Dear NISA,

This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.

Twitter    


I’m tired of your shit.

I’m here today to talk about your shoddy inventory management handling and your terribad anime offerings.

Inventory first. This shit is fucking ridiculous. Everything gets a single print run and then it’s fucking gone. I didn’t even know you had a fucking Fuka Hat until I searched on Google and got linked to a dead store page. You seriously sold an item for an unreleased game with no advertising and then pulled the product after a couple days? I’d have bought it for $20 for the fucking novelty, but I obviously can’t do that now.

Dat Cap

I wanted to buy some of your older games too, but LOL OUT OF STOCK. Even all your novelty goods like a coffee mug and a mousepad are fucking out of stock. How the fuck does that happen? I can get ones custom-made for the exact same price you’re charging, but you’re not willing to sell? You could fucking run this shit through cafepress or something (Note: cafepress sucks, but it’s just a fucking example) and be turning a sugoi profit.

The only things you sell that are in-stock are these $300 pictures. Newsflash: I won’t buy a $300 picture. I would, however, like to buy some games, some novelty items… fuck, even some guides and other items. I have money and you had a lot of cool shit I want to get, but your goddamn artificial scarcity is getting in the way.

And yes, I understand the business decision behind limiting your product runs. This means people will be clamoring for whatever new product you shove out because it’s OMG GUARANTEED TO BE RARE. I understand it’s a long-term strategy, but I don’t think it’s going to pan out unless you base your whole business around trying to sell mediocre games at the same levels you sell your good ones at. Good games sell just fine without needing such tactics. Also note that Atlus does just fine with marketing shit toward a pre-order focus while simultaneously never letting an item with demand remain unstocked.

What you really need to do if you’re so sold on this strategy is to create exclusive pre-order incentives that are actually limited to pre-orders. This will satisfy both those who only want to play the game later on down the road for cheap and those who MUST HAVE EVERY COLLECTIBLE EVER. It’s called double-dipping and right now you aren’t getting any of the former crowd. It’s a shitty business decision you’re making right now.

And you still don’t have all your pre-orders set up for September. I wanted to get Atelier Totori, but I can’t because it’s not up yet. This shit comes out within a month. Get your shit together. One of the main goals of a pre-order is to get people who are interested in the product now to commit to buying it. You lose out on your more casual fanbase when you don’t offer a chance to pre-order a game.

Why? Because if I watch a PV and get hyped, you have me for about 30 minutes. In that timeframe I’ll seriously look at my purchasing options. If I can’t find any, I’ll just forget about the game until you find some way to remind me about it… and if you can’t find a way to do that, you just lost a sale.

I can’t buy your shit unless you let me. Stop being such fucking retards.

 

Now to your anime.

No dubs. Most of the people who complain about anime dubs are:

A. Desperate to find some validation for their pirating ways.

B. Not even native speakers of English in the first place.

C. Bitter oldfags who think 90’s anime has defined the dubbing quality of anime ever since.

As an English-speaking person, I like to fucking watch my anime in the most natural way possible. No, not with shitty, Engrishy yellow subs — I want this shit dubbed in my native fucking tongue because I’m not a drooling, Nippon Banzai! dipshit.

Ridiculous prices. Excuse me, but do you seriously think I’m going to pay $60 for the DVD/Blu-ray Arakawa set just because you give me a 30-page artbook and some paper mask? No, fuck that. All across the board the prices are insane. $72 for two Toradora DVDs without any extras? $96 for the two premium editions which only include two 30-page artbooks? And you can’t even buy premium edition part 1 anymore?  No thanks, NISA. I’ll stick to the shitty fansubs. Even if I wanted your premium editions, because of your forced artificial scarcity I can’t even do that. It’s a great move if you only ever want 200 customers, max.

Hardsubbed blu-rays. I get that Japan doesn’t want us filthy gaijins to get blu-ray anime at decent prices cuz then the Japanese fans would just import it from America, but fuck everything about this. There are more than enough BD-rip groups for me to get my high-quality animu on without having to resort to an inferior release. And no, I’m not going to pay for something I can get 1,000 times better online.

I won’t buy your shitty sub-only, hardsubbed, overpriced anime. And yes, I’m willing to buy any fucking anime release as long as it’s for a reasonable price, which is my main fucking problem here.

 

And while I’m fucking at it… Let’s talk Disgaea 4.

Paying more than $5 for a Happy Meal toy isn’t my idea of “value”. Paying $60 for 9 of them is infuriating, especially when I don’t even want most of them.

I only really want the girls here and $60 for four figures is a tough pill to swallow. And if I’m allowed to be honest here, devil Flonne is the only good-looking figurine of the bunch. Why the fuck didn’t you add anything of value to your ultra premium edition besides these figurines? They’re in no way, shape, or form worthy of the asking price of $60 (they’re included in the Disgaea 4 Premium Figure set which costs $120, which is $60 more than the closest bundle). It’s even worse that you’re gonna put $100 of DLC in the game like you always do.

Now, I still admit I’m going to buy this shitty fucking pack. I always buy special editions like this on principle. I want publishers to see that awesome premium sets are a good business decision because I like this kinda shit. I’m still going to buy it, but think I’m at least entitled to bitch about it.

 

Yours sincerely truly,

Dark_Sage

0 thoughts on “Dear NISA,”

  1. I bought both the Arakawa and the Toradora sets. I tend to buy a lot of anime products because I like to support the industry and it makes me feel less guilty about being an active fansubber. I also have this dream that some day some chick is going to see my vast collection of dvds/blurays and decide that she wants to violate my body in horrifying sexual ways. Hasn’t worked out yet but I’m sure it will happen!

    Anyway, the Toradora and Arakawa sets were seriously overpriced. I didn’t mind the Toradora set as much since I have a huge hard-on for that show but the Arakawa set made me feel a slight amount of buyers remorse. The boxes are also about double the height of a normal dvd case which is kind of annoying.

    Bandai also likes to put out mediocre sets that command outrageous prices. At least companies are mostly releasing stuff in the form of series or half series sets. I started seriously collecting in the Geneon days where they would really screw the consumer by releasing volumes individually for 20-30 bucks a piece. Sometimes they would even cut the episode number per volume down to 2 or 3 in order to stretch out the total amount of volumes to 7 or 8 in order to get that extra money.

    I’ll still keep buying this crap though. I’m a sucker and I work hard for the money I make. I may as well spend it on whatever worthless bullshit I like.

    Reply
  2. “As an English-speaking person, I like to fucking watch my anime in the most natural way possible. No, not with shitty, Engrishy yellow subs — I want this shit dubbed in my native fucking tongue because I’m not a drooling, Nippon Banzai! dipshit.”

    Hear, hear!

    It looks like they just set up the pre-ordering for the Totori LE today. As a side note, I certainly wouldn’t mind getting one of their giclee prints someday.

    Reply
    • Well, yeah. It’s not like I wouldn’t mind getting one. Dressed for Success looks fantastic. I just don’t see myself spending $300 for one anytime soon. Maybe when I’m making $20k per year more…

      Reply
  3. I hate NISA for a different reason (though I will say that you hit every other mark that I have problems with).

    They decided to announce that they finally licensed the Black Rock Shooter game. Yesterday. After I had already shelled out $177 to YesAsia back in July to preorder the White Premium Box because the last word I had heard about them doing it was that they wanted to but the Western PSP market was risky to play into at this point (and hey, I really wanted that figma; how does YesAsia STILL have it and yet the other places I checked prior to them were all gone?).

    My fault, I know (and again, I REALLY wanted that figma), but still…

    Reply
    • Theres also people who still get it even if they knew it would be coming to the US.

      I decided to not get the premium with the 9 figures for Disgaea. Hell, I ordered the premium version on Gamestop cause I don’t care about the OST either, since you can download that online somewhere. The bonus is probably not worth it though, seeing typical Disgaea way of getting characters from other games after you beat it.

      Reply
  4. When I first heard of the Disgaea 4 Fuka figurine bonus I was really hyped.. until I realised it wasn’t the same as the Japanese version. The figurines you get with NISA don’t look look that great, in my opinion, so I just went for a standard copy of Disgaea 4 instead. Here’s a comparison of the Fuka figurines:

    JP:
    http://www.amiami.jp/images/product/review/111/TVG-PS3-0749_06.jpg
    US:
    http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/2982/fukafigure.jpg

    Reply
  5. Dude… Dark_Sage you should actually WATCH the Katanagatari BD’s. IM so damn pissed off i got these. You would have a fucking aneurysm if you tried reviewing them. The translation is terrible. I feel like I’m watching a bad Chinese bootleg… seriously. There are awesome lines like ‘ice burns’ instead of ‘frostbite.’ They are totally random on what they chose to translate. Some things get translated, while others do not. I.E. we get “Lady Denial” for Hitei, but not one of the blades gets translated.

    Its all over the place and god awful. I gotta take some screenshot examples

    Reply
  6. When they actually have some of the novelty stuff in stock they fuck up too.
    Ordered something along with Disgaea 4, everything was supposed to be sent once D4 was released. However, their system messed up and whatever they had in stock got shipped early, they sent an e-mail saying that it was their fault and I won’t have to pay extra for additional shipping and whatnot, the order still showed up as “Open” on their store website, so no big deal, right? Then D4 release comes along and… nothing. After sending a mail last week I finally got the shipping confirmation on yesterday, meaning I may finally get to play it next week.
    Good thing I have yet to finish Xenoblade.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Dragon Fist Downtown Uppercut Cancel reply