector’s Edition Blu-ray) Unboxing

GANGSTA. (ギャングスタ) is a 2015 television anime series based on Kohske’s manga series of the same name. The series was adapted by studio Manglobe, and the staff credits include director Shūkō Murase with series director Koichi Hatsumi, series composition writer Shinichi Inotsume, character designer Yōichi Ueda, and music composed by Tsutchie. The series first aired in Japan on July 2015, distributed by Bandai Visual.

Note: This post has been updated in May 2024 to reflect the current blog layout and some minor tweaks to the original write-up.

Background:

“In the city of Ergastulum, a shady ville filled with made men and petty thieves, whores on the make and copes on the take, there are some deeds too dirty for even its jaded inhabitants to touch. Enter the “Handymen”, Nic and Worick, who take care of the jobs no one else will handle.

Until the day when a cop they know on the force requests their help in taking down a new gang muscling in on the territory of a top Mafia family, it seems like business (and mayhem) as usual, but the Handymen are about to find that this job is a lot more than they bargained for…”

Plot Synopsis via Anime Limited, December 2017.

Studio Manglobe animated a lot of anime over the years, but unfortunately GANGSTA. was their very last project alongside Project Itoh: Genocidal Organ. The studio closed down which resulted in this series having distribution issues, but thankfully the Blu-ray version was released and made available for the distributors outside of Japan including Funimation and Anime Limited.

GANGSTA. was a very solid and interesting series but you can tell the quality does dip as the series comes to an end and sadly there’s no wrap up conclusion or satisfying stopping point so you are left asking for more, but Viz Media did license and release the manga for fans to continue the story from there.

GANGSTA. was acquired by Funimation and they had both streaming and home video rights for the United Kingdom, Ireland, United States and Canadian territories, but for the former they sub-licensed it over to Anime Limited for home video on its behalf.

However, licensing issues began in early 2019 that was caused by Funimation stepping into the UK market directly by acquiring UK distributor Manga Entertainment. As a result, GANGSTA. alongside dozens of other Funimation titles that Anime Limited had the UK home video rights for, went out of print without notice or cancelled before release. Therefore sadly this series is no longer available in print for the UK & Ireland so good luck finding copies for the show on home video.

Collector’s Edition Contents:

Anime Limited provided GANGSTA. with a collector’s edition release which was no surprise for two reasons – the first was that the series was well received by fans despite the production issues, and Funimation themselves also provided their own limited edition for their North American audience.

This release is presented with a rigid box containing an digipack housing the Blu-ray discs, in addition to a 40-page booklet. The booklet included information on the series, designs and more.

The artwork is free of any information or BBFC content and the info sheet covers the information and specification like previous Anime Limited releases. The collector’s edition Blu-ray was 1000 units printed for an SRP of £59.99. A standard edition DVD was made available at the same time, whilst a standard Blu-ray was not released.

The series was purchased during their 12 Days of Christmas sale where unsold stock was made available once again for a low price.

Physical Contents:

• Rigid Box with Digipack packaging and clean artwork
• Info sheet for specification and BBFC description
• 40-page Booklet

On-Disc Contents:

Distributor: Anime Limited
Released: 4th December 2017

The collector’s edition release for GANGSTA. contains all 12 episodes of the series across two Blu-ray discs, with the encode & authoring done by Funimation. The audio options available are Japanese with English subtitles and the Funimation English dub.

The white subtitles were locked during playback and the disc regions were locked to Blu-ray players set to B.

Blu-ray Specs:

Languages	English, Japanese
Audio	English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Japanese Dolby TrueHD 2.0
Video	1080p High Definition Native format 16:9 aspect ratio
Region	B
Subtitles	English
Locked Subtitles	Yes
Discs	2 (1 BD-50, 1 BD-25)

Blu-ray On-Disc Extra Features:

Disc 1:

• English Audio Commentary for Episode 1

Disc 2:

• English Video Commentary for Episode 2
• Episode 9.5 (Recap Special)
• Promotional Videos
• Commercials
• Textless Opening “Renegade” Ver. 1
• Textless Opening “Renegade” Ver. 2
• Textless Closing “Yoru no Kuni” Ver. 1
• Textless Closing “Yoru no Kuni” Ver. 2
• Funimation Trailers

Unboxing Photos:

Final Notes:

GANGSTA. was available to own on Blu-ray & DVD by Anime Limited in the UK & Ireland, but the rights have expired and reverted back to Funimation. Since then, there’s been no word on a UK re-release.