About a week ago, I said that I bought about 170 dollars worth of stuff. About two years ago, I'd be buying stuff like figures and collectibles from Japan on a monthly basis. But my interest in this kind of stuff had since died down, and I haven't bought this much stuff in around 9 months. Well, I guess you'd know by now, that in the end I gave into my consumerist urges! So today, I'd like to give a review of the stuff I bought: the Key 10th Memorial Box. And yes, my decision to buy this may have something to do with how much I liked Charlotte...

The Key 10th Memorial Box was released sometime in 2009. As the name suggests, this collector's item was released in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Key's founding. I'm a pretty big Key fan myself (for better or worse), and I've wanted to buy this for a very long time. But for a long time, I was also turned off by its hefty price-tag: 14,800 yen, when it was first released. And since it's a limited edition item, it becomes really hard to find this item six years after its release. So when I saw this item finally float up in Mandarake, I bought it immediately. Shipping included, the box cost me 170 dollars, which isn't that bad at all considering the good condition of the box.

As you'd expect from a collector's item of this calibre, the box is packed full of good stuff. First, the box contains all-age versions of every VN Key released up to 2009. This includes Kanon, Air, Clannad, Tomoyo After, Planetarian, and Little Busters. I can see that some people might complain about the removal of H-scenes, although I personally don't care that much. After all, who reads Key VNs for the terrible ero, anyway? My only minor complaint is that the Little Busters case was, perhaps wrongly, labelled as Little Busters Ecstasy (the 18+ version). The VNs also comes with a slim artbook that contains character sketches, commentary and lots of illustrations. Basically, the stuff you'd expect from a typical artbook. 

The box also comes with an assortment of mini-posters, nicely packaged in slim boxes according to the VNs the posters came from. I can't say too much about the posters, since I have no intention of opening them nor putting them up, but they'd probably resemble the mini-posters you can buy from AmiAmi. So nothing out of the ordinary, really, besides the fact that these posters are 'official'. Same goes with the mug, which is really just a standard mug with Key's mascot on it. I rather liked the fact, however, that instead of a boring brown box, the mug's packaging also featured Ayu and Rin (aka Best Key Girl). Nice attention to detail there.

After posters, mugs and the artbook, it's pretty logical that the collector's items should come with a T-shirt as well. Again, nothing too special here, besides the fact that the T-shirt is far, far too big for me. I'm really not sure why they made it so big, especially considering that Japanese T-shirts are usually a size smaller than their Western counterpart. Perhaps this might say something about the real life appearances of the Key fanbase...

The coolest part of the box, in my view, is actually the assortment of alternative covers they provided. For every VN, they've provided about 2-3 covers which you can insert into the DVD cases. Personally, I'm quite impressed with the range of designs and how unique they look. For example, I really liked the alternative designs for Air's cover art. From certain angles, Misuzu's character design can look a bit autistic, but the alternative covers really made Misuzu look a lot prettier. I think that's a general problem with a lot of Key's earlier work, really, since what's considered 'moe' in the early 2000s is borderline autistic by today's standards. But anyway, it was very nice of them to provide the alternative cover art. Really innovative.

So at the end of the day, was the box really worth its price-tag? Well, the instinctive answer is no. Even if you take away the hefty shipping, the items themselves are really just 'official' versions of things you could print off or download yourself. Not to mention that none of these things will most likely get any use - for example, I'll probably never actually wear the T-shirt. But as a collector's item, the box has a lot of value. Almost like how people buy antiques, not to actually use them but rather as an investment. So maybe in forty years, this box might become an antique or something. Would I still be into anime by then? I'm not so sure.