Or... "The worst online shopping experience of my life." This was bad from start to finish and cost me way more time than money, which is much more valuable anyway, at least to me. So, this will be a bit of a rant.
In general, I like the overall idea of this. Nintendo having their own store, where you can purchase some goodies that you can't get anywhere else. You get steelbooks with many of the game orders, there is some free merchandise for Platinum Points, and so. I like it.
I also think how they handled this Collector's Edition isn't such a bad idea, even though it came from the circumstance of the game's release being antedated to July. At first I thought that this was disappointing, because it doesn't come with the actual game inside. But I haven't even played the first two games yet (like so many things for my Switch), so I was mostly getting this for the collectible stuff, where I just love the Nintendo Switch steelbooks and the artbooks. Which is exactly what this comes with: a steelbok and an artbook, for a price without the game (I might add images later).
It's also really good for anyone who wants to buy the game digitally.
You can get the Collector's Edition without any extra costs then. It's a
very good idea to sell them like this, actually, even though it's weird that they don't contain a physical copy of the game.
Ideally, it would at least come with a swappable cover without the gigantic USK age rating logo on it, but this is a problem exclusive to Germany. Still, it might be nice to have a clean cover in general, I think it's an additional selling point of these editions.
So far, so good, but the problem then came with the strict limitations and an online shop that simply was not ready for a storm of customers. You could register your interest via e-mail, in which you got a couple of notifications that the pre-order will start soon and how super strictly limited this will be. Yikes. Of course this had all the attention of the ebay scalpers and their army of bots. I actually was using a web monitor myself to check the My Nintendo Store for updates... The situation was this desperate.
After the announcement in September that the pre-orders will begin "very soon" they took the My Nintendo Store offline for one entire week and then waited two more weeks before starting the pre-order, which was a total disaster. Two days of 404s or a shop that was simply unresponsive. I still managed to be one of the few lucky ones who were able to get a copy before the professional ebay sellers.
Meanwhile, in Japan you can still order the same Collector's Edition and you can even get two per customer. There they produce them by demand from what I've heard... Why it can't be the same for Europe and North America can only be answered by Nintendo themselves. It would have made things much more relaxed for sure.
Anyway, after all this stress of ordering the Collector's Edition, imagine my surprise when it arrived today... Damaged. See the top left corner of the box. They simply put it into a thin cardboard box of the exact same size, meaning that any kind of pressure during transport will damage the item. Great. Thank you, Nintendo.
I've contacted customer service, but I doubt I will get anything out of it... And it's just more time lost on something that's supposed to be simple and enjoyable. Well, at least I got one, right?
For now this will have been the last time that I have gotten a Limited / Collector's Edition from the My Nintendo Store. Let's hope that they won't do anything like this for Tears of the Kingdom.
#firstworldproblems
Update:
It turned out that Nintendo did have a small stock for replacements and this time they've safely packaged the whole thing, so I now have a copy in a good condition.
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