Greetings From Japan
DQ reader Jon Hui sent me this e-mail about gaming while living in Japan.A bit of background for your readers if you decide to post this. I live in a tiny town in the Akita prefecture. My town has a population of 4,500 people. This town of mine doesn't have stores that sell anything gaming related. However, if I travel the 23km to a city with 100,000 people, then I can purchase games.
You can't rent video games in Japan. They are worried about piracy, which is odd since you can rent out music cds. So there is a significant used games section at most places that sell games. In many of these stores, there are large signs up posting prices that they will buy back games and consoles for. The buyback prices seem significantly higher than they are back home (I'm from Canada), where as I might be looking at between $5-$25 for a game, Mario Kart DS is still being bought back for 3100 yen, which is roughly $28.
Unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 sections are very small, while the Nintendo DS sections are probably the largest. The PS2 games may rival the DS games just because of the pure volume of them. Then comes the Wii section and then the PSP section and then the PS3 section. Although the PS3 doesn't have too large of a library, they playable demo stations are generally always PS3s. In fact one store has three of them set up playing different games.
I waited until the 40gig SKU of the PS3 was released here before buying one because I didn't care about backwards compatability and am quite happy with my white PS3. Amazingly, while prices were dropped for the 20gig and 60gig versions back home, prices continue to be above the price of the new 40gig versions here. Maybe now that Sony has officially announced that they would stop producing 20 and 60 gig versions, they might drop the price down.
Just a couple of things I wanted to add about languages. I am not able to speak or read Japanese well enough to play games in them. So it was a relief to know that some games either have English options in them, or are released with the English language versions of the game right on the disc. Since my menu language is set to English, they boot up in English as well, no need to navigate any sort of Japanese menus to switch it to English. There seems to be no official source for whether or not a game has English language options or not. The game boxes themselves also do not provide that information (that I can read). I am stuck using a thread on the US Playstation forums to check for English in the games. Every time a big time game is released in Japan and includes the English version, I make note. So far these include Uncharted, Ratchet and Clank Future, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, and Winning Eleven 2008 as being fully billingual. There are others, but these are the only ones I have purchased. Oddly, at least to me, Oblivion for PS3 does not contain the English version on the disc; which is disappointing. If it had, I might have bought it again.
In that town of approximately 100,000 there are 3 stores that have a pretty large gaming section. None of them are gaming only stores. Prices vary quite a bit between stores, so it is useful to shop around a bit. PC gaming is essentially non-existant here.
This description of gaming in Japan will only apply to small towns, as you move to the larger cities the situation changes.
After I received this initial e-mail, I asked Jon this question: "do you see people with DS's everywhere? It seems like from the numbers they're selling, everyone in Japan should have one. Or two."
Here's his response:
My prefecture is somewhat unique in that it is probably one of the oldest (average age) and worst off economically. In fact, one of the cities was featured in a New York Times article detailing how small and local businesses were suffering. What this translates into is a small number of young people who are older than high school but younger than 35, and probably not a lot of disposable income for those who are.
So, while I do see a fair number of DS's here, it isn't as many as I saw in, say, Tokyo. The PSP is also quite popular here. I asked one of my students what he did over the holidays and he told me he was playing Monster Rancher on his PSP.
Oh, one thing I wanted to comment about was Wii availability. I bought one in Canada on launch day, waited in line overnight, but I didn't bring it with me to Japan, since the console is region locked I didn't think I'd play it much. However, with the iminent release of Super Smash Brothers Melee, and Wii Fit already out, I may reconsider my conviction not to buy a console I already own. So I've been eyeing the displays at the stores, and it doesn't seem like it would be any harder than walking in and asking for a wii. Now these boxes might be empty, but I am able to identify the words for "sold out". Which seems pretty different than the situation in North America. I'll let you know if I have any problems getting a Wii when Super Smash Brothers Brawl is actually released here.
Jon e-mailed me last week and said he walked right into a store the day Super Smash Brothers Brawl was released and purchased both a Wii and the game with no problem.
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