Alright, this is the best thing about Japan.
They have this chain of stores called Book Off.
These Book Offs are the best stores you will ever find.
There are hundreds of them.
And they have used games in mint condition. (With the manuals and the stickers and everything collectors want.)
PSX games, lots of em, and SNES games, and newer games, and these games are so cheap you wont believe it.
Most psx games are 1$. Original mint games!
Some maybe a couple bucks more.
And they have the original soundtracks. I found a mint special edition FF8 OST in Osaka in one the Book Offs.
And a Secret of Mana OST.
I bought so many PSX games that I couldnt take them with me on the airplane back. I had to ship them!
So did my friends!
When we by luck stumbled upon our first Book Off when we took shelter for some rain in Tokyo, we couldnt believe the games where so cheap, so we asked at the counter if the price was to buy or not.
And from that moment we went hunting for Book Offs.
Its always a surprise what the next Book Off has on its shelves, cause its all used, so you dont know whats in the store. But the condition of the stuff is unbelieveble.
The Japanese takes extreme care of their games and belonging. It must be.
The also have lots of manga, books and cds and stuff.
These stores are too great too be true.
We plan to go back to Tokio to go Book Off hunting.
Besides Book Off, Akiabara in Tokio has a couple stores, these are the best in the world.
We were in this one store, it has Lufia mint in the case, and Lufia 2 and chrono trigger and all the seiken densetsus, and dragon quesst and FFs on the nes and snes Breath of Fire 1, 2 and any other old school rpg or action game or any game, all like new for what 10 dollars each? Some even less, some a little more.
All the Street Fighters, Saturn games, Playstation, Neo Geo, all the best games, classics, everything!
In ONE little tiny store! With sonic and street fighter II demos playing at the front door, and cool merchandise and evrything you want. You have to see it. Its heaven.
They do have expensive old games in those hard core gaming stores, but i didt know many of those games, mostly japanese titles.
Any hardware you want. Game books, magazines, its al there.
And of course there are many SEGA arcades.
Akiabara has a couple but one is called the Battle Arena, you go downstairs and there are 200 or more only fighting games arcade cabinets in that place. And you can smoke inside. It doesnt get better than that.
People play Gundam multiplayer on 8 screens and stuff like that.
People play arcade games with their own cards on the screen and stuff, its crazy.
You think Japan is the best place for gamers in the world, for console and arcade gamers right.
But then you are in Tokyo and you find out its much, much better than you had imagined. Well, at least than I had imagined.
Its really heaven for me over there.
And you have McDonalds everywhere, you could still smoke in the McDonalds when I was there in 2011.
The Japanese are strange, but in a good way.
One thing though, the streets over there have no names. And the girls are more beautiful than you might think now.
''Hadouken!''
