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The price of anime DVDs...

But a THREE episodes DVDs (Kiddy Grade, for instance, otherwise excellent) is really too expensive...

Anime DVDs will always cost more because you have both licensing and translation/dubbing costs to consider which producers of American-originating DVDs generally don't have to worry about. Anime also is not a huge DVD seller in the grand scheme of DVD sales, so companies producing anime DVDs for the American market can't sell stuff cheap and rely on mass sales even to break even, much less make a profit. These lower-priced rerelease are only feasible because most of the up-front costs were covered the first time around.

The bottom line is: Be smart. Sometimes it is cheaper to rent some anime discs, and buy them at the most 50% off the MSRP should you want to keep them. Use the Releases section of the ANN Encyclopedia to do some price comparison.

I first started buying anime at Suncoast and stores that have now been swallowed up by Suncoast. Then I bought a few, like Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade on the Suncoast website. Finally I found other sites that were much cheaper. A few years ago Suncoast's website sold only at regular price, no real discount.

Then I go to CD Japan and find how incredibly crazy it is to purchase a DVD from them. To get the whole series of Gits:SAC here, even the special DVDs with the DTS version and other goodies attached, would be about $350US at regular price. On CD Japan with only 2 shows per regular DVD and spanning 13 DVDs will cost, at the current exchange rate, $750 US. Plus you would need a region 2 or region 0 DVD player even to watch them. So even buying the special DVDs here is a bargain compared to what Japan has to pay for them.

We should all be thanking our lucky stars lol

I don't think those figures are arbitrary, I think they're meant to give fans a rough idea into what anime companies have to deal with in setting prices.

On the high end is FLCL. FLCL is $29.99US per disc, but like Gantz, it's only 2 episodes per disc. This means that, if you want all six episodes, you would have to put up over $90US ($89.97 + Tax) just to get all of FLCL. Unless you are sure about buying it, that's a lot to ask of people for what boils down to only six total episodes (especially now that Gantz is priced at almost half FLCL's going price).

Then you have the "really out there" one: The World of Narue Boxset: $79.99US for 12 episodes. The normal box set price for 13 episodes and below has been at least $15-20 lower than that (usually $59.99US), and Narue just hasn't really been as popular as many other animes -- probably for this very reason.

I can’t fathom why in the world Central Park Media would release an Anime Test Drive DVD of the first episode... and then sell the entire series as a box set. Why would anyone buy a box set of an anime series they’ve never seen before based on one episode? Ugh. To be fair, World of Narue is certainly a cute enough series that warrants a quick view, but it’s probably not worth the $80 that CPM is asking for it right off the bat.