Since we’re just shopping these remaining days, it’s time for some thematic posts. Today let’s cover crane games!
These haven’t changed fundamentally: you put ¥100 or more in and manipulate a crane to try and win a prize. The prizes are usually food, figurines, plushes or some sort of toy or accessory. Often they are anime themed, but equally often not.
I like the figures of course, and as usual they’re difficult to win. The cranes are weak, and randomly become stronger, so luck and persistence are required. Sometimes – rarely – you’ll win a prize in a few goes. Sometimes you’ll dump thousands of yen in and walk away empty handed.
It can be maddening when the crane picks the thing up and drops it once it rises. Here the evil of these machines is on full display: they manipulate you to keep trying: ‘you can do it, you almost just did!’
There exist exotic variants as well, such as this one where the prize is held by what seems to be the merest of elastic strings. But it’s a ruse: no matter how well placed you get the crane this just bounces up and down. It’s locked in with an amazing force, and far, far harder to release than it looks!
Or there’s the above type, where you manipulate the red bar on the left to hit one of the plates to tilt the entire device, at which point treats rain down as prizes. I actually won on this first go. It was a box of cookies, which we discarded without even opening.
This one dispenses Kobe beef flavoured crisps. In these types the crane picks up the object every time (see the rubber grippers on the crane in top left) and the trick is hoping that when it drops it actually falls into the prize slot. Basically it’s random, and you’ll lose far often than win.
Here’s some cute chickens, which are much bigger than the prize slot. Here the difficulty is twofold: actually picking them up and then hoping they fall sideways so they can fit in the slot. Do you feel lucky?
The above shows a ¥10 machine (yes, ten yen) which vended tiny Australian animals. This was easy, with a nice strong claw. While designed for kids I played this a lot and won every animal! The ¥10 machines are fun since they give you the adrenaline boost of a win for a low cost 🙂
Obviously these machines wouldn’t be so common (and fun) if they never paid out, and one of the reason we love them is the feel when you do win. Like me getting two Umamusume (‘Horse girl’) branded energy drinks from one go. They tasted unspeakably bad, but the cans will live in my can collection for ever (which reminds me maybe I need to do an update blog post on that). I’ve also won a figure, a sheet (I think?) and many little toys.
Sometimes you see a prize you want that you know you’ll probably never get, like this horse girl noodle stopper. In this case you can just ‘cheat’ like I did yesterday and buy the figure new at Akiba in one of the many shops that sell crane game prizes. Sure it cost me ¥2000, but I never would have won it for that price had I tried the machine 🙂