It's been a while since we had an episode that actually captured the chaos that is One Piece. The animators clearly were as happy as the rest of us with the introduction of that motorbike. They spent the whole budget on that thing.

So we have one chapter an episode for the entire arc but when we actually get to the part we want to see we go to half a chapter, with lacklustre animation. I give up.

Why do they always have to make the villians out to be morons? Anyway they turned the animation up to eleven when it mattered and look who's here. It's pandafishman.

@Vegard:

Not all of them. I can confirm that the Evangelion movies, as well as the first two sets of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (though annoyingly enough, not the remaining three…) are multi-region (A and B, to be precise). I heard that the Dragon Ball Z BluRays they just started putting out are also multi-region. So we can't really say anything for sure right now about how these One Piece sets will be.

The new Yu-Yu-Hakusho sets are region-free as well but frankly after the Brotherhood debacle, I don't trust them as far as I can throw 'em. If One Piece comes out on Blu-Ray I'm just going to go ahead and buy a new regionfree blu-ray player.

@Antz:

They're actually doing this with the Slayers: Revolution/Evolution-R complete set. It'll be an 8 disc combo pack, unless they decide to re-author the Blu-Rays to increase the episode count on each one(which they won't), which would take it all the way down to 7 discs. Either way, it's a lot of discs to stuff into one case, but it can be done. It just requires a flippy thing in the case and a lot of overlapping discs.

The extra packaging is probably more expensive than the dvds. It's dirt cheap to make them these days.

Ah that's cool. Yeah I guess I'm slightly out of touch. Haven't been buying that much anime lately. Time to get a region-free blu-ray player. Not in the least to finish Brotherhood.

Have Funimation ever done Blu-ray/dvd combo packs? I'm familiar with the concept but I don't think it's ever been used on anime.

Well I checked the sets that are out and there's only two sets with 14 episodes. I can't see them making a habit of that. Let alone go to 15 episodes.

Let's not forget that Funimation is running a business here. They're supposed to make money. 12 episodes per set is a perfectly reasonable amount, not to mention licensing season 5 will be a lot easier if they can use the profits from 5 sets instead of 4.

@Sano:

Here is my predictions on the Season 4 release.

S4V1: Episodes 206 - 217 (12 Episodes)
S4V2: Episodes 218 - 229 (12 Episodes)
S4V3: Episodes 230 - 241 (12 Episodes)
S4V4: Episodes 242 - 253 (12 Episodes)
S4V5: Episodes 254 - 263 (10 Episodes)

Something like that would make sense. Why make 4 sets when you can make 5 and get more money (and use a higher bitrate)