Sunday, March 28, 2010

Just an Idea

Three posts, now! Madness!

Really, this is something I forgot to mention yesterday, so I could theoretically just edit it in, but where's the fun in that?

So before we went to Akihabara yesterday, we went just up the street from where my dorm is. There's a little wooded area up the hill, and in that area's a Shinto shrine. Really cool little thing, with a bunch of all the traditional buildings. It's really great to see, and I'll probably go visit it more once the weather warms up (it is bitchin' cold today).

But of course, my mind immediately went to how this would make for an awesome RPG. Hell, I'll go whole-hog and say that it would make an absolutely awesome Persona 5. Six strangers (In our case, we can say they're Americans, but if this was Persona 5, they'd probably be either all Japanese or have only one token foreigner. The fact that it's an all-dudes dorm is something of a detriment as well.) move into a dorm down the street from a shrine. There are a bunch of mysterious happenings that start going on around town (what, I'll leave to your imagination). Or perhaps the group starts just looking at the shrine. But either way, demons show up out of the shrine and we descend into a fairly standard plot. I haven't really thought about it any more than that. But I still think that it would make for a good intro to an adventure.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Akihabara Electric Town

Two posts in about 24 hours? Unheard of!

So, as the title mentions, a few of the guys I'm rooming with and I went into Akihabara for the day. We were originally planning to hit up a lot of Tokyo, but we ended up spending a lot of time in Akihabara, and it wiped us out.

It was...shall we say, an experience. I'm sure most of you know what Akihabara is- the anime, manga, video game, and general Otaku center of Tokyo, which, with Tokyo being the center of Japan and Japan being the center of Otaku stuff...pretty much makes it ground zero for all things to do with anime, manga and the like.

So, let's start with where we went first- a big ol' arcade right across the street from the station. In the basement were rows upon rows of fighting games that my buds dived right into. They were pretty good. We walked up and down the street, marvelling at the amount of girls in costume hawking maid cafes. We checked out some amazing stores- there was this one amazing figure shop where I would literally blow thousands of dollars if I had it (I ended up only buying a cute little Motoko figure for 100 yen, but I'll be back for some of the better stuff.) We got food from these street vendors.

There really was an awful lot of advertisements for the moe stuff, which coupled with the maid cafes, really says that yes, a lot of the otaku industry, so to speak, is about catering to dudes' fetishes. There's really no getting around that fact, despite all of the other awesome stuff that goes on.

Oh, and there was also a lot of Touhou stuff being advertised. Is there a new game out or something?

Friday, March 26, 2010

Across the Sea (Live from Chiba!)

Hello, any and all readers of this blog (If I really have any who still check after the almost 4-month absence of substantial posting, I am impressed at your dedication.

This post comes to you live from Chiba, Japan. For those of you who don't know (and why would you?), that's a little bit outside of Tokyo, similar, I think, to the more famous Yokohama. I'm here as part of a study abroad program, and I'll hopefully be learning a great deal about Japanese culture, traditions, customs, and lifestyles. But given where I post, I doubt you want to hear that. You want to hear about the wonderful land of anime and manga, the otkau's paradise, right? (I kid, I kid.)

Well, actually, there's not a great deal of anime and manga stuff around, at least right at the surface. The anime and manga subculture is, I think, only slightly more popular here than it is in the West, so you don't see a lot of it up front. There was the arcade...

Alright, I've got to correct my previous statement. We just went out to get some booze and check out this used game store.

Holy Mother of God, did they have absolutely everything in that game store. I'm talking the Nanoha A's fighting game, like, three dozen visual novels you'll never see in the States, friggin' Fate Stay Night (which I'm picking up either now or before I leave, depending on whether or not it works on my mac), a few of the weirder F/SN fighting games, tons of manga, anime. I mean EVERYTHING geeky. I'm going to have to go back now that the shock's worn off and see what I missed.

And tomorrow I'm probably bound for Akihabara. Well.