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Taking Amazon Japan’s lowest-rated light-up nunchucks out for a spin

Master Blaster Nov 12, 2024
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Don’t just buy any illuminated weapons. Do the research first.

Who among us hasn’t saved up our money for months in the hopes of buying not just a pair of nunchucks, but the really fancy kind that light up when you twirl them around? However, having purchased them, you find that they are just another piece of garbage churned out by a predatory company exploiting our never-ending lust for light-up nunchucks.

On the other hand, there are also times when people’s personal frustrations unfairly punish products that are actually decent. So, who can you trust?

Luckily, SoraNews24 is here to help. Normally, our writer Masanuki Sunakoma is in charge of reviewing the worst-rated items sold on Amazon Japan on this website, but this time Go Hatori will take the reins because he has more experience in the martial arts.

Go ordered two pairs of Fluorescent Nunchucks from Amazon for 1,888 yen (US$12.36) each. The website showed an overwhelming number of one-star reviews with comments such as “Broken,” “Didn’t work at all,” and “A waste of time.”

The reviews were not promising, but could they really be that bad? After all, it’s just a couple sticks with lights in them and that seems pretty hard to screw up. Perhaps this was a case of a vocal minority of people who had defective products while the vast minority of satisfied customers were too busy happily twirling away to leave a review.

Go opened his packages only to quickly find that one pair of nunchucks indeed did not work at all. Perhaps getting a dud really is a common occurrence.

Go returned the defective one and got a new pair that did work… to an extent. It seemed to have a short somewhere and would only light up if the cap was loosened a little.

One of the nice touches was that each pair came with way more button batteries than needed to power the lights. However, Go also interpreted that as the maker saying: “This thing eats batteries so fast, you’re going to need all of these, chump.”

Assembly was a breeze. Just pop in the batteries and screw the caps on each end of the sticks.

Also, contrary to the name, these use LED lights (actual fluorescent light nunchucks would be interesting. You’d only get one shot with them but it’d be an exciting one).

▼ The batteries go in under the lights.

The lights seemed rather rinky-dink, much like the kind you’d find in dollar-store products like a glowing poop on a stick. There’s also no switch so the only way to turn it off right away is to remove the batteries.

It does go into a sleep mode automatically if kept still for a period of time but that’s not very efficient for the batteries. Go was starting to feel like he could make a better pair by himself from scratch.

But this nunchuck review wouldn’t be complete unless the nuns were actually chucked, so Go donned his assassin outfit and went to the park to try them out.

They surprisingly looked pretty good in action. The way they changed colors was nice and the brightness of the LEDs were better than Go had previously thought.

▼ Go’s Instagram post has a more high-res look at the nunchucks in action.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Go Hatori （GO羽鳥） (@mamiyak46)

Our reporter was about to change his tune regarding the Fluorescent Nunchucks but when the spinning stopped, he noticed that the screw-in parts that the chain was attached to were coming loose. Had he played around with them much longer, one or both sticks would have likely flown off his weapon and that could be dangerous.

In conclusion, Go felt that if someone is really, really, really in need of light-up nunchucks and can’t find some anywhere else, they can try buying these. However, the fact that one pair didn’t even work from the get-go and there are some serious structural integrity issues, he felt compelled to agree with the one-star reviews and not recommend buying Fluorescent Nunchucks that aren’t even fluorescent.

Source: Amazon Japan / Fluorescent Nunchucks
Photos ©SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]