I always had a soft spot for the whole "volume 1 plus box" thing where you fill it up as you go. Mostly because I like nice packaging, but I think it also pokes something in my collector brain. (which is likely me being susceptible to marketing practices, but oh well)
It's not a practice that happens much these days, since we're luckily not releasing things as singles any more so most shows are just all in one or two. But there's a logic to it for longer shows, so it was neat that the Fruits Basket remake got a set like this.
Interesting thing about this set, at the time they started it, it wasn't officially confirmed how many seasons or how long things were going to be. Sure, it was HEAVILY RUMOURED to be about 5 cours in total, but that wasn't officially confirmed. So I feel like the sizing of the box may have been deliberately a bit flexible. From memory, season 2 part 2 came with a big envelope of art cards (with space for adding the art cards from the previous seasons) which just so happened to perfectly fill what was then the remaining space in the box. So if something happened with the final season or it got extended, in theory they could have just said "yep, complete box" and done something separate.
End result is the final season does come out and there's also a movie. Keep in mind at this point the size of the box is basically predetermined since they included the box with season 2 part 1. I have to assume this was at least partly planned, because with the final season there's also an artbook, that happens to perfectly fill the box and make it all nice and neat, as seen in the first photo.
But what about the movie? Well, if you take the o-ring slipcovers off and leave out the artbook, you can instead fit the movie in the box! So it's a complete box this way too! I'm not sure this was intended, since the movie spine and packaging style doesn't really fit, so on my shelf I keep it separate. But like, I wonder, this may or may not have been intended, or maybe it was kind of insurance in terms of whether the final season surprisingly ran for two cours? Like they designed a box that could fit 5 cases in slipcovers with an artbook, or 6 cases without slipcovers, or 4 cases and a big envelope of artcards that we just happened to include?
I am now thinking about the attack on titan final season, where they keep going "psych there's more" - and how the limited edition fancy release of part 1 is clearly designed to fit IN a box, but the box presumably will come with the final part once they know how much space they need. This makes me giggle
also: grumble grumble at how fruits basket the final season has a different non-matching logo that unnecessarily changes colour due to the whole funimation/crunchyroll merger thing, so it VERY SLIGHTLY doesn't match.
would have been way worse if I'd got the local Australian releases instead of importing, the final season spine doesn't match at all for that :v (local releases didn't include LEs so of course I had to import)
