Kara No Kyoukai – Garden Of Sinners Complete Blu-ray Box

I have to admit that I really like Kara no Kyoukai (空の境界). I’ve spent $565 USD to purchase all volumes of the Kara no Kyoukai Limited Edition DVD just about a year ago. Yet on hearing the news that on February 2, 2011, a complete Blu-ray box was released in Japan containing all 7 films and a new bonus chapter, I eagerly place my order on Amazon.co.jp. At the time Amazon.co.jp was listing it at 36,664 JPY + 2,000 JPY shipping making it a total of about $470 USD. Expensive, certainly. But it is definitely cheaper than the $565 USD I spent to get the complete set of limited edition DVDs. And since I should get better picture quality from the Blu-ray discs plus a nice Visual Chronical Book. I though it was a pretty good deal. Luckily it only gets better. Soon after, Aniplex of America announced that they are going to do a North America release of it. Right Stuf listed the item at $398.98 USD with free shipping. After looking at all the release information and compared pictures, I believed that the North America version will be identical to that of the Japanese release. So being adventurous here, I cancelled my Amazon.co.jp order and placed the order with Right Stuf for a $80 USD saving. Right Stuf shipped the item on February 8th, the North America release date. Unfortunately being out side of USA, I only got the item at the beginning of March. And now finally I’ve found some time to take some pictures of it.

Here’s the shipping box of the Kara no Kyoukai Blu-ray box. The box is identical to that of the Japanese version. The text and all that on the box are all Japanese. Seeing that, I finally can relax. I saved $80 USD and I got the same thing as the Japanese release. Great!

 

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Itazura Bank

This is Itazura Bank (いたずらBANK) made by Shine. Itazura (いたずら or 悪戯 in Japanese) simply means mischief or prank, but I am going to call this Naughty Kitty Coin Bank in English. It’s been out for a while now, I think I first seen it just as the year 2010 arrives. Now as much as it looked interesting back then, I never got my hand on one. A few weeks ago Hobby Link Japan listed  for a price of 1,530 JPY, which I think is pretty cheap, so I bought it. There are four different models of Naughty Kitty Coin Bank and there are four models of Naughty Puppy Coin Bank. Each model has a different box print and a different cat/dog. The item is since sold out from Hobby Link Japan. However, another trusted shop J-List still has it in stock for a slightly higher price of $28 USD. J-List ships some item from USA while some from Japan so those of you in North America might pay slightly cheaper shipping than directly from Japan.

Well here we go. The coin bank came in a transparent box which allow you to see pretty much the entire coin bank clearly.

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Recent anime related merchandise purchases

I’ve received some not so usual purchases recently and decided to take a few casual shot of these items and make a post about it. The first is the complete set of Kara no Kyoukai (空の境界) Limited Edition DVDs. I actually didn’t get a chance to watch Kara no Kyoukai until end of 2009. Watched it and really liked it. Now I was not really blown away by the animation nor was the story that drove me to really like the series, they are good but not the driving factors for me. The one that drove me to spend such a large amount of money to buy this entire DVD set from Japan was that, the concept and philosophy within this series (with many references to Buddhist teaching) are very much similar to what I have established myself. Typically a series that want to just through in a few ideas tends to have many holes even at a very high level. But this series, I found that I actually agrees with their reasoning process and view of the philosophy, and that intrigues me so much so that I ended up buying the entire series from half a globe away.

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