Day 6: The Preview of Battle: Denkigai

We woke up bright and early at 9am and rushed our asses over to Shinjuku to attend Denkigai.

Inside the Shinjuku JR Station

When we got to Belle Salle in Shinjuku (after some tribulations, apparently there are multiple ones in Shinjuku), we could already see the huge lines of fellow otaku waiting for certain booths.

Lines outside Denkigai

To be honest, I wasn’t really particularly interested in any of the booths, so I just got into the Arc System Works line. It actually started outside around where the picture above is and went all the way in.

The inner line at Denkigai

The Arc Sys booth was selling a Noel/Mu dakimakura cover and an interesting calendar that has Ragna as a kind of main character that shouts quips at a Blazblue/Guilty Gear character that month.

Arc System Works booth

Didn’t really feel like dropping 10000yen on a Noel dakimakura (but those armpits!), so I just bought 2 calendars (one for a friend). If they were selling a Rachel or Platinum daki on the other hand… some more money might’ve been spent.

I ended up getting into the Navel line with a friend (more or less on a whim, lol). By the time I actually got there, all the limited stuff was already sold out. The friend I lined up with wanted their limited tapestry, but that was sold out by the time he got up there. I just ended up buying an artbook (since I was there anyway, lol).

Navel booth

We wandered around the event space for a while, looking at the various booths by what were mostly big eroge publishers. There was one interesting demo of a USB onahole by KISS (Custom Maid 3D makers) that had sensors embedded into it. The demo was to… “assist” a maid with eating a popsicle using the dildo in the USB onahole in the shortest amount of time possible. (Yeah, no pictures, sorry!) The guy running the demo was also really hype, commentating the entire time and yelling out things like “Oh no! You’re going too fast!” etc.

Afterwards, we ate at a nearby place that had pretty cheap food. Had  some katsu curry rice that was pretty decent (especially for the price!). Was feeling pretty hungry so I splurged and got the double portion that had extra meat.

Double Katsu Curry Rice

We made our way through Shinjuku with the intent of riding the JR to Akihabara since there was a special going on at K-Books over there.

Near Shinjuku JR Station

Making it to Akihabara, we headed towards K-Books

En route to K-Books

I ended up buying just enough manga to hit the amount necessary to get the bonus, which was a huge calendar that was exclusive to K-Books.

Afterwards, carrying all of our anime goods from Denkigai and K-Books, we made the long trek over to Odaiba to check into Hotel Nikko over there. In order to get into line hella early for Comiket, we collectively agreed to split the (much higher) costs of a hotel room in Odaiba for the next few days.

While checking in, the staff noticed our many (paper, anime) bags that we were carrying and offered to take care of them for us for the time being.

Anime in Style

Luggage. Luggage. Anime. Luggage.

When we got up into our room, it was surprisingly spacious, especially for Japan. Of course, we were planning to stick 5 dudes in a 3-person room, so it was still cramped for us. Luckily, it was totally manageable.

One interesting thing I noticed while poking around the hotel room was that the nightstand drawer had a “Teachings of Buddha” book instead of the normal Bible you’d find in pretty much any Western hotel room.

Eastern hotel reading material

At this time, it was getting dark in Odaiba, so all the many-colored lights were starting to turn on:

Odaiba in the evening

The plan was to wake up extremely early tomorrow and prepare to fight the crowds at Comiket tomorrow… nah, screw sleep, let’s go back to Akihabara and play arcade games!

In particular, I really wanted to go back to Hey! and buy the Blazblue NESiCA card, so that’s what a friend and I did.

The fighting game floor at Hey!

Also played a few games of Blazblue CP with said friend and started to raise each others’ ranks (lol). Didn’t stay too long though since we would be up early tomorrow.

On the way out though, I had to try out this game:

TABLE FLIPPING: ARCADE EDITION

Operation is easy: slam your hands on the thing and then flip the damn table as hard as you can. I slammed and flipped so hard that I ended up getting the top score on that machine for the day:

I Am Number One (for today)

On the way out, I also stopped by Go Go! Curry for a late dinner. Ate even more katsu curry rice:

Katsu Curry Rice @ Go Go! Curry

Went back to the hotel soon afterwards. Hunted around for free internet and found it in the business office in the form of a ethernet cable just laying there on a table. That let a friend and I check out all of the corporate booths that we wanted to hit tomorrow at Comiket, since our party was planning to line up for that in the morning.