It’s taken a few weeks, but the Royal Mails customs processing staff have finally released my Japanese media order for the month, admittedly along with a fairly significant customs charge in tow. Given how long, thin and three-times-the-size of the disks I ordered the box was, I guess it’s not really all that surprising that it caught Customs attention.

It seems to me that I used to be far more in the habit of posting about R2 DVD releases that I’ve purchased, largely because it’s pretty easy content to generate – there wasn’t much thought required to come up with something to write about it, particularly when no-one else was talking about the omake featurettes that appeared on them. I seem to have stopped doing these things, though. As much as I’d like to think it’s because I’ve decided that posting such things is a little too much like an obnoxious display of overt wealth (even though I’m not actually wealthy), it is, in fact, probably more to do with the fact that I don’t have any way of taking screencaps from Blu-ray disks, and recent R2 releases I’ve been buying haven’t really had much in the way of physical extras to talk about. Next month is the first new Haruhi release, though – maybe I should start running a pool as to whether all my random extras will feature Koizumi?

Speaking of physical extras, the reason why the box proved to be such a funny shape was because this thing had been stuck into it…

What is it, might you ask? Well, unravelling it reveals that it’s…

Absolutely nothing to do with Sora Kake Girl (Psych?). Yes, I’ve been buying the Garden of Sinners LE’s as they’ve been releasing them (I’m a sucker for the Kajiura CDs packed in with them), and CDJapan threw in one of the sales posters with my order of the most recent release. It’s been a while since they’ve done that – I used to get them all the time five or six years ago. It’s just a shame that I don’t have anywhere to hang the thing, I’d kind of like to frame and hang this one on the wall. Maybe one day…

And, yes, I really am buying the Kurokami blu-rays. No, I don’t know why, particularly given that the show’s going to be getting a US BR release at no doubt a far, far lower price, and probably before the Japanese release is even finished. I do realise, however, that I seem to be pretty much the only one buying the Kurokami release – sales in Japan seem to be so atrocious that the volumes aren’t even showing up on the weekly sales totals. I have to imagine that, rather than being due to the quality of the show itself (which is pretty averaging – it has it’s moments, but whilst rarely great, I’ve not been finding it as aggressively terrible as some have suggested, and certainly no worse than some far better selling titles), it had the unfortunate timing of hitting at around the same time as the whole Hetalia-fuelled anti-Korean sentiment within Japanese anime fandom.

Sales of Sora Kake Girl, whilst not amazing, are thankfully not quite so terrible. Sales seem to have settled down to the 3500-4000-ish mark for the BR and DVD releases combined, with most of those sales being the BR version. It’s less than half of the kind of numbers that the HiME franchise was doing per-volume, but it’s better than Xenoglossia at least.

To tie things back to where I started, I do wonder how the lack of first-pressing extras is effecting the Sora Kake sales – since the first volumes LE Weiss Schwarz card, there’s been nothing. The only extras which actually ship with the disks are the booklets, which whilst nice (and including a short story with each volume – shame I don’t do moonspeak), aren’t a limited item. There’s no incentive to pick the release up soon, and I doubt the second Weiss Schwarz card with volume five is really going to change matters.

Let It Do Sports! The ads’ for Shishidou products on the back of the booklets make me laugh.
I’ve completely gotten off the point of why I was going to talk about this volume, actually – I was really prompted into wanting to talk about this volume by it’s on-disk content. Specifically, with the cover girl of this volume being fan second-favourite Takane (the actual favourite probably being serial Lum-cosplayer Tsutsuji), she gets the picture drama for this volume.

This means that this disk contains almost as much Takane content, and certainly more Takane dialogue, than the rest of the series combined. I figured that this was a matter worth highlighting.

Being Sora Kake, this also means that picture drama in question starts with a spot of casual nudity, though those who watched through the previous volumes episodes would have already been treated to Takane-norks due to Sunrises comprehensive demisting efforts. Otherwise, it’s full of the usual fanservice-type content as Takane talks about her school days and a guy she used to know. Whilst I appreciate the variety of costumes on display, I do question the value of the swimsuit shot when they start the thing with her completely nude. It seems kind of redundant to me.

There’s not much else to say about this release – it starts off that awesome Baseball episode that seemingly turned half the audience off the show, and ends with that episode where Nami crowbars all the maids. That means the next volume starts with the Shishidous getting dramatically screwed over by Nerval. Yay!

Redundant Hotness?
Speaking of the next volume, the cover girl is Nami. The omake feature is confirmed as being her as well, and, continuing their whole Vocaloid thing the show has had going, will feature cameos by Hatsune Miku, Rin and Ren (and presumably Nami in the bath at some point). The volume after that has BouMin on the cover, and given that the omake name is something like “The Girls who Leapt to Food”, I’d imagine that’s going to feature them as well…