Category: Trip

You won’t be surprised to hear that gacha machines are as ubiquitous as ever. The average price of prizes continues to rise, and machines below ¥300 are very rare now.

Dedicated gacha shops are common, and there’s even a few chains. We went into a three story one near Osaka station with over 2800 machines (most with unique prizes)! These places are popular with locals and tourists alike, so it’s no wonder they’re reproducing.

As we do every trip, we’ve sunk a decent amount into the machines. And according to our policy we don’t open the capsules until we return home. Since some bubbles are opaque, we’ll certainly forget what’s in them.

Heres my usual gallery of the variety of prizes. I used to be able to broadly categorize (anime, game, animal, tokusatsu etc) but those days are gone since anything seems possible now.

I watched a Japanese documentary on gacha prize design a few months back, and they estimated 20-25 new sets go into machines every day!

If you happen to be watching the new Kamen Rider series called Kamen Rider Zeztz, you’ll have seen his power ups are vended from gacha machines. Of course there are machines decorated to look identical to the ones in the show, and they vend toy versions of the power ups. It would be so much fun to be a child in Japan!

The premise of gacha has now made its way into drink machines. While I’ve seen such things on previous trips, they seem much more common now. A certain amount of ‘slots’ in a drink machine is dedicated to vending beverages with unique cans. Since there are several types what you get is random like a gacha, plus you get a can of tea as well!

Thats the Shadowverse can I got. The design is actually a sticker that was immediately removed and applied to a handy postcard 🙂

Let’s break my rule and open a gacha prize! I saw the above machine in Osaka and bought it (¥300) not due to the art, but because I (mistakenly) thought it was one of the machines with handwritten messages. Here’s what was inside:

Keen observers (I wasn’t) will note the ‘messages’ are spoiled not only on the included sheet, but also on the gacha poster as well! I’ll give it points for having an actual glass bottle, and also being the smallest bottle I’ve ever seen. It was devilishly difficult to get the message out and I had to use tweezers in the end. Here’s what it says:

I would have preferred a handwritten message from the girl on the poster!

We caught the Shinkansen back to Akihabara today. As usual it was a comfortable trip, and both of us may have even dozed a little.

Ten days ago when we did this trip in the other direction we went through a blizzard, but today the weather was clear. It looks to be the same for the remainder of the trip, so we’ve been lucky!

There’s our train lunches. Which one would you eat?

Our Akihabara room is large by Tokyo standards, which is good since we’ve got a mountain of luggage to pack. The view outside the window looks onto the train track and we can see the trains going all day long, which is cool.

Dinner was Sushiro with the touchscreen wall. It’s a dazzling display of technology miles beyond anything the USA has, which is another thing I like about Japan. We only ate 8 plates (which cost about $16) but the table across from us – 4 young men – ate over 50!

We’ve got no plans for Tokyo, aside from just enjoying the familiarity and the vibe and filling up our suitcases. I’m sure we’ll fit something else in one of these remaining days.

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!