Today we split up to do our own shopping and I went to Den Den Town, a few stops away from Osaka station. This is the otaku shopping district of Osaka, and I always look forward to visiting when I’m in town.
Den Den town is packed to the gills with figure and game shops, and many of them look like the above photo, with ‘rental cases’ containing items for sale.
It seems like any scale or prize figure released in the last few years is easily purchasable here if you look hard enough. I wasn’t in the market for any, but it’s always fun to browse. I went into many of these, as well as card shops, model shops and gacha machine shops.
Even though I’ve sold much of my collection and have more or less obtained all the Wizardry games, I still love looking in the retro game stores. The Osaka branch of Super Potato is incredible, with vast stocks of games going back decades. As has been the trend since the pandemic, the prices continue to climb. Retro gaming using real hardware is a rich man’s game these days.
Alas the one thing I want to buy – a 2DS – eludes me. I’ve seen many, but none in fantastic condition. I’d probably pay good money for a near-mint boxed model. I’ll keep looking.
Speaking of expensive games, the above Famicom (NES) game is notable. It’s an unremarkable port of an arcade game, but it’s widely believed to be the best NES box art and in recent years has become very well known for this reason. Since the game is purchasable on the Switch store for a few dollars, anyone buying the Famicom version is doing it for the box anyway. But for $350+ they better really like that art!
Even more eye-watering is this Gameboy Light I saw at Mandarake. I’ve given up ever owning one of these – I should have bought one two decades ago – but this version which was an Osamu Tezuka shop exclusive has a sticker price of over $1000 dollars. That’s impressive enough, but if you translate the tag you’ll see it’s in damaged condition!
Many of the reseller shops post buylists, and I saw this one at Mandarake for a Wonderswan game. I did some research and the game is rare, but this buylist is for a special version that was only sold at a single launch event and may be limited to fewer than 20 copies! It’s incredibly rare, and Mandarake will give you over $3000 for a copy if you own one. I wonder if they’ll get any takers?
Something remarkable occurred at Mandarake today as well: I had a lengthy conversation with another customer, and he even asked to exchange phone numbers! What did we discuss? I’ll save that for another post…
Tomorrow we’re heading back to Tokyo for the final phase of the trip. We have loose plans and will mostly just take it easy and enjoy ourselves for a week. Since we’re not doing anything particularly interesting (with regards to this blog) I’ll take the chance to do my usual catch-up posts on various aspects of Japan I enjoy so much. Look forward to them!
