Tokyo Game Show

Tokyo Game Show was the weekend of September 24th through the 27th this year, and I got to go. I've always wanted the chance to go to a game conference or convention like E3 in the US, and if I hadn't gone to Japan this year, I might have tried to get into Penny Arcade Expo. Regardless, TGS is one of the biggest game conferences in the world, held each year in Chiba. Now, I live in Osaka, which is fairly far away from Tokyo. The fastest way to get there is the shinkansen, or bullet train. It takes about two and a half hours that way, and costs a lot of money. I, along with a fellow Minnesotan, went with a cheaper route. The night bus. Now, the night bus is super convenient, and fairly cheap. The problem, especially for someone like me, is that it is designed for the average Japanese person. This means that given my height, I had virtually no legroom. As in, less than flying coach. And since the average Japanese person is rather short, the seat back contours to fit them, and not me. This meant that while trying to sleep, my lower back hurt, or my neck hurt. There was no comfortable way to sleep, and for the most part, I didn't.

We took the bus, departing at 11:15 PM on Friday night. It's about 8 hours by car/bus (which gives you an idea of the speed of the shinkansen. It's faster than a plane trip from here to Tokyo), and the idea is that you sleep the whole way. Well, I managed to drift in and out and got maybe 3 or so hours total. We arrived at Tokyo Disney Land at about... 7:30 AM. We had to go there, because buses that stopped at Chiba were sold out for that day. Because the game show is BIGGER THAN DISNEY LAND. Had to take the train over, which was easy, and then got tickets and got in line. And what a line. Our original plan was to meet up with another friend from Minnesota based in Tokyo, get his ticket for him so he'd wait in line less, and get in together. But that proved to be impossible. I had not counted on a line 12 people wide wrapping around the entire convention center. Just finding him alone would have been impossible, not to mention him actually making it into the line without a ticket. So I ended up with an extra TGS ticket, which I still have. Souvenir? Regardless, we eventually got in, after what seemed like an eternity baking in line on a very hot day. The line we were in managed to move the entire way around the convention center, all the way back to where we got into the line, which was at the entrance, apparently. I took plenty of pictures at first, but the frenetic pace of the day, combined with my growing exhaustion, meant I abandoned that fairly quickly. I had a great time at what I later found out was the weakest TGS in recent memory. Plenty of major developers didn't even show up, and there were no new announcements made at all. Regardless, I got to play Left 4 Dead 2, which pretty much made the whole thing worthwhile.

By the time we got out of the show, it had reached 4 PM, and we headed to Tokyo station to get some dinner. Which was hard. Apparently, though it is a fairly huge hub for transportation, the area around Tokyo station is somewhat lame, and it took us a while to find a decent place for dinner. Bummed around the station for a few hours, and then headed back to Disney Land to find our bus. We figured we'd be tired enough to sleep the whole way back on the bus. We were half right. My companion, being shorter than me, had little trouble crashing and sleeping the whole way. Meanwhile, I found it still impossible to get to sleep for more than a half hour at a time, and wound up back in Kyoto exhausted. Somehow I managed to drag my tired ass back home, where I arrived at 7:00 AM or so, and promptly went to bed and slept the whole day. Woke up just in time to do some homework for the next day.

Final note: It was a great weekend, and I don't regret a single minute of it. Regardless, if you are tall in Japan, do not take the night bus if you value your comfort.