Erufailon4

In my previous collection update a year ago, I expected I'd buy in 2023 "maybe not as much as in 2022 but we'll see". I definitely did buy less manga this year, but for Blu-rays we did see and what we saw was that I ended up pretty much doubling my Blu-ray collection. I can thank the monetary graduation gifts I received as well as my work try-out for giving me the necessary budget to spend, but on the down side the shelf space is really starting to become an issue. Let's see how my collection looks as 2023 comes to its close.   Manga & Light Novels   Even in a relatively quiet year on the manga front, my collection grew enough for the larger size volumes to now occupy almost all of my top-left shelf. New arrivals on the English side this year were Bocchi the Rock!  vol. 1, Children of the Whales  vol. 2, Soloist in a Cage  vol. 1, the first two volumes of Oshi no Ko  and The Promised Neverland  vol. 3. As I recall most of them were ordered onl...

2022 was the year I really started expanding my "Japan Collection" (for the lack of a better name), as I essentially doubled the amount of manga and light novels I have, and went from two blu-ray releases to fourteen. This hasn't exactly been the cheapest possible hobby, but still living with my parents means I don't really have to worry about budgeting my life all that much yet, so I've been taking advantage of the situation with my many purchases during the year. As a consequence of them, I've assembled myself quite a collection, the current state of which I'll be going over in this post.  Manga & Light Novels  I've categorized my manga by trim size, meaning the largest volumes are first. That of course means starting with English volumes from Viz Media, mainly the deluxe box set of Nausicaä  which I bought in 2021 and unboxed on this blog. At the start of 2022, I only had it and three other Viz releases, but since then, I've bought three mo...

It's once again collection update time, and this time I've got some special stuff to show. Let's get started.  Astra: Lost in Space  vol. 5 (Finnish edition) I've been collecting Astra  since it started being published here in Finland last August, and I'm pleased to finally have completed my collection. I originally watched the anime back when it was airing in 2019 (through... less than desirable means as it wasn't simulcast on any official service in Finland) and while I kinda liked it, it didn't really become a favourite of mine. However, last year I rewatched it right before the manga's Finnish run began, and I loved it. So, now I have all of it in manga form, as well as the British blu-ray release of the anime. Excellent feel-good shonen series, which is something that I think we all need during these difficult times.  (Bought from my local supermarket on Sun, Apr 10th, for €7.90.) Violet Evergarden  (UK Collector's Edition Blu-ray) I originally ...

There were not many new additions in February so I decided to combine both of these two months into one post. That way I ended up covering more stuff in this post than I expected to and it ended up being quite long, so without further ado, let's get started.  Astra: Lost in Space vol. 4 (Finnish edition) Planet Icriss is where the story of Astra  really starts to get interesting, and I was pleased to discover the manga handled the big moments just as well as the anime did (I know the anime is an adaption of the manga but I watched the anime first so that's what I'm judging this based on). Volume 4 was slower paced than I expected, although there was some scenes that were cut from the anime so that explains it. The next and final volume is where the really good stuff  happens, and I'm looking forward to reading it in April.  (Bought from my local supermarket on Wed, Feb 16th, for €6.90.) Yotsuba&! vol. 5 (Finnish edition) More Yotsuba  goodness is always we...

A bit of a slower month than the previous one, but there were still a couple of items that ended up in my collection this month - a gorgeous KyoAni masterpiece and some laid-back  Yotsuba&! goodness. Let's get started.  Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll  (UK Collector's Edition Blu-ray) This one is actually a Christmas present from a family member, it just took a while to arrive from the UK despite being ordered well in advance. Well, good things are worth waiting for: it's a high-quality set with a lot of cool physical extras - 40 pages of storyboards and a short story never published before in English, just to name a few - and a solid blu-ray of one of my favourite entries in the Violet Evergarden  franchise. (Be sure to check out NormanicGrav's unboxing post for a more detailed look at the set.) I don't have a lot of Anime Limited's releases yet, but I plan to get more this year.  (Presumably ordered from Amazon UK. SRP: £44.99. Arriv...

I'm trying out a new blog post format, where I go over the anime/manga/etc I've added to my collection in each month. Still a work-in-progress, as I'm figuring out what is the best way to display the pictures. Most of these are Finnish releases, so the information is not of much use to English-speaking folks, but I've included the places I've bought each of these from and the price. (This is not  an advertisement for any of these products - I'm not affiliated with any retailers or publishers, and these are purely my own opinions.)   Attack on Titan vol. 34 (Finnish edition) Even as an anime-only for AoT, there was no way I was going to miss getting the manga's historical final volume on the day it was released in Finland, December 8. The volume marks the end of an era, concluding the manga's 6-year run in Finland. I won't be reading it until after the anime is finished, but in the meantime it'll sit comfortably in my bookshelf, its spine standin...