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Japan Pickups: Wizardry (Part 1)

Sunday, June 25th, 2023

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been selling off my game collection over the past five years. I’ll never stop being a game collector – I still have all my handheld games for instance – and I enjoy collecting a certain series now to keep my fingers dipped in some of the systems I’ve divested from. That series is Wizardry, and once again I bought some more games from the series while I was in Japan.

This 1996 Super Famicom game was the fourth in the Gaiden series (the first three were Game Boy games) and, like its predecessors, was never released outside of Japan. Wizardry still existed as an ongoing series in the west when this game was released, but the Japanese spin-offs were well and truly established by now.

The game is rare and somewhat pricey these days, and I’m happy I found a great condition version, especially since the box is beautiful and features silver ink. I can’t of course play it (I don’t have a Super Famicom), but maybe one day I will.

The two PS1 games shown above contain remakes of the first five Wizardry games fancied up with new graphics and sound, and the PC-Engine game contains Wizardry III and IV. While I’ve played all these games in various versions over the years, I’ve never been able to play the PS1 remakes and would love to since they contain all new Jun Suemi monster art.

No Wizardry games were released in the west for PlayStation or the TurboGrafx, but with the above pickups I now (believe I) have all but one of the nine games released for these two systems. The one I am lacking (Wizardry Empire) doesn’t seem particularly rare or expensive; it’s just I haven’t found it yet.

One of the Busin games was the only PS2 game in the series released in the west (as Tales of The Forsaken Land), and was in fact the last physical release Wizardry game released outside of Japan. I own it, and played it at the time, and it was a great new installment. In Japan Wizardry saw many PS2 installments in multiple series (main, Gaiden, Empire) and I think I now own them all with the above three pickups.

A PS3 game – Labyrinth of Lost Souls – was released in 2011 and even came out in the west. Alas it was digital only, and since my PS3 is long dead I couldn’t play it any more even were it available. I’ve read that the Japanese physical edition (which you can see in the pic) was limited release (which may explain why it was pricey)! I’m glad I now own it, since it’s the last physical release of any Wizardry game.

With these eight pickups my physical Wizardry console game collection is very close to complete, but since the original series was released for so many machines there’s still a lot of retro versions out these I’d like to get my hands on. Wizardry for instance saw releases on Apple-II (in 1981), PC, Macintosh, MSX and a bevy of different Japanese home computers. Wouldn’t it be fun to own one of them?

As far as the ‘Part 1’ of this post is concerned, I also bought a few Wizardry books while in Japan. I’ll detail them in the next post…

Posted in Collecting, Games, Otaku | Comments Closed

Bikkuriman Star Wars

Friday, June 16th, 2023

You may have received a postcard from me in the past with a shiny square sticker on it. This is usually a Bikkuriman sticker, which is packed in with a wafer snack. On Thursday at Nakano I bought this:

It’s a sealed box of Bikkuriman Star Wars wafers! It cost me a grand total of ¥3040, or about $21. Not bad for a collectible from 7 years ago. “Seven years ago?!?” you say…

Yep, these wafers are loooooong expired. Obviously, I bought these just for the stickers. I had originally considered taking it home unopened, but I’m a bit tight for luggage space so last night I executed Operation Bikkuri and opened it in my hotel room!

Isn’t it lovely how it’s been packed? I found it interesting the pack colours align and are not equal. Here’s the two wrapper designs:

I was a bit cautious opening the first one. Things have changed now and the stickers are sealed inside little plastic bags but back in 2016 they were just loose so I feared the wafer may have rotted/melted and ruined the sticker. Happily my fears were unfounded:

Since I had done no research, I was not prepared for the stickers to be holographic! This was a most pleasant surprise. I didn’t try the wafer: I don’t really enjoy them even when fresh and I didn’t want to risk food poisoning 🙂

My next surprise was that amongst the 30 packs I obtained a full set of all 24 stickers. And don’t they all look fantastic? Which is your favourite?

Bikkuriman stickers have been around for decades now and are known for their particular style. When they do collaborations the same style is used and I think it matches Star Wars well. I’m astonished I didn’t know about this product before seeing it in a case in Nakano!

I love these stickers! This is the quintessential example of why otaku shopping here in Japan can be so much fun: finding a treasure you didn’t even know existed, and for cheap as well. A quick look online shows me there were followup series for later films. Maybe one day I’ll find some of them?

Oh, and yes I got 30 stickers where the set is only 24, which means I got 6 extras. If you want one, please leave a comment on this post (or text me) within the next day. First come, first served!

Posted in Collecting, Japan, Otaku, Trip | Comments Closed

Ikebukuro

Friday, June 9th, 2023

I arrived in Japan late last night. The flight was uneventful (aside from the fact we flew over the Mariana Trench) and navigating the airport and getting to the hotel (by taxi) were both easy.

My room is comedically small, but as with most things in this country it’s a marvel of efficiency and I know I’ll be comfy here during the ten days of this stay.

The hotel is in Akihabara on the river, and there’s a shrine right next door. This lovely fellow greets visitors to the shrine, and as you can see it was raining quite heavily both last night and this morning. I was jet lagged and very tired (I only got a few hours sleep) so today I visited Ikebukuro since I know the area well and knew it would be a less-hectic destination.

But first… I had to eat! I was still on Australian time and famished by the time Saizeriya opened at 10 am and I shoveled spaghetti into my mouth like a beast. I was still not feeling great at this point (from the flight) but I don’t exaggerate when I say the spaghetti energy was like a full life recharge and I left that place a new man!

What followed was a pleasant several hours otaku shopping in the many shops in Ikebukuro. I visited the enormous gacha machine shop, various game and anime stores, some character shops (Rilakkuma, Kamen Rider) an old candy shop and of course several game centers. Most of these I’ve been to – and described on this blog – before, so I won’t go into detail again.

The retro game shop Super Potato is world famous, and in my opinion their better store is the one in Ikebukuro. And yet whenever I visit I’m the only one there – compared to the Akihabara branch which is always mobbed. Once again today I goggled at the items in the cases, the prices on which just continue to rise as the hobby increases in popularity. Even though I sold out of all my non-handheld games, I still love looking at the rarities.

I was particularly thrilled to see The Black Onyx. This nearly 40-year-old game (the above is a 1987 port for a Sega console) is arguably the grand-daddy of all Japanese RPGs and went on to influence many other games including Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. It’s never been released in English which is unusual since it was actually written by an American. I’d never seen a copy before today, and would dearly love to play it one day.

A bit later in the day, on my way back to the train station, I visited Mikado, a game center specializing in retro video games (on original hardware). This place was incredible! Across three floors they have many dozens of retro arcade games going all the way back to the 1980s. While clean and well-kept, the building and interior have a bit of a grimy vibe to them, and when you step inside you feel like you’ve stepped back in time. The dimly-lot basement in particular was astounding: full of old men smoking whilst playing mahjong games with ‘questionable’ graphics! I played two somewhat ‘famous’ games I’ve never seen before, Dancing Eyes and Gals Panic 4, before the smoke chased me out 🙂

The new Animate mega-store opened since we were here in January and it’s very impressive. It has eight large floors of anime/otaku merchandise and there’s a good chance of you’re a fan of any current series there’s a whole swathe of merchandise in here for you. I didn’t have the time to look at every floor (or even half of them, this place is massive), but I was taken by a giant range of cookies on the ground floor. So I bought one:

The cookies feature extremely detailed printing onto the icing, and there were dozens (over a hundred even?) available. I chose this character from Granblue Fantasy and when I tried it after dinner was surprised to find it was very hard. As in a-bit-hard-to-bite hard! The icing was super solid and the cookie more like an iron ration. Are these designed to be eaten or collected? I’ll never know 🙂

I saw lots more than I’ve covered here (I’ll save Ultraman for another day for instance) but suffice to say this trip has started strong. Tomorrow I’ll change tack a bit, and show you something new. Stay tuned!

Posted in Games, Otaku, Trip | Comments Closed

Picross For Bastards!!

Sunday, April 16th, 2023

Remember that insane Picross book I blogged about last year. I finished the Bastard!! puzzle. Here it is:

The accompanying contest required the entrant to identify the character in the puzzle from the three choices of Dark Schneider, Kall-Su or Tia Noto. Can you see which one it’s supposed to be:

Yep of course it’s Dark Schneider! That would be like making a Star Wars picross and having someone like Sio Bibble instead of a leading character!

The puzzle took me many hours over the last seven months, although to be honest I gave up on it at the end of last year before returning to it today for a five hour bender that has ruined my eyes. Alas I’m 7 months too late to win the Dyson vacuum cleaner, but I’ll forever have the self-satisfaction that I beat it.

Now about the >100 other puzzles in the book, not to mention the second book I bought since that last post…

Posted in Art, Otaku, Puzzles | Comments Closed

My Collections: PS3 and PS4

Thursday, March 30th, 2023

The Playstation 3 (PS3) was released in November 2006 and it would be 10 months before I finally bought one early in September of 2007. The system was very expensive ($500), had a slow start, and even almost a year into release there was a lack of games that caught my eye. Indeed, for the first couple of weeks I owned it, I didn’t even buy any games for it and instead used it to watch blu-rays and play PS2 games!

Looking back on the PS3 I remember it as the console that ushered in – for me – the era of downloading games. Sony introduced the PlayStation shop with the PS3 and there was a lot of interesting and inexpensive games available, and during the life of the console I probably bought a couple of dozen games online. Of course I also bought disc games – 98 in total – and my PS3 library ended up being one of my top 10 biggest game collections.

That’s the bulk of them above, and notable titles included the first of the Souls series, the immersive RPG Dragons Dogma and Diablo 3 which featured couch co-op that KLS used to play together endlessly. In fact we played the PS3 often enough that not one, but two of them died, with the laser failing on one and the disc tray on the other! We played them both to death 🙂

The PS3 era of games is unremarkable from a collector’s perspective. They’re not old enough to be retro, and not new enough to be appealing to modern gamers. Furthermore, many of the landmark titles have been rereleased or ‘remastered’ for newer consoles. There is very little value in PS3 games today, and it’s probably the least collected console. The vast majority of my games – which are of course all in pristine condition – are only ‘worth’ only a few dollars. I have a couple of ‘rare’ games (shown above) but even then they’d sell for less what I paid for them. Maybe one day PS3 games will gain value, but I don’t think that day is anytime soon.

The life of the PS3 extended all the way into 2017, but long before it was retired it had already been surpassed by its followup, the PlayStation 4 (PS4). This was released in late 2013, but I didn’t get mine until Christmas 2014 (in response to the death of our second PS3).

In some ways the PS4 is still a current-era console, in that it has yet to be officially retired and you can still buy them new in stores. For many years ours was our primary console, and both KLS and myself played it extensively. And then, about 2 years ago, it died as well, and we didn’t replace it (although not for lack of trying).

I loved the PS4. It has a great controller, a good OS and it was successful enough that the market supported lots of fantastic games (such as Monster Hunter World, Nioh and several Vanillaware games). It had easy and fast online play, and if you didn’t absolutely need them upon launch the games were reasonably priced after a few months as well.

In the 7+ years we owned one I bought 123 PS4 games. I think – since many of them were $30 or less – this was also the console with the lowest average game price of any I have ever owned. That’s not to say I didn’t over time pick up a few games that are a little more collectible (such as the limited edition of Odin Sphere) shown above, but most of my PS4 library is as unremarkable (as collectibles) as my PS3 games.

This post is because – as with the Wii and Wii U collections – I’m also selling my PS3 and PS4 games. Look closely at the above pics and you may note that there are four games that I bought for both the PS3 and PS4 and one of them – Dragon’s Crown – I also own for the Vita! I love that game to death, and it’s one of a few that will be hard to say goodbye to (especially since it’s a collectors metal case edition with an unopened pack of trading cards) but I hold out hope we may get yet another remaster for Switch sometime soon. The bulk of these games I won’t miss though: they were fun to play in their time, but I’ll never play them again and they’re just now taking up space in the house.

Between 1995 and 2021 we had (8 models of) four different PlayStation consoles in our house (not including PSP or Vita) but have yet to buy a PlayStation 5. Right now it doesn’t have many games I’m interested in, it’s very expensive, and the Switch is more than enough for our needs. With the sell off of my PS3/PS4 collections has the sun set on PlayStation in this house? Time will tell…

Posted in Blog, Collecting, Games, Otaku, Tech | 2 Comments »

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