xdaniel

Hey there~

📜 Hobby programmer, ROM hacker, retro computers & consoles, anime & manga fan, sometimes NSFW?

🌐 🇩🇪/native, 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇦🇺/good, 🇯🇵/へた

🔒 @xdn-desync

📷 via Picrew by 🐦kureihii https://picrew.me/image_maker/1272810


⛏️ The Cutting Room Floor
tcrf.net/User:Xdaniel

iiotenki
@iiotenki

So as I alluded in the last post, I popped down to Akihabara in the middle of my work day to see where things stand with game shops around there. First, the good news: a lot of the staples that have been around forever survived the pandemic and, impressively, still by and large sell the exact things I've known them to specialize. But the bad news is, prices in general are so obscenely high for just about ANYTHING that it's abundantly clear that they're targeting absolutely undiscerning foreign shoppers who don't know about or can't shop on Yahoo Japan and Mercari. We're talking 20,000+ yen boxed copies of Pokemon, 130,000+ yen copies of LSD and Serial Experiments Lain on PS1, and plenty, plenty more. We're talking differences of like 4x market price for common fare and 1.5 to 2x market price for rarer stuff. Just absolute madness, even with the current strength of the dollar against the yen.

It's the exact same thing as what's been going on in Den Den Town, but markedly worse because of the higher tourist population, which are still flocking to these stores in droves. Things had been trending in this direction well before the pandemic, but I was just left genuinely flabbergasted this time around. It's that flagrant. There are still fun things to do in that area, but if you're trying to shop for retro games on any semblance of a budget, quite frankly, you shouldn't even bother there at this point. The only real exception I found in the entire area was Beep Akihabara, whose PC and arcade-centric selection means it's pretty slim pickings for most other stuff, but they were the only ones that weren't out to fleece customers based on the games whose prices I knew off-hand. Suffice it to say, I was happy to give them my business, largely in the form of a bunch of doujin books, which I'll likely show off when I'm back home.

Anyway, I hate being such a downer about this stuff because there is a real joy to going into a lot of these iconic stores and thumbing through their inventory. I missed it a lot when I was living in the States, especially because US shops obviously don't tend to stock the kind of stuff I'm remotely interested in. But I can't in good conscience recommend seriously shopping at any such places in Akihabara, at least without browser tabs open for recent prices on Yahoo and Mercari. The genuine deals I found were so far and few between, exercising any less caution is just asking to be fleeced. As I said before, even with proxy fees and shipping, you'll still save a ton of money over these stores just going the online route and never looking back.

Here's hoping places one day come back down to earth, but as long as tourists keep flooding them and popular Vtubers give them the flimsiest excuses to inflate things to cash in on trends, I ain't holding my breath.


iiotenki
@iiotenki

I really do want to stress that as bummed as I was to look around most of these places, the Beep Akihabara really was a fantastic exception and is worth visiting even if you're not all that interested in retro PCs or arcade PCBs. (But you'll be surrounded by so much of the former in particular in some spots that you might very well be made into a convert.) Just a lot of fun stuff to peruse, some rare, some not, some crazy rare, within such a tiny footprint of an underground store and the staff is super nice and helpful as always. I had a back and forth with one of them about the one game I actually did purchase from them to make sure I was understanding what I was getting and their answers were frank and honest. (I ended up getting the game in question since they told me what I was expecting, but just did due diligence because of a note mentioning it was a store sample copy specifically, which threw me off.) They were even pleasantly surprised and chatty when I also asked whether they had any stock of some doujin arcade hardware I was looking for, which was super nice.

I've honestly always had nothing but good things to say about them over the years and that remains true now. For a certain type of person, even amidst a sea of other increasingly mediocre shops, at least in terms of pricing, I would say that the Beep Akihabara is worth the trip down by itself. Plus, if you buy stuff from them, they continue to have killer custom bags, which is a plus, too. It's never the most popular store in the area by any means, but you can tell it's well-loved by its staff and even if the rest of the area goes to hell even further, I'll still stop by there whenever I make the trip to Tokyo. In fact, in all likelihood, I'll be going back there later this week to buy a Capcom CPS-2 motherboard from them. They weren't the only ones selling them, nor was it the cheapest, if just by a slim margin—that goes to the Surugaya directly next door to them above ground, which I will say was one of the less egregious stores I saw on the whole and still has a truly fantastic selection from floor to ceiling worth checking out—but after my experience earlier this evening, I'm happy to give them even more of my money before I leave town next week.


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in reply to @iiotenki's post:

this makes me so upset to hear... the physical store being able to thrive is something that i really prize about japan, and having online sites be the clearly better way to get good deals just devalues the physical shop... which, at least the shops still exist, since in the US you can't even find real shops to buy certain things in. i don't think it'll ever be that way for japan due to population density, but i still get scared of it happening.

Yeah, it bummed me out super bad to see it in person! I don't expect stores to compete with online alternatives all the time of course when they have rent and salaries to pay, and even when I was last there in 2019, I was still able to source a decent amount of cool stuff in that area for pretty fair prices. But knowing that wage increases haven't really happened in the same way they have in other industries (and they've definitely been long overdue in this country, inflation or not) and seeing first hand these places were seemingly able to function perfectly fine just a year ago at saner prices when it was still only people like me with work visas being let in, it really does feel like a cynical grab for those tourist dollars at the expense of literally any other customers. Super Potato in particular, I don't think I saw a single Japanese customer outside of the people visiting the arcade up top (which still has that fun ambience, for what it's worth). That's been becoming the case with the Den Den Town one, as well, from what I've noticed the last couple of visits, so it didn't exactly shock me to see, but still.

It sucks because when I first arrived, I was really determined to do as much of my game shopping in physical stores as possible to make up for lost time and just appreciate them as institutions! Colorado has a few local stores, but they just haven't felt like spaces for me in a really long time, which is a big reason I've loved shopping at Japanese ones. I have a few spots in my neck of the woods that I like to keep an eye on (the Book Offs/Hard Offs in general have been less prone to these practices, even if you can only really count on them stocking more common stuff, at least consistently), but a lot more of my higher-end purchases have had to be done online than I would've liked and it's definitely just not the same. Hopefully things cool off eventually, but I'm not holding my breath for at least another year. 😩

While I don't know how much LSD, Lain or Clock Tower should be, I do know that this much money for Pokemon, especially the first gen games, is insane! That's what, 130 to 190€ by the current exchange rate? I'm seeing a complete copy of Pokemon Green on eBay right now — cart, box, manual, registration card(?), cart case, world map —, from a seller in Hamamatsu City I'd ordered from before (well, before the pandemic, shipping costs exploding, etc., you get the idea), for a mere 40€! Even with shipping, it would still be less than half the cheapest Green in your photo! Makes me regret not picking up at least the original games CIB back when they were still ~20€ plus shipping each, maybe 5-7 years ago.

Yeah, I'm used to seeing the Pokemon games pretty inflated when I go to certain stores these days, but these prices were so craven, I had to double-check on my phone to make sure they hadn't spiked for some random reason since I'd last taken a look at them. And sure enough, like what you saw, my first result when I typed Pokemon Red into Mercari was a complete boxed copy for 5500 yen, shipping including. Which, yeah, even that would've been pricey just a couple years ago, but at least is more reflective of the fact that, y'know, there are a billion of these things in this country, even boxed, ahaha.

For comparison's sake, since I casually tend to keep on eye on most of them, I've seen complete copies of LSD go for somewhere in the neighborhood of ~80,000 yen, less without the obi. Lain is a little more variable, but in the same ballpark. And Clock Tower, from what I've seen, people are lucky to even get 15,000 for a complete copy, and a good chunk go for closer to 10,000. I could still in very select instances find rare-ish games at more competitive prices in cases where they don't have much appeal to foreign tourists, but even those feel like much more the exception than the rule compared to even just a few years ago. It's bonkers, just completely bonkers.