Pretty Packaging: FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST Ultimate Edition

(Anime Limited goes crazy pimping, part III...)

Last week saw a veritable deluge in releases from Scottish distributor Anime Limited, three of which easily qualified for a "Pretty Packaging" article. So on Saturday we showed Miss Hokusai, yesterday we showed the Escaflowne Ultimate Edition, and today we go to the biggest yet: the utterly insane Fullmetal Alchemist Ultimate Edition.

This boxset contains the Blu-ray edition of the original Fullmetal Alchemist series from ten years ago, and that immediately poses the question who would buy this. That series famously got remade entirely in HD a few years later, in a longer version with a different branching story, called Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and that one has easily been available for a while already. So who'd invest in the older version?

Fans. That's who. Fanatical devotees of the original version, collectors, crazy completists... that is the market. So Anime Limited used a business model where, if they would only sell a couple of copies in that limited market, they might as well pimp the edition to high heaven, to make those few copies commercially viable again. And that is exactly what they did.

Early rumors noted that the edition was going to weigh 8 kg (which is 17 lbs), and blimey, those rumors were true. The discs are housed in a resin slipcase-of-sorts which is called "The Gate", and... well, see for yourself. Here is a gallery of shots. Click on the edge of the pictures to scroll through them, or at the center of each to see a bigger version.

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