“Life In The So-Called Space Age”
My flight boards soon. In about 22 hours I’ll be home.
You are often interviewed by security on the way out of Tokyo, and the girl that interviewed me said I’ve seen more Japan than she has. I said I’ve got lots more to see and she laughed and said she hopes I can return soon.
So do I.
My stamina ran out about five days ago, and I developed a technique of siphoning energy from my soul to keep going. Yesterday my soul ran dry as well, so I had to use a forbidden spell to sacrifice my very humanity so I could continue with the punishing schedule I’ve been on for almost a month now. And so what’s left of this man has reached the end of another long vacation. In what has become tradition, the vacation once again draws to its end in Akihabara.
I inadvertently went to a new Sushiro sushi restaurant and discovered they’d move on from tablet ordering systems into massive touchscreens at every booth! Even the sushi train itself is now virtual, and if you touch something scrolling by on the screen it will be sent to your booth. It’s not surprising to be impressed with technological advances while in Japan, but this one impressed me more than I have been in a while.
Naturally I got my ‘hamburger sushi’ again, which is magnificent and truly the peak of authentic Japanese cuisine, as I’m sure you’ll agree.
I spent a lot of time in card shops today, and took photos of the most expensive cards I saw for various games. From top left, we have a $3800 One Piece card, a $5900 Pokémon card, a $6300 Yugioh card, and a $107000 Magic card. I chose not to buy any of them. 🙂
I also spent quite a bit of time in the Hirose arcade, playing Kamen Rider and a bunch of retro games (Volfied, Cadash, various R-Type clones and both Macross shooters). The more time I spent in this incredible arcade the more I love it. The above photo was taken on the fourth floor and all the cabs along the left are different Tetris games.
I also found this cabinet that is apparently continuously streamed to a YouTube channel! Of course I played the game and I wonder if there were any viewers? What a wonderful idea.
I did a lot of ‘text shopping’ with KLS today, which entails me texting photos of displays (usually cosmetics) then her telling me if she’s interested in anything. We’ve done it before and it’s a lot of fun. It was a big success and she was able to get several fun items. (She didn’t want the cat compact in the photo.)
Dinner was my favourite meat spaghetti from Saizeriya, which I ate six times these past two weeks. I’m 43% noodle now!
And dinner 2 was a melonpan from Daily Yamazaki, which is a rare konbini which is why I didn’t have this one in my melonpan review post. I’ll save my opinion for next time.
Now I’m packing while watching anime on TV. Tomorrow I fly home, and hopefully by this time tomorrow I’ll be asleep on the plane.
Here I am with a couple of professional cosplayers promoting an anime series (the same one for which I got the stickers yesterday). They were cute and welcoming and my smile is very genuine. I’ve had this smile on my face most of the last two weeks. Even despite the heat and discomfort, and the overly abundant and sometimes rude tourists, I still love it here and already look forward to my next visit 🙂
This is the latest Kamen Rider arcade game. It’s a touchscreen game where your group of Kamen Riders battles against another group. Gameplay is simple at the lowest levels, and it’s impossible to lose. I imagine it’s a lot of fun for kids to touch the screen to use their attacks, like playing on a massive iPad.
It’s an IC card game, and a card is dispensed every time you play (¥100). You can also just buy additional cards for ¥100 apiece. I’ve got over a dozen cards now; you can see my best ones above.
The above is the view as you play. The screens are massive and tower over you (only the lower one is a toushscreen). Just below the bottom screen you can see I’ve placed five cards into scanners: four riders and an equipment card. You do this during setup, and it’s fun how the game scans and loads each rider as you do it.
As I said gameplay is simplistic but dynamic, and the animations are fun to watch. I haven’t yet ‘got into’ Kamen Rider so I only know a few characters, but it seems there’s loads of them in this game.
I played this a bit in January, and much more this trip. Every time the game was more or less the same, where only my riders varied as I received and used new cards. I knew there was a way for the game to progress if I could use a ‘license’, but I couldn’t find one until my last day on Sendai:
These are given out in arcades, and have unique codes that let you create your account. Every time you play and scan your license, the game loads your save. With this, the game opens up so much! (I blanked out the ID number since there’s some personal info linked to my Rider account.)
With a license you now progress through the game, fighting more difficult and complicated opponents. You’re also scored and this gets saved to per-arcade and national rankings.
You receive experience to level up your riders, and unlock lots of items the use of which I don’t know yet. You get personal experience as well to level up your account level (which unlocks new battles and other features).
There’s even an upgrade grid that you fill out with points you earn by using various attacks in the game!
Here’s my player card (which can be customized as well) showing my progress so far. I’m level 4! 🙂
With a license, this game becomes very much like a mobile game played in an arcade. There are daily items to obtain, daily quests to complete, and various other benefits awarded for regular play. Imagine going to the arcade every day to play Ganba Legends to get your daily login bonus!
It’s quite popular as well, especially here in Tokyo. I had difficulty finding a machine to use yesterday, since they were often being played by grown men with teams of impossibly flashy cards and boxes of backup cards sitting nearby. I believe you can also fight against opponents teams, so sometimes maybe these guys were playing against each other? Watching them play it’s clear strategy and team-building becomes critical if you want to defeat higher-level opponents.
Two of the machines in Hirose arcade have these boxes attached which let you record screen output to a flash drive! This is probably for the purpose of YouTube videos or something, and it’s an amazing feature I’ve never before seen attached to an arcade game.
This game is fun. The card-collecting feature is addictive, and the idea of slowly building my level and fine-tuning a team to defeat more and harder opponents is appealing. If I lived here, I would absolutely be ‘all in’ on Ganba Legends.