Category: Games

Japan Pickups: Wizardry

June 20, 2025

My Wizardry game collection is close to complete and it’s been a while since I’ve found anything I didn’t have, so finding four items on the recent trip was a pleasant surprise.

The special edition of the remake of Proving Grounds Of The Mad Overlord comes with an art print and two booklets. Wizardry The Five Ordeals released just a couple of weeks before the trip and was widely available everywhere (it’s a port of a Japanese PC game). I’m looking forward to playing this one!

Elminage is a game series that is Wizardry in all but name and was developed by some of the same people that made the Japanese Wizardry games. I already owned two of the games and with the addition of Elminage II and Elminage Gothic I now have the entire series. Both of these games were quite expensive, and it’s worth mentioning that I can’t play Elminage Gothic since it’s a 3DS version and my 3DS’s are religion locked to USA games.

Incidentally, my collection of Wizardry games now exceeds 50! I believe I own every game in the series including all the Japanese ‘gaiden’ games, so from this point expanding my collection will only happen via new releases or if I manage to obtain more of the original computer versions.

I also purchased on this trip the above three Wizardry guides. Each of them are full colour with dozens of pages of monster and item art, and detailed maps of each game level.

As with the dozens of other (Japanese) Wizardry guides I already own, these are beautiful books with production levels that far exceed what we had in the west at the time. It’s evidence of how popular this series was in Japan that I now own multiple comprehensive guides for each of the first few games, each released by different publishers and yet I’m not aware of a single western guide for any of the first five Wizardry games!

Lastly I found this Wizardry fanzine in the retro game section at Shosen Book Tower in Akihabara. As you can read on the translation at right, it has a lengthy interview with Superdeluxe games about the collectors edition mentioned above, as well as a wealth of other wizardry-related articles and artwork. This book is obviously a work of love by dedicated Japanese fans and will require close reading via translator since I suspect there’s some good information in its pages 🙂

My Wizardry book collection exceeds 50 titles now as well, and continues to expand via novels, manga, game guides and RPG manuals. With hardly any information on such books available online I have no idea how much else is waiting to be found on future trips…

Kamen Rider Ganba Legends

June 14, 2025

This is the latest Kamen Rider arcade game. It’s a touchscreen game where your group of Kamen Riders battles against another group. Gameplay is simple at the lowest levels, and it’s impossible to lose. I imagine it’s a lot of fun for kids to touch the screen to use their attacks, like playing on a massive iPad.

It’s an IC card game, and a card is dispensed every time you play (¥100). You can also just buy additional cards for ¥100 apiece. I’ve got over a dozen cards now; you can see my best ones above.

The above is the view as you play. The screens are massive and tower over you (only the lower one is a toushscreen). Just below the bottom screen you can see I’ve placed five cards into scanners: four riders and an equipment card. You do this during setup, and it’s fun how the game scans and loads each rider as you do it.

As I said gameplay is simplistic but dynamic, and the animations are fun to watch. I haven’t yet ‘got into’ Kamen Rider so I only know a few characters, but it seems there’s loads of them in this game.

I played this a bit in January, and much more this trip. Every time the game was more or less the same, where only my riders varied as I received and used new cards. I knew there was a way for the game to progress if I could use a ‘license’, but I couldn’t find one until my last day on Sendai:

These are given out in arcades, and have unique codes that let you create your account. Every time you play and scan your license, the game loads your save. With this, the game opens up so much! (I blanked out the ID number since there’s some personal info linked to my Rider account.)

With a license you now progress through the game, fighting more difficult and complicated opponents. You’re also scored and this gets saved to per-arcade and national rankings.

You receive experience to level up your riders, and unlock lots of items the use of which I don’t know yet. You get personal experience as well to level up your account level (which unlocks new battles and other features).

There’s even an upgrade grid that you fill out with points you earn by using various attacks in the game!

Here’s my player card (which can be customized as well) showing my progress so far. I’m level 4! 🙂

With a license, this game becomes very much like a mobile game played in an arcade. There are daily items to obtain, daily quests to complete, and various other benefits awarded for regular play. Imagine going to the arcade every day to play Ganba Legends to get your daily login bonus!

It’s quite popular as well, especially here in Tokyo. I had difficulty finding a machine to use yesterday, since they were often being played by grown men with teams of impossibly flashy cards and boxes of backup cards sitting nearby. I believe you can also fight against opponents teams, so sometimes maybe these guys were playing against each other? Watching them play it’s clear strategy and team-building becomes critical if you want to defeat higher-level opponents.

Two of the machines in Hirose arcade have these boxes attached which let you record screen output to a flash drive! This is probably for the purpose of YouTube videos or something, and it’s an amazing feature I’ve never before seen attached to an arcade game.

This game is fun. The card-collecting feature is addictive, and the idea of slowly building my level and fine-tuning a team to defeat more and harder opponents is appealing. If I lived here, I would absolutely be ‘all in’ on Ganba Legends.

Game Boys

June 12, 2025

Most of the games I sold last year were for various versions of the Game Boy, and the sale was very lucrative since this is a market which has been exploding in value. On this trip I’ve been keeping an eye on Game Boy hardware in particular, which is increasing in value much faster than other retro consoles.

Look at these GBAs for example. Nintendo sold over 80 million of these and you’d think the value would be low as a result. But finding good quality ones (with battery cover, no scratches etc.) isn’t easy and finding ones with rare colour schemes is very difficult. Even so, $500+ surprised me.

But look at these limited edition versions! I’d never even heard of the one on top (sold only at the NYC Pokemon store, which no longer exists) and the one on the bottom was a special version sold in Japan only when Mother 3 was released. As you can see, each were priced at well over $1000.

But even those prices are nothing compared to ¥660000 (about $4600) for this limited Pokémon Game Boy SP! And it’s not even in pristine condition! Surely this is the holy grail of SP collecting? I’ve still got two SPs, and I was intrigued to note that even unboxed common versions go for $200+ now.

The above is a Game Boy micro faceplate – just a little plastic thing that clips onto the front. At $200+ this is eye-opening so I did some research and this was a Japan-only Club Nintendo reward for cashing in Nintendo Points! You’d have to be a maniac collector to buy this one.

It always bothered me that the Game Boy Light was never sold outside Japan (because it was released just before the GBA) and I always wanted one since it’s the only GB model I don’t own. Like a fool I let the years pass without buying one and now even unboxed standard versions are $500+. Or you can get this Osamu Tezuka limited version for $1000…

Or this Pokémon one for $3200! What’s surprising about this particular item is I took the photo in a Bookoff used shop. Bookoff is a great chain and you can sometimes find rare items in them but I think this is by far the most expensive thing I’ve ever seen. I wonder if the person with pockets deep enough for this will find it?

Incidentally Pokémon games continue to dominate the used GB/GBA markets. The guy I sell games to says he can’t keep them in, and when I sold him all mine last year he already had a buyer lined up! (Admittedly mine were in close to mint collection.) The used game stores here are full of old Pokémon games, and even loose cartridges these days go for many times their original retail price.

You’ll have noticed a distinct Pokémon subtheme on this post, as one of the driving forces behind GB collectibility is people still playing old Pokémon games on original hardware. Here’s a $1000+ Pokémon original DS (which I also didn’t know existed) and while I didn’t take photos the various Pokémon-branded DS models fetch predictably high prices as well.

And on the topic of DS’s, one of my game regrets is never buying a 2DS. I thought it was weird when it was released but in the back of my mind always planned on getting one for my collection. But I didn’t and they disappeared from stores very quickly. They’re rare in used shops, and as you can see even imperfect examples are expensive. One of the shops in Akiba has a sealed boxed version in a case, but it’s labeled ‘Not For Sale’!

If you’ve got a Game Boy or one of the many follow-ups be sure to keep it in good condition. It’s probably worth quite a bit more than you’d think 🙂

Robot Claw