Robot Claw

Yesterday was supposed to be our last day here, and we split up with me returning to Akihabara and KLS shopping in the massive Tokyo Station complex. We both shopped until we nearly dropped, and met back at the hotel. I made some extraordinary purchases, which I’m sure I’ll blog about in time.

Neither of us took many photos, so the ones on this entry are ‘out-takes’ from previous days.

Late last night we received a text from the airline: our flight home was significantly delayed, and the delay was long enough that we’d miss our connecting flight home and have to spend the night at Atlanta airport. Apparently this was due to a ‘computer glitch’, which we later learned was the FAA glitch in the USA that affected nearly 10,000 flights.

This is not the sort of news anyone wants to hear on the night before their departure home, but we decided on a plan quickly. We extended our hotel another day, booked an Atlanta hotel, and made the most of it! We now had nearly an entire extra day in Tokyo (and in addition are booked for tonight in two separate hotels in two countries)!

So we had an unplanned full day today. We visited some giant Game Centers, had a nice lunch and did a leisurely walk back to our hotel from Ueno, stopping in many shops along the way. It was far more relaxing than most days of this trip, and we ended up turning an unexpected delay into a nice day in the city.

It’s now late at night and we’re at the airport waiting to depart. We’re tired and have a long trip ahead of us, and are both hoping we can get some sleep on the flight.

As always Japan was welcoming and modern and convenient and surprising and efficient and a wonderful place to take a vacation. It’s interesting to see how the country has evolved in the over 20 years I’ve been visiting, and even in the pandemic years since my last trip it seems to have taken significant steps into the future (compared to the USA) while keeping in touch with its rich history and traditions.

I already look forward to what I will see when next I visit 🙂

I’ve heard that arcades here were affected by Covid, with some closing for good and others shrinking. From what I’ve seen in Tokyo, this doesn’t seem to be the case and there’s still lots of games present in most ‘game centers’.

Of course arcades have changed profoundly since the 1980s, and very few (if any?) these days are simple solo play cabinets. They still exist in certain Akiba arcades, but the majority of video games today are dedicated machines, often internet connected and multiplayer.

To make money arcades need to offer experiences the player can’t have at home, and the companies that make the games continue to innovate here in ways alien to the rest of the world. We don’t even have game centers in America, much less ones that can accommodate a half dozen of the above Gundam machine all connected together both locally and online.

The above is a quiz game that up to 99 players can play online. The arcade I was in at the time (Round 1 Kyoto) had about 20 of these machines in rows, as well as a separate machine for signing up or creating accounts. You can even win real-world prizes if you do well. Amazing!

Here’s one of those (addictive) fishing games where you hold a fake reel and wind in the fish when you catch it. This schoolgirl was playing all alone and as we walked past she was reeling in a gigantic ‘boss fish’!

This is a RTS game where you control the action using a joystick and a ‘light pen’. The graphics are amazingly good and nearby is a dedicated terminal where you can view player records and even replays! Once again the game is linked online so you can play against those in other game centers across Japan.

I don’t know much about this one since it didn’t have an attract mode but I’m guessing some sort of FPS moba (like Overwatch). As you can see it’s brand new and it’s even possible it was being tested (they had four cabinets) since I haven’t seen it elsewhere.

This was a curiosity: at a tiny Game Center in Kyoto we saw candy cabs modified to display the output from PCs (or even Misters) running Touhou doujin games. And if that sentence doesn’t mean much to you don’t worry: the gist is that some arcades these days even include ‘independent’ games! I saw similar in Nakano yesterday, and it’s reassuring to think that if brand new ‘official’ machines are all about multiplayer and dedicated cabs, then it’s nice to think of enthusiasts repurposing the old-style cabinets for retro-style gaming.

I played Bombergirl today which was a bit of a moba-rework of the old multiplayer game. You may also notice the graphics have received an… update. It wasn’t great, but it was fun, and once again you can see the cabinet was needlessly custom, with a tall vertical main screen, a lower touch screen, three buttons with their own screens and a strange thumb-joystick.

Music games remain ever-popular, and in fact are the most common type of machine in every arcade we’ve visited. If an arcade has only one single game, it will be a music game. As with other types of game they also have become fabulously customized and dedicated, with many features you’d never see at home such as circular touchscreens or unusual control systems.

The taiko drumming games are always popular and almost always being played. Many photos in this blog don’t have players in them because I was in the arcades very early, but even then the drum games are usually busy.

The music levels of arcades (and yes I mean level: the arcades are often multi-floored in Tokyo) are cacophonous and brilliant with flashing lights and vivid colour. Even if you don’t play the games it’s an exhilarating experience walking through one.

Here’s me playing an IC card game ‘for kids’. This one is based on Ultraman, and you put your IC cards of the Ultramen you want on your team on the game console, and the game ‘scans’ them in for the game. Of course it uses NFC chips in the cards and scanning is immediate, but kids must get a massive thrill getting a new card in a wafer pack or from the toy store and looking forward to using it on the machine to beat the next difficulty level! The game is a lot of fun to play as well, and naturally you can see I got an S-Rank my first try 🙂

I took many photos and this post could be twice as long, but you get the idea. Video games in arcades are far from dead in Japan, and in fact are still innovating. If I lived here I don’t doubt I’d go far down the rabbit hole the IC based RPG strategy games, but as it is I find it yet another aspect of this country that fascinates me every time I visit.

Went to the Nakano Broadway shopping arcade yesterday, probably my favourite place to shop in the entire world.

Dozens of specialized stores sell all sorts of collectibles and curios. While some are ‘mom and pop’ shops crammed to the gills with stuff (like the example above), most are part of a megastore called Mandarake, and run the gamut from book and CD shops to stores specializing in specific types of doll or model kit.

I could – and have – spend hours just perusing the weird stuff sold in these shops, and there’s a treasure around every corner. Like these tiny Japanese Star Wars candy boxes from the late 1970s (priced at about $380 US today) that seemed to contain a Star Wars character Letraset each.

Or this tiny (about 10 cm square) little booklet with art from a famous mangaka that was priced at about $2500.

Or even this snail zoids kit! I very nearly bought this actually, but the box was a bit too large for our remaining space.

Kristin saw a 28 million yen Hermes purse in a resale shop (that’s $213k US dollars in todays money), and a $30k amplifier for a turntable. It’s hard to imagine who will buy these, and how they even got into this slight out-of-the-way mall.

The above is an item I didn’t buy, which is perhaps regrettable since it was sealed. But it was amazing to see regardless. I did make a few purchases, including of some items I’ve been after for years, but I’ll leave them for future posts.

We found an Ultraseven ‘exhibit’ to celebrate 55 years of the beloved character. I was able to pose next to an original suit (not the original suit, but one made since) which was cool.

But mostly the 7 hours spent there was perusing the weird shops, and occasionally communicating via google translator with employees to try and find a treasure or two. It was another fun day 🙂

Since we’re just shopping these remaining days, it’s time for some thematic posts. Today let’s cover crane games!

These haven’t changed fundamentally: you put ¥100 or more in and manipulate a crane to try and win a prize. The prizes are usually food, figurines, plushes or some sort of toy or accessory. Often they are anime themed, but equally often not.

I like the figures of course, and as usual they’re difficult to win. The cranes are weak, and randomly become stronger, so luck and persistence are required. Sometimes – rarely – you’ll win a prize in a few goes. Sometimes you’ll dump thousands of yen in and walk away empty handed.

It can be maddening when the crane picks the thing up and drops it once it rises. Here the evil of these machines is on full display: they manipulate you to keep trying: ‘you can do it, you almost just did!’

There exist exotic variants as well, such as this one where the prize is held by what seems to be the merest of elastic strings. But it’s a ruse: no matter how well placed you get the crane this just bounces up and down. It’s locked in with an amazing force, and far, far harder to release than it looks!

Or there’s the above type, where you manipulate the red bar on the left to hit one of the plates to tilt the entire device, at which point treats rain down as prizes. I actually won on this first go. It was a box of cookies, which we discarded without even opening.

This one dispenses Kobe beef flavoured crisps. In these types the crane picks up the object every time (see the rubber grippers on the crane in top left) and the trick is hoping that when it drops it actually falls into the prize slot. Basically it’s random, and you’ll lose far often than win.

Here’s some cute chickens, which are much bigger than the prize slot. Here the difficulty is twofold: actually picking them up and then hoping they fall sideways so they can fit in the slot. Do you feel lucky?

The above shows a ¥10 machine (yes, ten yen) which vended tiny Australian animals. This was easy, with a nice strong claw. While designed for kids I played this a lot and won every animal! The ¥10 machines are fun since they give you the adrenaline boost of a win for a low cost 🙂

Obviously these machines wouldn’t be so common (and fun) if they never paid out, and one of the reason we love them is the feel when you do win. Like me getting two Umamusume (‘Horse girl’) branded energy drinks from one go. They tasted unspeakably bad, but the cans will live in my can collection for ever (which reminds me maybe I need to do an update blog post on that). I’ve also won a figure, a sheet (I think?) and many little toys.

Sometimes you see a prize you want that you know you’ll probably never get, like this horse girl noodle stopper. In this case you can just ‘cheat’ like I did yesterday and buy the figure new at Akiba in one of the many shops that sell crane game prizes. Sure it cost me ¥2000, but I never would have won it for that price had I tried the machine 🙂

Bullet train back to Tokyo yesterday. Once again, first class, and once again a super comfy and enjoyable trip. As usual we got up with the Sun and were on the train when lesser people still slept. Here was my breakfast:

After dropping our so-heavy-even-Hercules-would-struggle suitcases off at the hotel, it was time for Odaiba! Now we’ve been before, and I’ve even posted photos of the giant Gundam on this blog, so today I’ll show a dramatic one taken from the back:

You can’t see the (new) head in that pic, which features a single prominent horn. As you can see the weather was beautiful, and the Gundam shone even more beautifully than Himeji castle 🙂

After lunch we headed to the main attraction of the day, Teamlab Planets. Three years back I went to the now-closed Teamlab Borderless installation also in Odaiba and it was breathtaking. We had high hopes for this one as well.

Much like Borderless it is a series of art installations utilizing light and projections, and the viewer walks through them to experience them. Most are in large spaces, and the use of darkness and mirrors makes it difficult to gauge exactly how big the rooms are. Where borderless was almost exclusively light projections (albeit creative ones) Planets has a few more tricks up its sleeve.

Such as this room full of large inflated ‘bubbles’, many of which can be freely moved around.

Or this room which includes hundreds of strings of real orchids that dangle from the (mirrored) ceiling. You crawl under them to get into the middle area, after which you feel like you’re in a cave of orchids. It’s quite special, especially since it’s currently winter here and the orchids all seem healthy and as you can see are flowering.

The two highlight parts of Planets for us were difficult to photograph due to them being mostly dark and involving projections. The first is a gigantic domed space with a mirrored floor. Intricate and super high resolution animations of flowers are continuously projectors onto the dome in such a way you feel you’re floating. Imagine a planetarium, only the show is gigantic flowers floating through space. It was a dazzling display, and because it’s constantly spinning and moving around the optical illusion of movement in the viewer was astounding. We sat on the floor for a while in this room, and it really felt we were spinning around and not just the flowers.

The other amazing exhibit was this room of shin-deep warm milky water on which were projected colorful koi fish. They were extremely realistic, and the opacity of the water made them seem an inch or two underneath the surface. When you touched them they left flowers in their wake, the petals of which would drift away in the ‘current’. Both this and the previous room were random projections, so you could spend all day in them and not see the same thing twice. We were both extremely impressed by these fish 🙂

Needless to say Planets was incredible, and although (perhaps?) a bit smaller than Borderless I’d say equally worth visiting. Unfortunately Borderless is gone now and Planets will be gone in six months or so, so don’t delay if you’re interested!