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Just a fact: much more common in Japan. Remember, this is a country where people still buy CDs.

Also, with certain shows (like K), they'll have "stamp card rally" promotions, where you only get the special bonus if you buy every disc or every book in the series at that store, and fill a stamp card.

Also, those nice blind-box keychains? Some of them, for really popular shows (e.g. Free, Touken Ranbu, Yuri on Ice will probably get this treatment), they'll have a special thing where there's an extra charm you can only get if you preorder the whole box at that particular store, and several stores will have different ones, so to get the true whole set, you have to preorder the main whole set from three different stores. Yeah. And Im sure some people do.

I'm curious how the HxH exclusive actually did for Best Buy. I sort of didn't think of HxH as a huge seller, so it makes me wonder what they were thinking with that. Viz has regularly not been the most keen decision maker when it comes to their anime division, so it wouldn't surprise me if this was another one of those "mistakes"...

relyat08 wrote:

Viz has regularly not been the most keen decision maker when it comes to their anime division, so it wouldn't surprise me if this was another one of those "mistakes"...

This is particularly the case with the "Shippuden" dub is now released quarterly/seasonally on Amazon Video and they have not released a new "Sailor Moon" dub episode on Hulu for over a year.

Most UK retailer exclusives in the past had the same disc packaging but something extra (like a figure with Death Note from Virgin or a box with the last volume of GitS:SAC from Play IIRC).

Recently the fad has been for Steelbooks, mostly from Zavvi (who already do a lot of exclusive steelbooks for non-anime titles), and all of them movies (Ghibli films, Perfect Blue and the live action Attack on Titan at HMV). Before that there were the odd slipcover and booklet combo (the Blood-C movie and Eva 1.11 and 2.22 at HMV), and I can't remember if they repeated the same artwork or not.

PS: if anyone owns any retailer exclusives that aren't in the release system here and can provide the details (most importantly the UPC code from the back), let me know.