Crunchyroll Launching On Wii U This Thursday

Joshawott

Joshawott

Monsieur Monster
AUKN Staff
For a while now, fans of Japanese anime and Asian drama series' in Europe have been able to stream thousands of hours worth of content to various device, from phones, tablets, smart TVs and even Microsoft's video game consoles through a dedicated application for the&nbsp;<strong style="line-height:1.6em">Crunchyroll</strong>&nbsp;streaming service and now, the company is expanding their reach even further.

On Christmas Day last year, Crunchyroll launched an official application for their service on the Wii U's Nintendo eShop in North America,&nbsp;marking the first time their service has been available on a Nintendo console. At the time, an official announcement from the company mentioned plans to expand the service to other territories in early 2015 and now, through a press release announcing this week's upcoming downloads, Nintendo of Europe have announced that the Crunchyroll application will be coming to European Wii U owners when the digital store updates on <strong>Thursday 8th January</strong>&nbsp;- just in time for the Winter 2015 season!

A premium membership is required to use the Wii U's Crunchyroll application, but you can start a 14 Day Free Trial.&nbsp;

Source
 
Ha, I don't have a Wii U but it's great to see that it's being brought over so quickly. I wish we could get the PS3 app officially too since persuading people to make a second account just to download it isn't all that easy (c'mon, Sony).

R
 
robot monkey said:
Strange move for a relatively unpopular system, but I suppose it's not going to cost them much supporting it.
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You make it sound like they didn't release a PlayStation Vita application in North America xD.

The Wii U is of course nowhere near where the PS4 and XBox One are (well, except in Japan where everything smashes the XB1), but 2014 was a pretty good year for the Wii U. Key titles like Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. have done a lot for the system, which combined with the impressive first-party schedule for 2015, has likely resulted in making developing for the Wii U more desirable.
 
It would be cool if you could stream it to the gamepad so you could free up the TV (or vice versa) or use the browser etc at the same time. I wonder if that's the case?
 
qaiz said:
It would be cool if you could stream it to the gamepad so you could free up the TV (or vice versa) or use the browser etc at the same time. I wonder if that's the case?
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As our application is no doubt 100% identical to the North American one, you will be able to stream Crunchyroll to the Wii U GamePad as the GamePad screen basically mimics the TV screen all the time.

black1blade said:
I would think ps4 is a priority though.
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There's been a lot of speculation about Sony not allowing Crunchyroll on their systems in Europe, due to it competing with Animax.
 
Joshawott said:
As our application is no doubt 100% identical to the North American one, you will be able to stream Crunchyroll to the Wii U GamePad as the GamePad screen basically mimics the TV screen all the time.
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Thanks for the info. That's awesome, the gamepad screen isn't the best but it's really convenient to just be able to stream stuff to it, so I'm glad that's possible. Do you have any idea if the gamepad does anything else in regards to display info of the show/synopsis etc while you're watching or multitask etc or is it just always a mirror of the show? Maybe I'm asking for too much lol :p Thanks in any case! Seems to be a great addition to the Wii U.
 
qaiz said:
Joshawott said:
As our application is no doubt 100% identical to the North American one, you will be able to stream Crunchyroll to the Wii U GamePad as the GamePad screen basically mimics the TV screen all the time.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the info. That's awesome, the gamepad screen isn't the best but it's really convenient to just be able to stream stuff to it, so I'm glad that's possible. Do you have any idea if the gamepad does anything else in regards to display info of the show/synopsis etc while you're watching or multitask etc or is it just always a mirror of the show? Maybe I'm asking for too much lol :p Thanks in any case! Seems to be a great addition to the Wii U.
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It's just a mirror of the TV screen unfortunately. So the application isn't built around the Wii U hardware as well as say, Netflix and YouTube are.

There's already a number of people suggesting that Crunchyroll patches in support for the Pro Controller, so maybe an update could freshen things up in the future?
 
The application is now live on the Wii U eShop, unless you somehow don't have 74.2MB free.

I've just downloaded and opened it. It's pretty much identical to the PlayStation 3 app, with the GamePad mirroring everything the main TV screen does (so you'll want to turn the volume down on the GamePad if using the TV!). Aside from when you input your log-in details, the application makes no use of the touch screen either.

It does however, have a Miiverse community.
 
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