Category: Otaku

Japanese Gamebooks

At the Mandarake rare bookstore in Nakano mall, I happened to notice the attendant (a stunning Italian lass cosplaying as Sailor Moon) packaging some sort of Japanese RPG rules book for sale. I asked if they had any others – daring to think I may finally, after six trips to Japan, find a gamebook – and she directed me to the glass case outside. There I saw this:

And this:

And this:

And more, including some AD&D books and quite a few Japan-specific titles. Almost all in fantastic condition but also sporting fantastic price tags. As a rule of thumb, estimate ¥100 at about $1.

I would have needed over $1000 to buy all the Fighting Fantasy titles alone…

Now it’s hard to leave me speechless these days, but this sight did. I’ve been looking over and over again every time we’ve visited Japan for gamebooks and never ever seen a single one before. My mind was blown; I was overcome. But it was early days in the trip, which means I wasn’t yet at the point I was spending without reason. So I only bought one item – the cheapest one – this:

FF Gamebook 19, Demons Of The Deep. I bought it when it was first released in 1986 but at the time wouldn’t have known (or cared!) that it was also released in Japan.

Here’s an interior shot:

You can see there’s little trace of western influence here, with vertical text and using Japanese numbers! The presentation is beautiful though, with very sharp printing and perfect reproduction of the art.

The book comes with a separate adventure sheet with rules on the back:

And includes a nice section at the end detailing the other available gamebooks:

It’s noticeable smaller (and thinner) than the western editions too. Here it is compared to my UK and US imprints:

I’m enormously happy to finally own a non-English FF book, and something about it being as exotic as in Japanese makes it quite special.

And yet I do regret not buying more. I wasn’t going to spend over $300 for Sky Lord, but why didn’t I buy at least Out Of The Pit? Silly me!

Now I move toward the next challenge: a non-English Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Given it was published in over 20 languages that shouldn’t be too difficult. Should it?

Broadway

I just wrote a lengthy post but the app I used to blog from my phone crashed and it was all lost! So here’s an abbreviated version…

Yesterday we spent the day at Nakano Broadway mall, a Mecca for fans of anime/games/manga/toys etc, filled with shops that look like this;

And this…

And this…

We’ve been many times but it gets better every trip. It’s not for those with shallow pockets though; I think as the awareness of this place has grown so have the price tags!

I saw countless amazing things but none more so than Japanese imprints of the FF books I collect. That deserves its own post in the future though; watch for it!

Broadway isn’t just shops, there’s also a few arcades and lots and lots of gashapon (toy vending) machines:

We love all this stuff. It was a great day 🙂

Gore Magala Girl

That’s the figure/kit I got for my birthday. It was time to set it up!

But first a brief explanation. This is a figure inspired by this guy, Gore Magala:

He’s one of the enemies in Monster Hunter, and his armour – once you defeat him and collect enough parts to make it – is very distinctive:

So this figure kit, while not reproducing the in-game appearance of the armour, is inspired by Magala. Here’s the contents:

So many parts! There are several configurations the figure can be displayed in, and I wanted the dress-with-umbrella mode. This required use of the wings, folded around to form each half of the dress:

The problem was… it’s very difficult to assemble! The pieces hardly wanted to go together, and once I got it mostly done I couldn’t get the dress around her.

The archer mode was just as difficult, and since I didn’t want to use glue or modify the pieces I eventually just settled for replacing her normal clothes with the armour…

…and displaying her in ‘dual swords’ mode:

I think I’ll call her Momo 😉

I think I could easily get the wings attached and set up like the image on the back of the box, but I want to finish filling my new curio first to see how much space I have.

Final review: looks great, incredibly (over) engineered, very challenging to assemble!