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The New Addiction

Sunday, June 23rd, 2013

Meet Zoffy, of Nebulon, my avatar in the new Animal Crossing for 3DS:

The game is all sorts of awesome, especially if you’ve been hooked by any past game in the series. It’s wonderful to get back to village maintenance and chatting with your animal buddies:

Although I’ve only been playing a week (since returning from Japan), it’s obvious the game is much more expansive than ever, with a mind-boggling array of stuff to do. This is no longer just a game you play for half an hour a day!

One new addition is ‘Club Tortimer’, which is an island excursion where you can play with people from all over the world. Yesterday I did this, and found myself on an island at night with two Japanese girls:

The one on the left was called Mari, and was very talkative and spoke great English. She is a secretary in Kobe that likes Ultraman! (This came up because my character, Zoffy, is named after one of the Ultramen):

The girl in the middle (with the pink hair) works as a secretary in a Tokyo Hospital. She is a hardcore player, and even had this award:

Anyway while we were chatting, we were just standing in a line like in the first picture. They were asking me about America and what I like about Japan and all sorts of stuff when I said “Do you know Rilakkuma?”. Their reaction was immediate and astounding:

As soon as the famous bear’s name was mentioned, both girls started running about the island excitedly just saying things like “love”, “cute”, “gyu~~~!” etc. They were maniacal about Kuma to the extent that even the mention of his name sent them into paroxysms! It was very funny 🙂

Later in the day, I also met Audrey, who lives in Paris. She told me it was sunny and hot:

So I showed her a fish:

These occurrences and much, much more are what await you should you enter the world of Animal Crossing 😉

Jokes aside, the online component (random matchmaking) is somewhat restricted as you may expect from Nintendo. Also, with no way to friend these people or even interact much with them outside of one-line chats, it will probably be something I don’t do very often. But my first experiences of it were very amusing!

Now back to catching bugs…

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Tech, The Unknown | Comments Closed

Shuwatch!

Wednesday, June 12th, 2013

After yesterday’s exhaustion, today was a rest day. Which meant over 7 hours on my feet doing 22k steps 🙂

The location was Akihabara (again!):

Bernard stayed at the ryokan for resting, so it was just KLS and I. We had no real goal, and just perused the seemingly endless amount of otaku shops.

Here’s a creative display of new manga:

An area of merchandising that was nonexistent on our first trip a dozen years ago was food. It’s quite common now to see food merchandise for most series. Here’s a selection of monster hunter snack food items:

We also went to Yodibashi camera in Akiba, pretty much the most amazing store on Earth. Here is KLS perusing a $8500 4K TV:

And a charmingly marketed men’s razor:

Lunch was Italian. I had spaghetti and KLS a mushroom pizza. As we were waiting I checked my DS for street passes. It’s very easy to get them here on the subway. I’ve obtained 51 in just two trips out with the DS.

KLS headed back early and I hit the game shops and centers and failed to win anything great. I was pretty ruined when I got back. But not too ruined to be giddy with excitement when we discovered Ultraman on TV 🙂

Tomorrow we’re off to Kyoto for two days on the bullet train!

Posted in Otaku, Trip | 2 Comments »

Let’s Talk Characters

Thursday, June 6th, 2013

Japan loves character goods, which are simply merchandise featuring a particular character. Often the characters exist solely to be merchandised; sometimes they originated elsewhere (comics or games usually).

The merchandising of popular characters is at an incredible level, with goods of all shapes and sizes to be found virtually anywhere.

Right now, it seems these are the most popular individual characters:

Rilakkuma

This guy has been around for 10 years now and rules the roost at the moment. Rilakkuma goods seem to be more common even than the venerable Hello Kitty (who I ignore in this article) and run the gamut of stationary, toys, clothes, food, electronics, kitchenware and just about everything else.

Here’s a photo of one single UFO Catcher machine stuffed with Kuma stuffed toys:

It was 4 years ago I was introduced to this guy via buying a pair of socks for SFL. And even then it was only because he is a bear. I’ve grown to like this character a lot 🙂

Nameko

He’s an ugly mushroom! He’s new, unusual, and riding a strong popularity wave. I hate him a bit, but Bernard has warmed to him. Right now his merchandise seems restricted to stationary and toys, but it is certainly abundant. I wonder if he will end up a fad?

Airou

This character is based on sentient cats from the Monster Hunter game series, which automatically earns points in my book. The fact he is cute and a cat only helps.

Although Airou doesn’t seem to have exploded beyond certain genre stores, there is an incredible variety of merchandise available and due to the success of the game the character is very well known. One of my favourite characters to be sure 🙂

In terms of series (as opposed to individual characters), there is no doing that One Piece rules the merchandise roost, with goods even more abundant than established lines such as Gundam or even Tsubaraya (Ultraman, Godzilla etc.). One Piece is the most successful manga series of all time, and undoubtedly the most merchandised!

Posted in Otaku, Toys, Trip | Comments Closed

Crossing Items Off My List

Wednesday, June 5th, 2013

There is an origami ‘museum’ not too far from where we are staying. Naturally, since Bernard is an origamist, we visited yesterday.

The museum, which is in the building of a company that makes traditional washi paper, consists of a small gallery, an impressive store, the area where the paper is made and died, and rooms for instruction. It is all very impressive, and the staff were very friendly and helpful.

As we were leaving, a friendly old fellow intercepted us at the lift and told us he would give us a demonstration. This was none other than the chairman, and we were treated to a private demonstration of his skills (and his English!) for the next 20 minutes or so. It was wonderful!

If you’re ever in Japan, this place is worth a look.

The above is a random sketch in one of many sketchbooks in one of many arcades (‘game centers’) in Akihabara, where we spent the rest of the day. I didn’t take a great deal of photos throughout many hours of shopping, eating, UFO Catching and gaming, but I’m quite pleased to say many of the items on my shopping list were found in that several hour period. The rate at which my wallet bled cash was amazing!

Notable pickups included;
– The two DS Wizardry games that were never translated
– Musha Gundam 2
– Vast amounts of monster hunter figurines
– the new Yamashita art book
– certain souvenir items for friends that I was after

The latest and unquestionably greatest of the current crop of UFO figures is a magical girl Kirino from Ore no Imouto. Here’s a picture of an advert for it outside of one of the mega-arcades:

Bernard and I both won one 🙂

The monster hunter cat mascots (‘airou’) are a very big deal here, with vast amount of available merchandise. Twice now KLS has joked (?) about buying one of the big guys seen above!

Game Center highlights included the dozens of classic game posters on display at a Sega arcade, a punching game which nearly broke my hand, and Y200 for what seemed like an hour of darts 🙂

It was another very long and active day, and I fear Bernard may be at the apex of ruination. Even I am in an advanced state of decrepitude, and as I lay here early the next morning writing this the question of how to even rise from the futon is a challenging one!

But I’ll soldier on. As I always say on vacation, I can rest when I get home 😉

Posted in Art, Food, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Trip | Comments Closed

A Bridge Too Far

Monday, June 3rd, 2013

Predictably, we couldn’t sleep much our first night, and took advantage of this to plan a trip to the famous Tsujiki fish markets. We left the ryokan around 5:30 am and headed over…

…only to find it closed to tourists until 9 am! So, at about 6:30 am we were loose in a city that wouldn’t wake for about 3 hours 🙂

That was taken at a fox shrine near Tsujiki, as we debated our next move. Eventually we decided to stroll over to the imperial gardens before heading to another attraction around 9. The walking had begun!

Bernard’s camera is stupid-impressive, but also stupid-heavy! Here he is self-portraiting during a break we took after finding the imperial gardens closed! Asakusa here we come!

That’s a look back along Nakamise-dori from within the famous Senso-ji temple. It was about 11 am by now; the day had barely started yet we’d been gallivanting for hours already. Senso-ji was great though, with lots of people and the tourist shops selling everything a man could want…

Our first lunch (Burger King!) over, it was time for Odaiba. While no Alihabara or Nagano, it was here that Bernard would be introduced to the wonder of the Japanese arcade 🙂

This photo was taken while I was still in the late stages of shock after just coming across a Monster Hunter shop in Decks mall. Since I believe in supporting the economy, I made some modest purchases and was awarded with a special bag, Airu (the cat mascot) hat and even a sticker!

That’s a real scale Gundam outside Diver City mall at Odaiba. Note KLS for scale. This was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen!

It was about 2 pm when we found the first of 3 major arcades in Odaiba. Oodles would be spent UFO catching and redemption machining, and a great time was had by all! Among other things Bernard won himself an AKB48 mouse and mousepad set:

I won, from a single Y500 (~$5) credit, three super cute Airu’s from the same machine:

But alas, the wonderful Rilakkuma hand puppets were cursed with a ‘weak claw’ machine and were unwinnable:

We eventually left Odaiba around 6 pm, all in a state of advanced ruination. We’d been going strong for about 13 hours, and my pedometer registered over 40,000 steps. We had bags of loot and dying feet when we got back. Delirious, I even ate a convenience store hot dog for dinner…

…before collapsing – corpselike – onto the bed! What a first day 🙂

Posted in Food, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Toys, Trip | Comments Closed

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