NT <20 is back for another round of slugging, and terrible admittances. For example, I once took advantage of an idiot at a Best Buy counter and wrangled myself a free copy of Gurren Lagann 3, leaving Best Buy, beloved providers of most of my anime, $30 poorer. But that’s absolutely nothing compared to what I’m about to divulge. Namely, I shop at Tokyo Kid.

YES! A shocking revelation, but the worst is yet to come! I’m all up in the IRC’s business, frequently hating on Tokyo Kid and pouring adoration all over Kotobukiya, and I shop at the former all the time. But what’s worse is what I purchase there. Something I purchased there that we will be looking at today. Something that I refuse to use around the house because of just how damn shameful it is. Ladies and gentlemen…

Love Hina Playing Cards. Let’s do this.

Item Purchased: “Custom” Love Hina Playing Cards

Condition: Sealed in Shrinkwrap

Price Paid: $5.50 (God, this was so long ago, I may have this price wrong, it could have been less, but probably not)

Place Purchased: Tokyo Kid in Cambridge, MA

OH GOD WHY

Let me preface this with a quick note: all the pictures in this article were taken with a decent digital camera. It’s not anywhere near good by any means, it’s better than a standard cell phone camera, and if I could get the actual megapixels for you, I would. Alas, it’s old as hell and I have no idea. I would estimate in the 2-3 megapixel range. But bear in mind that the quality of the images in this article are not the fault of the camera. That’s purely the cards.

The cards themselves… there’s not a lot to say other than this was just a terrible mistake on my part. I was a junior in high school, and huge into Love Hina and Akamatsu’s work in general, but also a gigantic Akamatsu n00b. My mistake in this case was the fact that I looked at the cover and despite not recognizing this scene one bit, assuming these cards were still legit. As in, they were manga-based. Wrong.

My second mistake was looking at them and immediately realizing that they had to be bootleg or custom-made and this made them cooler. Wrong. Third mistake, thinking that full color cards were going to be totally awesome. Wrong.

There’s one good thing about these cards, and it’s the title of this article.

AWWWWWWWWW YEAH

But simply placing the most deserving cast member on the Ace of Spades does not redeem the rest of these cards. For example, look at this choice selection on the 10 of Diamonds.

Seriously? Seriously?

That’s right, folks, flip that card over and you’ll see the same image, minus that tiny text at the top with the characters names. That’s some originality on the part of the card maker (I am now forced to believe it was one guy who did this). Even better, the quality on all the cards is atrocious. You can practically pick out the pixels on any single image (that includes the back), and if anything could make the anime look worse than it already did, it was these cards.

The imbalance on the part of the characters is also pretty terrible. Instead of having a fairly even split between the five members of Keitaro’s harem (discounting Kaneko, since she didn’t appear in the anime until the OVAs), we get about half of this deck being Keitaro-Naru images, another quarter just being Shinobu, and then the last quarter pretty evenly divided between the other girls. In a moment that filled me with rage, neither of the Jokers is Kaolla Su, the character most fitted to be a Joker. Instead, we’ve got the scene where Naru falls on Keitaru and they stare at each other awkwardly, and a promo poster (text intact!) of Shinobu and Naru jumping in bathing suits.

So yeah, I was retarded. Don’t buy cards from Tokyo Kid.

Christ.