Archive for the ‘Collecting’ Category

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Can Collection Update (& Japan Pickups)

Monday, June 23rd, 2025

It’s been a couple of years since my last can ‘collection’ update, and since I obtained some on each of my last three Japan trips, now seems like a good time. I’ll try to list these additions in chronological order of when I got them.

I did a bunch of attic sorting last year and unearthed the above two. They date from 2019 and were part of series of five cans to promote the Far From Home film. I have no recollection of where or when I got these.

Some more Chinese Ultraman (in this case Tiga and Mebius) cans, purchased from a shop in NYC a few years ago. The contents were sickly sweet and instantly disposed of.

These are both mysteries. I think I got the Bumblebee one during my solo 2023 Japan trip, but perhaps I found it in NYC as well? The Qdol can features Kyo Kusanagi, a character from King Of Fighters, and was found at a local Asian grocer. They only had this character but looking online he was one from a series of six cans.

Last year Coca Cola did a worldwide series of commemorative Marvel cans featuring what I personally think was mundane art of dozens of characters. Above are six of them, five from the USA and one (Groot) I got in Japan.

The Australian cans in this series were different – taller and thinner – and didn’t feature as large a range of characters. I picked these two up in Oz last year.

Back in January I bought the Ultraman coffee can in Nagoya, and despite looking never saw them (there were six different ones) for sale anywhere else. The Ultraman can was bought at a local Asian grocer.

Jessica brought both of these cans of beer back from Japan – still full! – and they feature beautiful art by Hirohiko Araki, the mangaka of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. I don’t read the manga so I don’t know if these are original characters or from the story.

And lastly we have these four. The ENHYPEN can was purchased from a drink machine in Hakodate a couple of weeks ago, and was one of a series of eight cans that I never saw anywhere else. The second is a Hololive energy drink, and was bought at a konbini. The third is a Hokkaido souvenir coke can, which was available almost everywhere in Hakodate. The Digimon milk tea can was purchased at a local Asian grocer.

And that’s that for this update to a ‘collection’ which I don’t take seriously and just sits forgotten in the attic. Come back in a few years for the next update to find out if I get any of the new Jurassic Park Dr Pepper cans available in stores right now 🙂

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Japan Pickups: Wizardry

Friday, June 20th, 2025

My Wizardry game collection is close to complete and it’s been a while since I’ve found anything I didn’t have, so finding four items on the recent trip was a pleasant surprise.

The special edition of the remake of Proving Grounds Of The Mad Overlord comes with an art print and two booklets. Wizardry The Five Ordeals released just a couple of weeks before the trip and was widely available everywhere (it’s a port of a Japanese PC game). I’m looking forward to playing this one!

Elminage is a game series that is Wizardry in all but name and was developed by some of the same people that made the Japanese Wizardry games. I already owned two of the games and with the addition of Elminage II and Elminage Gothic I now have the entire series. Both of these games were quite expensive, and it’s worth mentioning that I can’t play Elminage Gothic since it’s a 3DS version and my 3DS’s are religion locked to USA games.

Incidentally, my collection of Wizardry games now exceeds 50! I believe I own every game in the series including all the Japanese ‘gaiden’ games, so from this point expanding my collection will only happen via new releases or if I manage to obtain more of the original computer versions.

I also purchased on this trip the above three Wizardry guides. Each of them are full colour with dozens of pages of monster and item art, and detailed maps of each game level.

As with the dozens of other (Japanese) Wizardry guides I already own, these are beautiful books with production levels that far exceed what we had in the west at the time. It’s evidence of how popular this series was in Japan that I now own multiple comprehensive guides for each of the first few games, each released by different publishers and yet I’m not aware of a single western guide for any of the first five Wizardry games!

Lastly I found this Wizardry fanzine in the retro game section at Shosen Book Tower in Akihabara. As you can read on the translation at right, it has a lengthy interview with Superdeluxe games about the collectors edition mentioned above, as well as a wealth of other wizardry-related articles and artwork. This book is obviously a work of love by dedicated Japanese fans and will require close reading via translator since I suspect there’s some good information in its pages 🙂

My Wizardry book collection exceeds 50 titles now as well, and continues to expand via novels, manga, game guides and RPG manuals. With hardly any information on such books available online I have no idea how much else is waiting to be found on future trips…

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Game Boys

Thursday, June 12th, 2025

Most of the games I sold last year were for various versions of the Game Boy, and the sale was very lucrative since this is a market which has been exploding in value. On this trip I’ve been keeping an eye on Game Boy hardware in particular, which is increasing in value much faster than other retro consoles.

Look at these GBAs for example. Nintendo sold over 80 million of these and you’d think the value would be low as a result. But finding good quality ones (with battery cover, no scratches etc.) isn’t easy and finding ones with rare colour schemes is very difficult. Even so, $500+ surprised me.

But look at these limited edition versions! I’d never even heard of the one on top (sold only at the NYC Pokemon store, which no longer exists) and the one on the bottom was a special version sold in Japan only when Mother 3 was released. As you can see, each were priced at well over $1000.

But even those prices are nothing compared to ¥660000 (about $4600) for this limited Pokémon Game Boy SP! And it’s not even in pristine condition! Surely this is the holy grail of SP collecting? I’ve still got two SPs, and I was intrigued to note that even unboxed common versions go for $200+ now.

The above is a Game Boy micro faceplate – just a little plastic thing that clips onto the front. At $200+ this is eye-opening so I did some research and this was a Japan-only Club Nintendo reward for cashing in Nintendo Points! You’d have to be a maniac collector to buy this one.

It always bothered me that the Game Boy Light was never sold outside Japan (because it was released just before the GBA) and I always wanted one since it’s the only GB model I don’t own. Like a fool I let the years pass without buying one and now even unboxed standard versions are $500+. Or you can get this Osamu Tezuka limited version for $1000…

Or this Pokémon one for $3200! What’s surprising about this particular item is I took the photo in a Bookoff used shop. Bookoff is a great chain and you can sometimes find rare items in them but I think this is by far the most expensive thing I’ve ever seen. I wonder if the person with pockets deep enough for this will find it?

Incidentally Pokémon games continue to dominate the used GB/GBA markets. The guy I sell games to says he can’t keep them in, and when I sold him all mine last year he already had a buyer lined up! (Admittedly mine were in close to mint collection.) The used game stores here are full of old Pokémon games, and even loose cartridges these days go for many times their original retail price.

You’ll have noticed a distinct Pokémon subtheme on this post, as one of the driving forces behind GB collectibility is people still playing old Pokémon games on original hardware. Here’s a $1000+ Pokémon original DS (which I also didn’t know existed) and while I didn’t take photos the various Pokémon-branded DS models fetch predictably high prices as well.

And on the topic of DS’s, one of my game regrets is never buying a 2DS. I thought it was weird when it was released but in the back of my mind always planned on getting one for my collection. But I didn’t and they disappeared from stores very quickly. They’re rare in used shops, and as you can see even imperfect examples are expensive. One of the shops in Akiba has a sealed boxed version in a case, but it’s labeled ‘Not For Sale’!

If you’ve got a Game Boy or one of the many follow-ups be sure to keep it in good condition. It’s probably worth quite a bit more than you’d think 🙂

Posted in Collecting, Games, Japan, Trip | Comments Closed

90s-Era Trading Cards

Sunday, April 20th, 2025

Last year I purchased four old packs of trading cards. They’ve been aging for over six months now and it’s time to open them and see what’s inside…

Tools released these The Rocketeer cards in 1992 and they’re typical of most of their series from that era. The plastic wrapper had become brittle and disintegrated a bit upon opening.

The pack contained the eight photo cards shown above, and they’re all a bit dark and muddy to my eye. Interestingly I saw this film for the first time last year, didn’t think it was very good, and I would have had zero interest in these cards upon release even were I still buying cards then.

The backs of the cards are a little difficult to read due to lack of ink. All of them were like this; maybe it was a production error? As I’ve said before I prefer the synopsis extracts on the backs of sets like this, although for this film I wonder how many read them?

There was a single (non die-cut) sticker in the pack as well, and it’s this somewhat boring movie poster style art. The adhesive had completely failed after 33 years, and when I peeled it off it wouldn’t stick to anything.

Overall a by-the-books set for a somewhat mundane film. I don’t think too many were enthusiastic for these cards when they released.

I’ve not heard of ‘Star Pics’, the company who released these Alien 3 cards, also in 1992. This was a famously troubled film production, and the result divides fans to this day.

Much like the previous packs (and admittedly the film), the cards are muddy and quite ugly. They’re also thin and flimsy, which indicate a low budget product. The screenshots are a bit blurry, which is unfortunate considering they would have been the feature cards of the set.

The backs are ugly and hard to read, but they tell a first-person account of the events of the film. An interesting approach that I think works well, but I wish the design had been more suitable for the theme.

Like other early 90s sets there’s no chase cards, and the budget feel of the material is probably indicative of the publisher. But this set is notably worse than the original Topps Alien set from over a decade earlier, which shouldn’t have been the case.

From 1996, this is a pack of Independence Day cards from Topps. We’re in the chase card era now, and the wrappers says I have a 1 in 9 chance of a hologram card!

I didn’t get one. The above were the six cards in the pack, and you can see they’re in a 16:9 aspect ratio which Topps used for their ‘Widevision’ cards for several years back then.

This is a very poor set. The screenshots are all blurry and pixilated, which is unforgivable in a set that is focused around displaying the images at a larger size. Some of the cards even look like they were photographs of a screen, rather than taken from film stock. Awful.

Furthermore, every card in the pack had ‘edge wear’ along the bottoms, which was likely caused by the machines that cut them. This is of no matter to me now since they’re going directly into the recycling bin, but imagine paying a premium for these packs 29 years ago and finding all the cards were damaged?

A very disappointing product, and another example of how Topps had fallen by the mid 90s.

I got this 1990 Classic WWF pack for KLS about a year ago and today is Wrestlemania so it seemed a good day to finally open it. She’s got a large collection of wrestling cards but since Topps sets have become overpriced she no longer buys any new ones.

Every card in her pack was A-rank wrestling royalty, which is amazing considering the size of the set (>130 cards)! How are there no forgotten or C-rank guys here?

The answer was poor collation. In her 15 cards she actually got 1-14 (and 136), and since card sets like this usually put the ‘big guys’ at the front, she got all the biggest stars. This is objectively bad collation, but in this case it ended up giving her a dream pack 🙂

The photos and bios are good, and the cards sturdy and well cut. This is a high quality product, and I imagine was quite popular with wrestling fans 35 years ago. I’m curious about the other 120 cards, but considering the steep price of the individual packs these days (I paid $10) I’m sure we’ll never open another.

I’ve still got a few more packs stashed away aging in a closet, and three unopened boxes of 1980s era cards. Over the summer I’m sure I’ll finally open one of them 🙂

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Ultraman Cards

Sunday, March 9th, 2025

I bought this in Japan:

It’s a box of the initial set of the new Ultraman card game! Even single packs of this was difficult to find in Tokyo, and I only saw boxes for sale in Nagoya. It wasn’t very expensive; about $30 for a sealed box of 20 packs.

At the time I hadn’t seen the English language cards for sale in the US, but in the last month or so packs of both the original set and the first expansion turned up at a local comic store. I bought every pack I saw, and opened them all.

The cards aren’t particularly attractive, and the first set in particular is heavy on images taken directly from the TV shows. It only features Ultras taken from the last couple of decades (no Showa era Ultras at all) which is ok, but I wish it was more art-based and less photographic.

The cards themselves are well manufactured, made of thick stock with a premium feel compared to other TCGs. The chase cards are beautiful, with the ones I pulled having metallic effects, rainbow foiling and embossing. But they’re spectacularly rare, and in about 40 packs (including all my Japanese ones) I only got one (of 40) ‘AP’ cards, and no SP, SSSP, UR or ExP cards!

I don’t know how to actually play the game, since I’ve failed to find any of the starter decks for sale here in the USA! Almost no retailers have them, and sellers online ask silly money. Hopefully I’ll get them one day and see if the game is fun 🙂

As I said this is a brand new TCG launched recently (with some fanfare) by Bandai. It’s a little surprising since Bandai have so many other TCGs on the market including Battle Spirits, which recently released these two Ultraman expansions:

There have been several Ultraman expansions for Battle Spirits over the years, with these two being the most recent, with the blue one in particular only being released last December. Kristin got me a box of each for my birthday.

The red expansion box came with a single card box topper promo pack (which I haven’t opened) and the set contains 69 cards in four levels of rarity. With 20 6-card packs, how much of the full set could I get?

I can’t play this game, and the cards are very wordy and entirely Japanese but they’re so pretty! This is the level of design the official Ultraman game needs in my opinion.

All the cards (even the commons) are embossed, foiled and plastic coated making them all feel like thin credit cards. And these packs are significantly less expensive that Magic packs, which asks the question why is the quality of Magic cards not at this level?

The blue expansion box included a box-topper and a promo for the new Ultraman TCG, which I found amusing. This set has 75 different cards once again in four levels of rarity.

The cards are the same high standard as the other set, and the rare cards just as spectacular:

I’ve only opened a few packs of each, and will probably finish opening the over the next few months. Even though I can’t play it, I like these cards much more than the official TCG, and I wish it were these ones that had been translated into English 🙂

Posted in Collecting, Games, Otaku, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

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