iiotenki

The Tony Hawk of Tokimeki Memorial

A most of the time Japanese>English game translator and writer and all the time dating sim wonk.



iiotenki
@iiotenki

Now that I don't have to rely on proxies to purchase anything from it, Mercari has such a fascinatingly surreal user culture for a modern e-commerce site here in Japan that's amplified by the fact the site structure clearly isn't built for some practices.

Feel the need to ask permission to buy something that's openly listed? I don't think anybody's going to be offended if you hit the "I want to commit to giving you money in exchange for goods" button like you're on literally any other shopping site, but okay, you do you.

Want to make an offer to a seller? Do it in the public comments because there's no formal offer button elsewhere.

Made an offer the seller has accepted, but not ready to pay for it quite yet and are scared somebody else is going to snipe your item? Ask the seller to edit the title to say "For ___-sama only," because there's no way for sellers to send offers directly to individual users.

The idea of Mercari is that its limitations are both intentional and meant to make transactions feel a little more personable compared to shopping on Rakuten or Amazon. Which it is and a lot of the best deals on game stuff have come from there because it's not as big on formal stores selling on there. But when you mix in Japanese social dynamics, it all comes across as an overly (unnecessarily?) polite online flea market or swap meet. There's a quaint charm to it and for all of its other archaic aspects, the nuts and bolts of the actual transactions are straightforward enough. It's just amazing to find a part of the Internet in 2023 where sellers have to explicitly state in their listings and profiles, "You don't have to ask permission to buy anything and if you talk in the comments and someone else buys without asking, tough luck."


iiotenki
@iiotenki

Anyway, I bought a proper Super Famicom, partly because it has one of the known superior PPU chips inside to hopefully mitigate the mild sprite ghosting my US SNES has and also just because it was getting to be a pain in the ass using my cart adapter to play Japanese since it was very finnicky about booting while also having an alarming death grip on the cartridge contacts. Paid all of about $60 and need to put it through its paces more, but I'm content! And frankly worth it to not have to deal with the latter alone even if the ghosting somehow persists. (And yes, I know you can trim the tabs off, but I'm always squeamish about doing anything permanent to console plastic, no matter how minor.)

Also just nice to not see a miserably yellowed unit for once in this country. You can still get a Super Famicom for pretty dirt cheap if you're not picky, but boy are the Book and Hard Offs of the world packed with yellowed units to the ceiling anymore. Phew. 😩

Anyway, back to admiring Tokimemo Pocket on the Super Game Boy and contemplating how even that's a superior experience to the actual SNES port.


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in reply to @iiotenki's post:

this reminds me a lot of how stuff used to work and still somewhat currently works in mercado libre. which used to be latin america's ebay and now is aggressively evolving into a pretty solid amazon competitor.

what's really funny to me is that some people are still using these old dynamics of asking permission to buy or using the public comments for all sorts of things with huge companies selling on the site and this companies probably employ a couple of costumer support people just to give people permission to buy stuff.

a lot of sellers specifically state that their items are still available if the post is up because asking if the item was still available was a pretty common thing for people to do before buying anything

That's really fascinating to hear! I can certainly understand a lot of those practices being in force when the Internet was newer and you couldn't count on a lot of the infrastructure being automated, but it's wild to hear those practices were so embedded into the site culture there that they still persist that much. There's a lot of logistical stuff when it comes to how the Internet used to be that I'm glad we moved on from, but I do miss that sort of naivety that used to come from the novelty of doing certain things like shopping and applying real world customs to it.