How importing Pico games can add up in price.

This is a bit of a followup to the previous article on purchasing Pico games, and tells a bit of my experience with import titles.

I initially started finding import games when they appeared on eBay, and purchased a couple before deciding to trying a look at Yahoo Japan Auctions.

I managed to purchase two games - "Cutey Honey" and "Pocket Monsters Advance Generation: Hiragana! Katakana! Kakechatta!" - before I decided it was costing too much money for me at the time to continue.

Here's the funny part; the base price of both those games -combined- were 500 yen. A price one would typically consider "cheap" at that time (It was pre-Tsunami, so the yen wasn't as strong against the USD as it is currently). The final price? 5,140 yen. A whole digit was added.

The factors that raised the price included the shipping charges, with 2,310 yen for small packet airmail, and commission and bank fees for the services I was using to send these games to me.

In comparison, if I was a Japanese native, I'd probably have just needed to pay around 1,800 yen at most.

I've also had to pay ~$65 USD to ship a large lot of US Pico games internationally, showing how it's more expensive to send the domestic games out internationally than it is to obtain them! (More on that later.)

Note that in Japan, besides having basic "Storyware" cartridges, the Pico also had mulitple special accessories, such as the Drive Pico and the Fishing Pico. There are also some fairly unique Pico hardware variants specific to Japan. I have not even attempted to send something like that over my way yet.

It makes me wonder, how would a theoretical "Catch 'em all" collector handle the possibly sky-high prices just to have this stuff shipped to his or her house?

I suppose the old saying "crack is cheaper" applies even for games for preschoolers...