ひさしぶりだね！Hello again everyone!
We interrupt you regular schedule for a special post (before I forget everything again): Tokyo Game Show!
Well, without further ado: TGS 2014!!
This doesn’t seem very fun actually
TGS was packed. Maybe I should have expected it to be so packed as it is a huge event, but I never expected there to be lines to LEAVE the station. I arrived really late, too, so I can’t even begin to imagine how it was earlier when the event opened! (to be fair the biggest line was the fare correction – I bet a lot of foreigners got lost and bought the wrong ticket :X)
The event was divided into four sections: The main booth section, which had the biggest companies like Capcom and Sony, and the indie are; the middle section had smaller companys (but some random big ones like Sega) and a section for universities to show off their game courses; the third section were merchandise booths; and the fourth section, away from all the others, was the Cosplay section and food court.
The main booth section was the most packed one, and it was really hard to walk in it during the early hours of the event. The lines for trying games were ginormous – the Monster Hunter one was almost two hours long! Actually, most of the lines were at least 30 minutes. I ended up not playing anything other than indie games and the universities game reel.
Arc System Works booth. Tsubaki is watching Sol-tan present Guilty Gear Xrd
GGXRD is impressively pretty
—-
Next booth: Monster Hunter!
Pretty impressive display
Monhun customized bike. I still can't believe you can actually BUY one of those
—-
Up next is… Random pictures of the event (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
—-
Push Me Pull You. Nifty cute indie game
Surprisingly, this indie game was what surprised me the most at TGS: Push Me Pull You. It has a really simple mechanic, and really straightfoward design and presentation too. The idea is that you control a half person-half person person, and you can stretch and shrink it’s body and control each front simultaneously. You have to grab the ball with your body and keep it on your side of the court until the time ends. They call it a soccer sumo, but I’d call it a basketball game with two (four?) people and no hoops.
It’s really simple, but that’s why I loved it. It’s a simple but innovative idea explored to it’s fullest. It’s a fun and really well polished game. I love the Keita Takahashi-esque design and presentation too. Most of the other indie games in the show were either candy crush or bejeweled clones or tried-and-tired-out ideas that don’t put anything new into the table.
I think the best part of the booth is that they had a lil’ corner with stamps where you could create your own pypm. Totally amazing, you can see they put a lot of love into this!
Talking about indie, something that disappointed me a bit was the universities corner. All the games presented there were unimaginative and lacked a lot of polish. I know you can’t judge student’s work too harshly, but the fact that a lot of jam games are more polished than those projects makes me think that game courses here in Japan fall into the same pitfalls as Brazil’s.
Finally, the most important part of the post and the reason why I even went to TGS at all:
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Ever since I saw the TGS poster at Seven Eleven I’ve been dreaming about going and meeting Shu Takumi, the creator of the Ace Attorney series and Ghost Trick. To be honest I didn’t care about TGS at all, I really really reaaaallllyyy just wanted to meet Takumi. I daydreamed about this for weeks, and I felt like crying from anxiety every time I thought about TGS.
And I still can’t believe I did it.
I had been planning on finding him by lurking around the Capcom booth or talking to him after the Dai Gyakuten Saiban live presentation, but TGS was way more packed than I expected. He also came from and went back to a unreachable staff only area, so meeting him after the live show was impossible. After the live show I saw the line for what I had thought was the demo play had emptied, so I entered there hoping to find him… Only to find a recording of the exact same thing I had just watched. I watched it all thinking “Hey, maybe he’ll show up” but nope.
I started getting really depressed. I started thinking “of course they won’t just lurk around, everyone would want to stop him for an autograph if he did, damn it’ll never happen” and when I looked to my right.
Bam
Shu Takumi
I was so nervous I didn’t manage to talk to him, but I managed to deliver the gift I had brought – which was a bunch of pictures from our Phoenix Wright photoshoot, and the endearing Ghost Trick keychains by Lumi.
—
Well, and that’s it! I actually met Takumi early in the day, but I felt so disoriented and baffled from meeting him that I just wandered around screaming internally for an hour. Because of this I didn’t manage to enjoy TGS to it’s fullest; I didn’t even get to the cosplay area. HOWEVER….. I managed to sneak in a cosplay event that happened after TGS!!
This is a story for another post tho. Sayonara! See y’all next week! ♥