May 2022 Batch 8!
It had taken a while and a lot of bad luck, but I have now finally received my Buyee/Mercari package from Japan;
Crows: Burning Edge [クローズ BURNING EDGE],
MELTY BLOOD: TYPE LUMINA [メルティブラッド：タイプルミナ] and
Wing of Darkness [有翼のフロイライン].
Crows: Burning Edge is an action beat em up based on Hiroshi Takahashi's 1990 manga Crows, which did receive a few live-action films by Japanese directors Takashi Miike and Toshiaki Toyoda. The game was released in 2016 and was published by Bandai Namco.
MELTY BLOOD: TYPE LUMINA is a 2D fighting game continuation to the MELTY BLOOD franchise, which is a spin-off of TYPE MOON's Tsukihime visual novel series. The game has English support which is a surprise given Type Moon is generally Japan only on their Japanese releases (though Witch of the Holy Knight will also have English support which is neat).
Wing of Darkness is an action mecha game which is more on the low budget shorter indie type side of things than your big Ace Combat or larger projects.
This order started on Monday 2nd May with 5 games chosen for one big order. As Solaris Japan had to postpone orders due to shipping services unavailable (caused by Putin invading Ukraine), I had to look elsewhere for imports that had more variety of games available, so I revisited Buyee. Things started off well with a lot of good bargains and finding a copy of MELTY BLOOD which was bizarrely hard-to-find as it didn't get any stock once it was released last September.
Then things start to go from good luck to bad. Starting with placing the orders, during checkout I had the option to pay via PayPal which is no problem - except the usual pop-up where you need to login and choose which card to use did not appear. My initial reaction was it'll be paid later, until I received a text from my bank stating I was in overdraft. Turns out Buyee got the payment done via my bank card, which was a problem because I use my funds on another - fortunately it was paid in GBP otherwise I would have been hit by bank charges but it still sucks that I didn't get them sorted through Monzo. I was able to get it done through Monzo directly but even that alone didn't get the order paid in Yen so I still ended up paying more than I should.
The cause of the payment botch was because I previously used Buyee for a Yahoo! Auction order back in September 2019 via PayPal, before I changed my approach on online orders. Then if that wasn't bad enough, Buyee took too long to get the orders completed, so one of them ended up getting cancelled. And then despite having another order completed and paid, it got cancelled "due to the convenience of the seller". Apparently Mercari sellers like to cancel orders to charge more or recognise that the address is a forwarding service and decide to cancel it because they don't want to ship it out to importers.
And the icing on the cake - I missed out on the coupon that allowed a discount on international shipping because the items took too long to arrive to the Buyee warehouse. In the end, I was able to consolidate the order so instead of paying about £20 per item it was £45 overall with extra packaging protection and the Buyee fees. The war situation did affect Buyee's shipping options but the 4000 Yen choice ended up being FedEx so it shipped late Tuesday and arrived today, which was nice to see.
The items arrived in the end and were working at least. MELTY BLOOD was the priority of the bunch, and the two games that got cancelled on me were
A Certain Magical Virtual-On and
City Shrouded in Shadow (Kyoei Toshi). The plus side is that those two games are more readily available so I can try again later down the line.
VIDEO GAME
(as seen in the previous post)
ANIME 
). The Remake may not be perfect but I also like this new version. After getting RE3 + RE8 CEs I knew I had to find a way to grab RE2 CE by any means.
