Hi everyone, so I’m back from Japan, and had a quick visit to the SNK pop up store at Animate.  Well, ok, I visited three times, well, sometimes I have regrets so I needed to go back and splash the cash.  This special area is temporary so if you’re in Japan, do have a visit, I’ll give directions just below and explain about what’s on offer, with a few opinions…

While I admire The King of Collectors’ series, and their decision to model their figures based on Shinkirou’s illustrations, I’m not so keen on the battle damage variants.  I don’t like seeing Mai with cuts on her face, but perhaps that’s just me.  The Geese and Duck King figures are fantastic, and we know now, due to an incident at Shout Essence, that they are sturdy!

Of course, the Golden Head model of Blue Mary is being heavily promoted, as we saw at Ami Ami, and she looks like she’ll meet expectations, I hope SNK pays attention to the fact that they respected her abs!

These jackets were crazy expensive.  Note that while animate can’t even allow foreigners access to their website, SNK has an online shop which you order from, using Buyee.

I found shermie!

5,500 yen is pretty expensive, but the average new anime T-shirt is actually between 4.5-7k yen.

I couldn’t tell if this was the original Neogeo but I would say it probably is and travels around with SNK for events such as this.

In another video you can see the prices of Neogeo carts, it will interesting to see what happens after the Plaion releases.

Some of these items I will never understand, like the plastic balloons that can’t float or stand, while the coasters are great, and the card holders are useful.  As for acrylics, I’m getting bored of them but they often rise in price as they are usually a limited run.  The sew on patches are hot hot hot!

They had some books too, notice the manga by the famous Trigun author Yasuhiro Nightow, I should have picked it up really but I’m not that much a Samsho fan.  The posters were great, some so big you couldn’t pack them in a suitcase 🙁

Directions

When you arrive outside Animate, you’ll find they now occupy three buildings.  You need to go to the Annex building.

You can confirm you are in the right place by noticing the poster on the leftmost wall.

Head into the lift and you’ll see the notice for the 4th floor.

And there you go!  Note that you’ll need to go the 5th floor to pay for your goods, also, you can get tax back, if you spend over 5500 yen. They use the Ocean system, so that will be refunded to your card after you leave the country.  Don’t forget to activate your account and submit the request or you’ll get nothing!

On the same floor you can grab some Yakuza series merch too!  While this pop up store will disappear, hopefully this page will remain as a souvenir.  NICE!