Best country in the world, etc.

In this post, I want to tell you guys a little something about the stores and arcades in Japan.

You know, I really, really love arcades. We used to have some small ones in my country, but they have long since disappeared, and even though I have no nostalgic memories of them, I still miss them a lot. Because what's better than paying €1 to play Street Fighter or House of the Dead for 2 minutes before paying another €1 to continue, amirite!?
Well, the arcades in Japan are alive and well, and oh so glorious.


Have a look:

You weren't supposed to take pictures (let alone video) in the arcade, but..well..I'm a baka gaijin so how was I supposed to know that? >:3

[Me kicking ass at the awesome Terminator Salvation game. I love the games with big fake guns <3]

[This is the capsule pod to one of the most awesome games I found in Japan. It's like an online Mech Warrior kind of game where you have an entire cockpit with a 180 degree view of the battlefield and a bunch of knobs and handles to move your mech with. Needless to say I sucked ass at it, but I had fun sucking!]

[Luckily I am much better at the shootan gaems, I even managed to stay alive longer than Taka-San]

[Cow, Taka, Chizu and Yuki playing some crazy 4 player SHMUP]

[One of my favorite games: Taiko No Tatsujin!]

Here's some videos of me and Chizu and Taka and Yuki playing Taiko:

Not only are the arcades full of badass video games, the Japanese also love their gambling. So there's a lot of Pachinko machines and also crane games.

[Gendo Ikari is watching you throw away your money. Keikaku Doori~]

[Coolest crane machine I ever saw]

[There's crane games for everything, including hug pillows and big and fancy €100+ PVC figures. Of course it's nearly impossible to win one of those, but that won't stop otaku from trying]

Then there's one more game I'd like to show you, and it's by far the weirdest one I encountered while in Japan.
Watch and wonder:

So aside from awesome arcades, Japan also has awesome manga, anime and figure stores. I was lucky enough to be with a group of people who knew all about that sort of things, and especially a big thanks goes to Taka-san for taking me to the eroge stores I would never have been able to find on my own (since they are slightly hidden from gaijin eyes).
Once again it wasn't allowed to take pictures, of course (imagine your Japanese ass might end up on the internet and your wife will see you were browsing the loli section at Melon Books!) but being the gaijin that I am I DONMAI'd through that to bring you the TRUE OTAKU EXPERIENCE!

[Please follow me upstairs]

[To a place where pink curtains separate the men from the boys]

[A place where even Chizu noona gets a little too embarrassed sometimes]

[But then she still goes in anyway, because she is a boss. Would you prefer to buy one of the thousands of doujinshi?]

[Or would you rather buy an Eroge PC Game?]

[Or maybe you'd rather have some hentai or porn DVD's?]

[Either way, you can't have this one]

[And you should pass the cashier on your way out]

Buying porn (2D or 3D) has been quite uninteresting here. No one was surprised by a white guy browsing loli doujinshi, and no one even batted an eye when I bought Japanese Language eroge games. Then again, that's probably for the best since it made the entire experience a lot less embarrassing.

Now of course it's not all porn and games (hohoho). There's also figures and manga!

[Manga is incredibly cheap in Japan, and even the smaller stores have hundreds of titles in stock]

[The video games are much less cheap, even to the point where they are 20-30 euros more expensive than in Europe. However, there's lots of awesome special editions and of course a lot of games that will never see the light of day in Europe or America. There's a lot of awesome VN's, Dating Games and RPGs we will never get to play ;_;]

[The amount of figures is what really made me soil my pansu. The prices for the new figures aren't as great as I expected, they're pretty much the same as on AmiAmi, but the prices for the older ones blew my mind. There were limited edition figures that go for over €300 on eBay for a mere 1,500 Yen (€15) and huge €130+ PVC figures for around 3,000 Yen. There's also pretty much any anime/manga merchandise you can dream of. I had to contain myself a lot in order not too buy too much crap, but I still ended up with a 10kg box of stuff ;=;]

So that was it for my post on Japanese arcades and stores.
In the next post, I will tell something about the friends I made in Japan, and about the awesome 'special' café I went to on my last day.
Please wait for me~