Alright! I got the Castlevania 20th Anniversary preorder box today. Oh, and the game, too. The final Game|Life verdict on this tchotchke-filled piece of cardboard is that it is Pretty Okay. You can't beat the price (free), although the whole thing seems like it could have been done a lot nicer and sold for twenty bucks or something in hardback format.
More pics and details inside to help you late-to-the-party folks decide if it's worth tracking down on eBay in five years.
Here's the whole thing, opened up. As you can see, it's a veritable cornucopia of free crap, all of it high-quality. There's the music CD consisting of the best Castlevania tracks from the series' 20-year history, the full and robust track listing of which was exclusively revealed by Game|Life last month. The track list is foil-embossed on the sleeve; a nice touch.
Below that is the stylus, which is actually quite nice -- it's dual-tone clear and white, with the logo printed onto it. Almost too nice to use, unfortunately. Same with the DS card case to its right, which flips open and stores a whopping two DS cards.
The art book, as presented here by our lovely and ridiculously overpaid hand model, is certainly ambitious in scope. As would best describe anything that includes all three Game Boy versions of the Castlevania series. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as if Konami had access to the actual art assets, as the blown-up pics in the book look to have been scanned right off old packages.
Oh well -- at least the feast of Ayami Kojima artwork in the pages that follows is in its full glory. Anyway, I give this the official title of Best Free Thing This Month, which wasn't even really a contest, I think its only competition was this blanket Sony sent me. I haven't opened it because I'm not entirely sure it's not infested with smallpox.
