Nigorimasen! Blog

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This week, Best Buy is having a 50% off sale on select anime box sets. (I was tipped onto this earlier in the week from this thread on Cheap Ass Gamer but waited until now to write about it so as not to get anyone in trouble.) The titles being discounted are:

• Tokko: The Complete Series - $12.49
• Elfen Lied: Diclonius Report Thinpak- $15.99
• Noein Complete Series Box Set - $17.49
• Dragon Ball Z Season 4 Uncut Box Set - $19.99
• Mars Daybreak Anime Legends Set - $19.99
• Fullmetal Alchemist Season 2 Part 2 (ep. 41-51) - $19.99
• Neon Genesis Evangelion Platinum Thinpak - $28.99
• Samurai Deeper Kyo Complete with GBA game - $29.99 [game trailer]
• Robotech Protoculture: Collection (85 dub-only episodes) - $37.49

These prices are also now up online while some of them already backordered. I’ll going to get Noein and Tokko for sure, and perhaps Elfen Lied, and pump up my Reward Zone points in the process while also snagging R.E.M.’s new album this week. Maybe I’ll get xxxHolic #1 as well…

P.S. A warning: the Eva thinpak discs lack the extras from the singles, something I found out during my interview with Sean McCoy who had done a couple episode commentaries for #20 and #26. I believe the Elfen Lied thinpak also lacks its previous extras.

I feel bad that I haven’t been posting as much as I would like due to school picking up again. However, I don’t feel really bad since I haven’t had much to write about lately. Anyway, yesterday afternoon, I found something to center a composition around. I was in Fry’s to ask about a recording device for some kind of security camera setup for my house at the co-op and after I got pointed in the right direction and took some notes, I wandered over the games section to see if they had any deals. There weren’t many but there WAS something that surprised me.

Plentiful shrinkwrapped copies of Katamari Damacy at its original price of $20! (The game is also “in stock” on frys.com at the same price.) By comparison, Gamestop only has used copies priced at $29.99, ten dollars more. I didn’t have a PS2 back when it was released in the summer of 2004 but now that I own one, I instantly grabbed one off the shelf while wondering why this store still had a fair number of new copies three years after its release.
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The September and December 2007 issues of Shonen Ace, respectively.

Last week I ordered two issues of Shonen Ace from Akadot Retail mainly for the pack-in extras (got the tip for December from Furu Anime Panikku) and got them in the mail Wednesday. The “appendix” for September’s issue was a Haruhi battery-operated fan while December had a medium size Evangelion T-shirt meant to celebrate the 13th anniversary of Shonen Ace. More pictures after the jump.

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Last night, I was browsing through the top song charts of various countries’ iTunes Stores and I was surprised to find “Sousei no Aquarion” by Akino, the first opening theme to the anime of the same name, on the Japanese chart. I then thought to myself, “Hey, wasn’t that one of Funimation’s Kickoff ‘07 licenses?” I checked and found I was right but then I began to wondering why I hadn’t heard anything about an upcoming release. The landing page for Aquarion says “Coming Fall 2007″, which seems to be a projection that be missed since it’s almost winter and there’s still no definite word. Meanwhile the other six titles seem to be doing fine.
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Before this week, the downloadable episodes that ADV Films was selling through its website were priced at $4.99 each, much higher than anime on iTunes albeit ADV’s stuff was at a much higher bitrate as well. Now the company has announced that it has begun offering downloads of “over 500 episodes” from 32 series for $1.99. Sounds good, right? Well, maybe not if you look at what you’re getting for your two bucks.
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AnimeNation is now selling the first four episodes of Girls’ High through streaming Windows Media for $1.99 a piece, which seems to be the company’s first foray into non-adult PPV content. I watched the first episode of Girls’ High on the preview DVD in the first issue of Otaku USA and thought it was okay. It was funny in parts but not enough for me to want to purchase the first volume. However, since I am curious about how new anime distribution systems function (see my previous posts about ADV Universe and iTunes), I decided to give it a shot.
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Last week, I foolishly bought 25 Geneon DVDs for $100 from RightStuf and they arrived at my regular home Wednesday, waiting for me until I came home from Davis on Friday. The problem is that I had to pack three small boxes to take home the discs that I had in my apartment. While I was carrying them to the car, I came to the realization that I have too many DVDs (anime and domestic films).
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I can’t believe that it took reading about Bandai Visual’s rather high pricing of the Gunbuster and fans’ reaction to it at SakuraCon last weekend to get me to write a post after a ten-day absence. My explanation is that I was distracted by a bunch of things including classes, chores, laundry, compiling my radio playlist, spending Easter day with my family, anime club, and watching the first season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on DVD. In that span of time, I start writing a couple of entries but I wasn’t able to finish them to my liking so I just moved on. In case you want to know, the first one would have been posted on Easter about religion in anime and would have focused on Scrapped Princess, FMA, and Chrono Crusade while the second was an informational post about MyAnimeList. Anyway, I apologize in advance if this is a relatively long post but I have a lot of stuff I want to discuss.

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One of my 2007 predictions came true last week when Funimation launched its Funimation Channel on iTunes last Tuesday. That day I decided to plunk down 2 bucks to see what kind of quality the episodes are. Yes, I know they are dubbed only and I’m fine with that. I picked the first episode of Samurai 7 because I hadn’t seen it before. Now, I would have posted about this last week when it was actually news but my attempts to record a screencast came up not so good so I’ll have to settle for something more pictorial.
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This week I received three different packages from three different places that I had been expecting for a while. I’ll try to write stuff up about each of these soon but, like the Sac-Anime audio I promised to post, I’m not promising anything. (About the interviews, I might just eschew transcripts and put them all in a single post.) But back to the topic at hand…

First: the Excel Saga Imperfect Collection from Best Buy. While I was home during winter break, I ordered this from an in-store kiosk for $18 (thanks to the CAG forums) because 1) it wasn’t being stocked anywhere anymore ever since the Thinpak Collection was released and 2) the kiosk prices can be much lower than what’s online. Now I have two copies of Volume 1 which isn’t a problem but still a little annoying.
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