Tokyo Game Show

How do I even begin to describe the awesomeness that was today? I shall try of course, but fair warning, this will be a very long post. And when I say very long, I mean if you can finish reading this, then I commend you because this is a post of epic proportions.

I woke up at 6:30am ugh. Tokyo Game Show (TGS) started at 10 so we had to leave early. We got to the bus by 8:10, which we took to Tsukuba Center where we transferred to the Tsukuba Express. Once we reached Akihabara by around 9:30 we had to transfer to the main JR line to go to Tokyo station where we again had to transfer to the Keio line. Tokyo Station is a massive expanse of massiveness by the way. It took us about 10+ minutes of walking to get to the platform we needed. The train ride from Tokyo Station to our destination took a long time. Unfortunately we caught the local train (which is the slowest: rapid, semi-rapid, local) and it took almost an hour. By the time we got to our intended station it was somehow 11 already. There were mass amounts of people there, all going to the same place of course, so we just followed the very very large crowd. Just so you all know how large of a crowd, I shall explain. Tokyo Game Show takes place from Thursday through Sunday. Thursday and Friday are invitation only (so gaming companies/sites/news people and the like), and Saturday and Sunday are open to the public. Attendance last year was 200,000 people.

It was 11:20 when we finally got our ticket and stood in line. We had to wait in line 20min for everyone to be shuffled inside. I was very excited walking in. Like squealing and jumping up and down excited. Except I didn't do that cause I was in public lol. TGS takes place in a giant convention center, which basically consists of 3 very large warehouse like rooms. The gaming companies had their booths set up in the first two rooms. The booths had mini-theaters with trailers of upcoming games, displays for upcoming games and merchandise, and stations where you could demo upcoming games. The third room had shopping and food.

I may start going into geek speak here as my inner video game nerd starts to fully take over, so if you don't understand I'm sorry. We stopped by Capcom's booth first and waited for all the other lame (snore. don't care.) trailers to finish so we could watch the trailer of the new Okami game for DS. I drooled. We were kind of hoping to see Judd-san there to be honest. He's a graduate of OSU that now works for Capcom as a producer I believe. He was the producer for that new Bionic Commando game that already came out I think? He was also the voice of Phoenix Wright in English. It was a slim glimmer of hope however, as we didn't see him. Though he must've been there at some point.

After Capcom we went into the 2nd big area and were stopped by some Japanese guy who works for Fuji TV. He asked if we wanted to do an interview (in Japanese). He came up to us because we're foreigners of course. I haven't decided whether I like the fact that we stand out from the crowd or not. I would've run away if Tori wasn't there, cause she really wanted to do it. It would've been really awesome, except I should add that I hate cameras and fear them. Not quite as much as spiders, but still quite a lot. So we walked over and started talking to the very nice interview lady in Japanese while waiting for the camera man to come back. Once he started filming it was much worse. I wasn't really sure whether to look at the camera or the lady, and when she would ask me a question and shove the microphone in my face I would just sort of freeze up (along with my brain's understanding of Japanese) and look to Tori for help. Tori is fine in front of a camera so she saved me most of the time. I did manage to add a few lines here and there I suppose, but for the most part I only succeeded in making a fool of myself. They asked us like where we're from and what games we liked and stuff. In the end they made us yell some stupid thing about our feelings of excitement at being at TGS into the camera and I just said something really stupid. I don't ever want to see that video ever. I would die of shame...

After the horrible, but still awesome(?) interview we continued to search through the booths. At which point I spotted a giant Square Enix sign and literally dragged Tori across the massive crowds while uttering squeals of joy. First we got to stand and watch the new Final Fantasy XIII trailer. In all its beautiful high definition glory. My face must've looked like that of a 6 year old let loose in a candy store. I drooled a lot here. A lot a lot. It was pure awesomeness and win and anti-fail and I can't wait to freaking play it. It comes out in December here, so it'll for sure be out in America by the time I go home next summer. I can't wait o_O

After the trailer we continued along through some other less significant games until I at last spotted what I was looking for. The game I was most excited to see today. Even more so than FFXIII if you can imagine. Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep for PSP. Unfortunately it seems they handed out passes to get into the booth very early this morning on a first come first serve basis (as far as I could tell), so only those people could get in. These are the people who most likely camped out in front of the convention center last night. Should've done that damn it. Oh well. So I couldn't get in to play the demo (oh cruel fate D:), nor could I get into the private viewing room for the new trailer... however, the wall of the trailer was (purposely?) this sort of netting that you could see through pretty well if you stuck your face right up to it. Which I did of course, along with lots of other poor souls who didn't have passes. Then I drowned in a pit of my drool for the 2-4min or however long the trailer was. Must. Play. Now. I was trying to wait till I got back to America to buy a PSP and play this game... but uh, it comes out in January here and I'm afraid I may not be able to resist (well I'm pretty certain that's going to happen actually). PSP just dropped price here too. Damn it.

I managed to drag myself away from the Kingdom Hearts booth (while internally crying over my lack of pass-holding-ness) and we wandered past the Xbox360 booth (boring snore) to the Namco booth where they were showing an awesome new trailer for the new Tales game for Wii. Wen I was done drooling over that, we walked over to the demo booth where they had the new Wii Tales and the new (evil) PS3 port for Vesperia, that has all these awesome new features that I wished for in the 360 version, but didn't get. And now I can't play the new version unless it gets localized and I get a PS3. Damn it. Anyway, I really wanted to play the Wii Tales, so I briefly got in line (I think it was 90min or so long... didn't care), but Tori dragged me away and told me I could come back (big mistake).

We went to the 3rd and final giant room area where they had shopping and food. We waited in line to get into the Square Enix shop for about 20+ min. They had this big display area of all their new figurines and merchandise which was fun to look at. I ended up buying an FFXIII poster and a Kingdom Hearts cell phone strap thingy. Tori bought stuff too. We waited in line for the Capcom store next, only to find out they were sold out of all the Okami merchandise (the only stuff we cared about), so that kind of sucked. I didn't get anything else. We didn't buy any food either, even though I hadn't eaten in a while. I was on an over-stimulated excitement high from being at TGS and wasn't hungry at all.

We went back to the Kingdom Hearts booth after shopping. Just to be sure we couldn't get in (cry, tear), and I drooled over the trailer one more time. Then I wanted to go and play Wii Tales finally. It was around 3 now, and the show closed at 5, so unfortunately (more tears) they already had too many people in line and I could no longer enter (I hate you Tori D:), so instead I decided to just wait in line to play PS3 Vesperia, even though I've technically played the game already on Xbox. I felt I couldn't leave a gaming convention without playing a game. Tori left me at this point, cause she didn't want to wait in line for 90min (yes it was 90min... no, I didn't mind at all). I just played DS while waiting. Entertaining myself while waiting in line to be entertained lol. Finally I got my turn. The guy before me had been defeated by the boss mid session (everyone got 10min unless you get game over), so I thought I'd try to fight him myself. I was doing really well actually, and was really close to beating him (I suppose it helps that I've played the game before), but then my time was up and I had to stop :( I'd spent a good 8min trying to beat him too, darn.

I still had 30min after the game demo, so I walked over to where people were playing the demo of FFXIII. Which of course, you also needed a pass to play, or I would've been in line long before to play it. All the awesome games require a pass, it's not fair D: I just watched (and drooled of course) while the other people played it. Which of course only made me realize even more how very awesome the game is. After their session ended, the screens started playing the trailer again, and some of the crowd and myself waited and stared assuming someone else would come to play next. Little did we realize there was only 15min left before 5 and the demos were done. So we just stood there for a good 8min or so staring at the same trailer 3 times. The staff were just letting us sit there lol, but when we came to, everyone started parting, realizing it was over, and I saw they had already roped the area off, and were ushering people out a small exit in the rope. Whoops. Well I wasn't the only one standing there, nor was I the last, so whatever :P

Apparently Nintendo doesn't attend Tokyo Game Show, which I didn't know until today, and was rather surprised at. We realized something was missing in the middle of the show. I dunno the reason.

I went to meet Tori at 5 so we could leave (if you were hoping this post is done now that I've reached the end of the show, then I laugh in your face haha). I realized as we were walking out, when my excitement levels began dropping, that my feet and back hurt like hell and I was starving. I'd been standing without sitting at all from 10am-5pm ugh. Including the packed train rides where we didn't get seats. We stopped at a nearby mall and ate at Subway (5 times now). And sat down of course. We bought bread from a bakery in the station too. The trains were packed, of course, with all the thousands of people leaving. We were only going two stops though, because we'd heard about a retro game store nearby (and the geek out continues).

We got kind of lost on the way to the store. The map we had wasn't the best. It was in this shopping center and we missed it the first time we passed it. We ended up walking in a big 30min or so circle back to where we started (that really sucked), then we doubled back and finally found it. Turns out it wasn't the exact store we were looking for. We'd seen the retro game store in a tv show that we watch, and we think it's a sort of chain of stores maybe, but the one we went to wasn't the same. Not that it wasn't cool though. It had lots of games, new and old, and was fun to look through. They had all these aisles of trading cards and I found Pokemon cards there. I looked through those for a while. Brings back memories. They had tons of the special shiny cards too for $1 each (ooh shiny), and I bought a few for old times sake. The lady at the register miscounted too, and I got half of them for free. I was about to say something, but uh... yeah... free :) her fault, not mine.

We left after an hour or so and finally started to make our way back. It was around 8 by now. On the train, we passed right by Tokyo Disneyland and got to see the castle in the distance. It was also the end of the day show where they shoot off fireworks so we and everyone else in the train was staring out the window watching. We didn't arrive back home till 11 (we caught the last bus of the day phew). I missed my shower curfew, but oh well. It was worth it. Today was such an awesome day.

Oh, I do apologize for the massive game geek out in this post (Also, if you managed to read this far, congratulations). I don't think anyone will understand most of what I said unless you're into games. This blog is a way for me to remember the day to day life though, so I suppose that's the way I write it sometimes. Sorry. I had so much fun today though, but now I'm exhausted. Tomorrow there's some festival on campus we're going too. Although, I don't know how many more trips we'll be going on in the near future. My long break is almost over, and school's about to pick back up again (and we need to stop spending money), so we may put Tokyo and other such trips on hold for a while.

Lots of pictures for the super long post! The rest of the photos of the past few weeks are on facebook now as well. Unfortunately pictures and video weren't permitted anywhere near the game trailers and demos so I have nothing of that. The staff members were hunting down and tackling anyone fool enough to try. I really didn't want to be that person, so I followed the rules.