I have a confession to make: I used to pirate videogames like crazy back in the day. My piracy career started early in my life since the days of the NES and SNES with my buying of bootleg cartridges and transitioned easily into the PSX days which was probably the easiest console to pirate in history (The N64 escaped my dastardly piracy sweep) and I easily transitioned into pirating PS2 games (again the Nintendo console eluded me). I didn’t see it as something dangerous or illegal as the both Middle Eastern law and its culture have little understanding of intellectual property rights. Plus my dad brought me fifteen pirated PSX games as a birthday present so if dad is pirating it’s not bad, right?
What does this have to do with an unboxing of Total War: Shogun 2? Well, now that I have some disposable income I try as much as possible to give back to the developers by buying the more expensive collector’s edition to make up for my previous crimes.
Now that that is over, let’s get to the unboxing:
Like all collector’s editions, the box this game comes in has to be larger than normal so that you may lord over the lesser mortals who couldn’t afford the honour of being “Collectors.” I’ve placed my normal (shamefully anaemic) copy of Empire:Total War for comparison.
A side shot so that you can compare the width. The vast majority of the box is taken up by the figurine of Takeda Shingen.
I was kind of confused as to how the box opens up, but I guess opening with the entire front of the box falling away to reveal an angry looking samurai general was considered cool enough to add in.
You can see how much of the box is dominated by the figurine’s own box. The art book and the limited edition copy of Total War: Shogun 2 are in a smaller box in the back.
I was rather disappointed that the art book is pretty much the same size as a DVD case. The art inside is quite good but the small size of the pages simply don’t do it justice.
I’m not surprised that Shogun 2 comes on two discs. The game clocks in at over fifteen Gigs of hard drive space (lower than Napoleon Total War‘s 20GB and equal to Empire Total War’s 15GB) and the series has always been two discs since Medieval Total War 2 if I recall correctly.
A sample of the art in the enclosed artbook. The artists at The Creative Assembly have brilliantly mimicked the Ukiyo-e style of woodblock prints both in the art book and in the game (though historically, woodblock prints were not developed during the game’s timeline) and it’s a real shame that we couldn’t see this stuff on a bigger page. There’s also standard game art for those that don’t like the Ukiyo-e print style.
The main attraction of the collector’s edition is this figurine of Takeda Shingen. It stands about six inches in height not counting the base and is quite heavy for its size.
I’m rather disappointed by the build quality as you can clearly see the seams where his arms are joined to his body and some of the paint from the brown mask has sprayed onto the fake moustache and there is a general lack of detail on the armour that just doesn’t compare to the Halo Reach Legendary Edition box (though to be fair, samurai armour is far more ornate than spartan armour).
So is it worth it? It’s about 130 dollars US and frankly, I don’t think it is. The art book is too small and the figurine is underwhelming and this collector’s edition lacks a lot of things that are standard like posters, making of DVDs or soundtrack CDs. It’s too anaemic for the price tag that’s being asked, simply stick to the regular edition of the game or the the limited edition for the Hattori Ninja clan faction.
Shogun 2 is a big game so it’ll take a while for us to review it but hopefully we’ll have the review up soon!
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