omakase november kill la kill box
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Omakase November KILL la KILL box.
I decided back in October to order a subscription box from Omakase. They are a bit cheaper than other boxes (holy shit there are a lot of anime boxes) since they are every other month instead of every month plus they come with some digital “extras”. They were also featuring KILL la KILL for their first box, and I like KILL la KILL as you probably know. (Their second box is Naruto so I bailed. If they offer a Tamako Market box, I’m in again.) The digital extras were chapter one of Ashley Davis’ Replay and a mini-album from Christina Vee. Neither will swing your vote if you are on the fence about getting a box or not. Viewster might as well not include either and toss in stickers or something. There is a digital video service from Viewster, but the selection was very limited. Most of the shows can be found on Netflix or CR anyway.
The box packaging is actually very nice. I like the design and how well they assembled the box. Right off the bat, there’s a nice card explaining what is in the box. My dog was curious and wandered over to see what I was up to. I got her to pose for some pictures.
The box contains the first KILL la KILL manga volume in a nice gold foil hardcover, a 3 star wristband (which I guess I can wear working out while wearing my 3 star T-shirt), a Senketsu scarf, a Guts button, and a Mako towel. You can buy the manga from Amazon for around $7, so a nicer hardcover version? Maybe $10? The wristband feels like $3-$4. The towel is fairly low in quality, so I’ll say $10. The Guts button feels like something a KILL la KILL con panel might giveaway (I did get manga plus a poster from the AX one). The scarf is also flimsy and low in quality… maybe $7-8. I think the value is just the novelty and rarity of the items, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near a $60 value that they advertise. I think if they threw in a KILL la KILL figurine, it would have made the box make more sense from a value proposition.
The cover is nice, but the inside is still cheap Tokyopop-level manga TPB paper. Is it too much to ask for the nice paper that the original flipped and edited Dark Horse Aa! Megami-sama had?
(Crazy to think that Dark Horse originally published Aa! Megami-sama on very high quality paper, they edited the manga to read the Western way, plus they edited all the sound effects to Western equivalents.)
I wish the fabric for the towel was a bit nicer. It’s not as comfortable as a cheap $8 towel from Target for drying yourself, nor is it nice enough to hang as a display item unless you are a college freshmen with no other options for shit to put on a wall.
The scarf is really thin as well, but it’s a serviceable fun item to wear to a con. It’s mostly used as a dog bandana these days.
I can’t see myself subscribing to this box again. There’s just not enough exciting exclusive items to justify the mystery or the cost. The market for fanboy monthly crates is also very saturated with supply a lot higher than demand, so it will be interesting to see which companies are still offering the service a year from now. I think anime is just hard to make a box for since the field is so varied and diverse so the companies have to play it safe with Naruto or KILL la KILL. Can you imagine how many people would be unhappy for a Tamako Market box? Also, most of the nicer anime goods are expensive. A good figure is going to run $30+. What could the box offer to appeal to people unless they do exclusive, one-time, high quality items? I don’t think that’s possible with a $30 box. Fundamentally, I’m not sure if the market is there or that the economics work out. We’ll see. Prove me wrong.
3 Responses to “omakase november kill la kill box”
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Agreed. Anime is just too varied and there aren’t enough “everyone would like it” series to justify something a la these swag box subscriptions.
I do think they’re going the right direction in making sure their items are exclusive. They just gotta think bigger about it, kinda like how they’re getting more Comic Con anime exclusives.
I see you went in for the box too. And yes, they need better stuff if they want to keep me. I don’t like the Naruto box, but I’ll stick around to refuse the third box is before giving up.
It is difficult to curate a box that can satisfy most people, I agree. For that cost, it’d be cheaper to simply bargain-hunt for exactly what I’d like and prefer on Japanese ‘secondhand’ sites than to let it be randomly decided. I also clicked through all of your anime box links in the post…they’re all filled with goods of western origin (GE mainly) of questionable quality and Japanese goods that couldn’t sell at 50-90% off MSRP in Japan. It is a shame; I’d hoped I’d find something desirable.