The Wonder Egg Priority “Episode 13” release date has been confirmed to be scheduled for midnight on Tuesday, Jun 29, 2021.
It will be streaming on Hulu, FUNimation, and other platforms. The final episode will be one hour long, including commercial breaks, so it’ll be the equivalent of two episodes when streaming.
The episode is officially called Wonder Egg Priority Special Edition since it’s considered a continuation of Wonder Egg Priority Episode 12, which released on March 30, 2021.
The Wonder Egg Priority Blu-Ray/DVD box sets will also include the final episode. The first volume is already on sale, but Volume 2 comes out on May 26, 2021, while Volume 3 releases on August 25, 2021.
The special Wonder Priority “Episode 13” will be packaged with the third and final BD volume.
It should be noted that the Special Edition episode is actually Wonder Egg Priority Episode 12. But since the recap episode was labeled as Episode 8 that meant the final episode count was increase to include Wonder Egg Priority “Episode 13”.
A Wonder Egg Priority Special Edition trailer was released as part of the announcement.
FUNimation’s Wonder Egg Priority Episode 12 release date delayed twice
Even the Wonder Egg Priority Episode 12 release date was delayed for streaming on FUNimation. At first, it was delayed until 4 PM EST, but then it was pushed back once again to 7 PM EST.
According to FUNimation’s official Twitter page, the cause was “due to a delay in materials delivery”, which is unusual.
What is even more unusual is that Episode 12 was announced by the Wonder Egg Priority’s anime official website to be the “final episode” of the anime TV series. But then several days later the official website stated, “Please look forward to the conclusion of the story of the four girls in Wonder Egg Priority Special Edition.”
Wonder Egg Priority delays blamed on the crazy production schedule
The anime industry is infamous for animators being overworked and production schedules pushing the studio staff to the limit. The reason that Episode 12 was delayed was due to the Japanese anime studio working on the episode the very day it was supposed to be released.
kVin of Sakugo Blog explained the situation on Twitter:
“Now that the gig is up and they’ve announced WEP’s actual finale let me say that the committee (Aniplex’s?) attempts to hide the tremendous mess the production was in by giving a regular episode number to the unplanned recap has been pathetic. This team deserves so much better.
“Even people without access to insider info have seen it. Voice acting agencies accidentally spoiling future developments because the episode numbers were off after the unplanned recap. The official account having to delete a post because the physical script had the ‘wrong’ number.
“You can’t hide the fact that your plans crashed so bad you can’t even broadcast the whole show, just own up to your mistakes and try to do better. It’s annoying since many WEP fans who don’t necessarily notice the telling cracks in the production have been bewildered about the news.
A lot of professionals in the anime industry are ridiculously good at hiding the fundamental problems with the schedules and workloads they’re given, to the point that it becomes harder for fans to notice how bad things are. Apply that to an exceptional production like WEP and.it becomes even harder for your average viewer to tell when things have gone wrong, even though in this case they *really* did. Today’s episode was finished hours ago and isn’t even the ending point they originally intended! But that’s kinda bad publicity, so gotta hide it. (Again, you can’t hide it.)”
In this case, the Wonder Egg Priority anime was produced by Studio CloverWorks, which is known for producing the popular Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai anime, co-producing Darling in the FranXX, and the Fate/Grand Order anime series.
In Spring 2021, they also released the Horimiya anime and The Promised Neverland Season 2 (which also suffered from production quality issues).
Even before the first episode premiered it was reported that the team working on the WEP anime was underdoing unusually bad production crunch.
“When people used to working under anime’s poor conditions point out that a project has gotten scary, it’s because it really has,” Sakuga Blog pointed out.
A recap episode was introduced in order to give the team a breather. While that’s not too uncommon in the anime industry, the problem is that a different anime TV series is slotted to take over WEP’s time slot in Japanese TV broadcasting on April 6, 2021.
That’s the real reason why the Wonder Egg Priority Special Edition release date was scheduled for late Spring 2021. They simply ran out of time and now everyone knows it.
Let’s just hope all this craziness isn’t enough to kill the chances of a Wonder Egg Priority Season 2 anime. Stay tuned!