Our hotel has a little robot in the lobby. We’ve seen these in shops before but this is the first time ‘in the wild’. Kristin has fallen in love!

Her mannerisms and facial expressions are extremely endearing and she responds to being spoken to and petted. If these were available in the USA and if we had hardwood floors I suspect we might own one.

Yesterday we returned to Ikebukuro for some small errands and because it was a bit cold to spend long periods outdoors. We both had a few shops we wanted to look in but we made a critical error of going into a game center and sitting at a fishing medal game we’d enjoyed before with ¥1200 worth of medals:

And then we started winning, and never stopped. Every time a ball dropped we had a fishing event, and we got a lot of small – 30 or 50 medal – wins. Then we got five golden balls dropped and has a jackpot event which even though we didn’t win the jackpot still gave us a couple of hundred medals.

The wins kept racking up. After an hour we still had more medals than we started with so started going crazy putting them in with no logic or reason. Our goal was to burn through them fast so we go eat and shop, but the winning continued! We caught a koi that gave us a whopping 500 medals which flooded the playfield and led to a cascade of other balls dropping including enough gold balls to give us our fourth jackpot chance.

I’ll spare you the details of how the jackpot is won but it’s just luck. I had even claimed winning was ‘impossible’. And then we won it!

Specifically we caught a giant squid and won 2353 medals! Our eyes bulged as a giant net above the screen in the middle filled with medals, and then slowly moved above our playfield and dumped them all!

There was now a mountain of medals, completely obscuring much of the field and covering the balls waiting to drop. There were in fact so many that they even clogged the drop area:

And I’m not exaggerating: we had to call an employee to help unclog the game since medals couldn’t continue to drop. It even gave us error messages since we’d won more medals than the game could physically dispense!

We played for a little more, just to diminish somewhat the enormous mountain of medals, but just under two hours after we started we ‘cashed out’ with this:

Our full small cup of medals had become three full large cups! We could have played for hours on these alone. You can bank them to an IC card to redeem on future visits, but the cards expire in three months. I told the attendant we didn’t want the medals since we wouldn’t be able to play again and he laughed.

We’d mastered the game. We saw all its tricks, won a literal jackpot and left with over 5x the medals we started with. I’d call that a success. 🙂