Pretty busy week.
Last Friday I had the placement test, on Saturday I went to Hiroshima (photos of the trip in a future post... or not) and today I went to view cherry blossom in
the most famous spot in Kyoto, the Philosoher's
walk.
On Thursday I went to Osaka with a fellow exchange student from the university. It was his first time in Osaka, so I showed him the otaku shops of Nipponbashi area.
While talking with him, he remarked that I indistinctively use "Nipponbashi", "Den Den Town" and "OtaRoad" to refer to pretty much the same area, but nitpicking the matter, that's not true.
"Nipponbashi" is the name of the bridge that crosses the Doutombori. Going south, down Sakai-Suji street, you find "Den Den Town" (electric town) from Nipponbashi 3-chome through 6-chome. There's a few otaku shops there (
Gundam's,
VOLKS Showroom, the two shops of
K-Books,
Animate, the main branch shops of Super Position...) and the rest are electronic shops and videogames shops like
Super Potato Osaka.
"Ota Road" is the parallel street at the west side of DenDen, and is almost totally focused to hobby related stores:
Melonbooks, Kotobukiya Shop,
Gamers,
Toranoana... and a few maid cafes.
First we went to
Mandarake Grand Chaos, located in America-mura (NW from Nipponbashi).
I went to the buy-back counter to sell some doujinshi that I brought from Spain. Sometimes I buy from
Yahoo! Auctions doujinshi lots, and among the stuff there are things that I had already bought. I sold 7 doujinshi (one from
King Revolver, one from
Crazy Clover Club and the rest from
Shoujo Hyouhon, one of them containing a
Takeuchi collaboration),
Tsukihime Shiryoushuu (most known as White Book) and
Maikaze's Touhou anime. I earned 9,800 yen, most of it coming from Touhou dvd (6,000 yen) and Tsukihime White Book (2,500 yen).
I purchased a
Fate/stay night shitajiki (for 105 yen) and
Ok Zwei, a
Mai-HiME doujinshi from circle
Twinzito that contains a collaboration by
Kikuta from circle
King Revolver. I think that now I'm not missing anything from him, but everytime I say this, an obscure and hard to find collaboration appears...
After that we went to OtaRoad, stopping at several shops. In
Toranoana I bought:
Milk Hunters 5 by circle
KuroYuki. Milk Hunters is a series of doujinshi based in the first and second seasons of
Pretty Cure, where
Nagisa,
Honoka and
Hikari are abused by a fat and ugly otaku...
I have the
Milk Hunters 1-4 compilation, but the 5 and 6 seems very hard to find.
In
Melonbooks building, after a brief checking on the 1st floor, we went to the second floor, that usually avoid because is the girls section, but to my surprise now a
Lashinbang shop was opened there! I didn't check it all because we were short of time, but in my next trip to Osaka I want to buy a couple of goods there. I purchased
Kara no Kyoukai Gengashuu Kessaku Sen 1 for 10,000 yen.
It was very expensive for a 2nd hand book, but since it was a C74 exclusive is very hard to find (only 1,000 were made). Nodaways, I was expecting to pay that much for it in
Yahoo! Auctions, so it was a good purchase since I'm avoiding proxy bidder fees.
It contains key animations from the first 3
Kara no Kyoukai movies, but unlike the regular books (
that I pictured in the C75 loot entry), this book is in full color.
Our last stop was
K-Books. I bought:
Street Fighter Artworks Ha. Released a few days ago to commemorate the 20th anniversary of
Street Fighter series. Contents wise, is similar to the previous
Eternal Challenge (that commemorated the 15th anniversary), but with the new illustrations of the past five years.
Unlike previous books, is sorted by artist and not by games.
Akiman, one of the legends from Capcom's earlier period. Sadly, he left in 2003.
Bengus, now known as
CRMK. The guy who defined the main
Street Fighter II cast and created from scratch the
Darkstalkers/Vampire cast. Until he left in 2006, he was my favourite artist at Capcom.
Nishimura Kinu. When
Bengus left, she became my favourite.
Shinkiro. Formerly an SNK employee,
I didn't got used yet to seeing his works with Capcom label.
Edayan. Sometimes I find some of his drawings a bit ugly, specially the girl's noses, but most of the time his works are great.
Ikeno. I don't like his "realistic style", but is the main one in
SFIV... I prefer his cartoonish style better (like the pics in the photo).
Bonus photo. Capcom Main HQ, located in Osaka. Was my first stop in my first trip to Osaka.
For now, this is the only interesting "extra" in the PSP version...
The only extra is a 32 pages artbook containing the promotional pics for the game.
The extras are a set of pins, a colection of cards with each character moveset and a cheap-looking mousepad.
The extras are a wallet, a clear card set, a case and a 140X50 cm tapestry of Saber.
Photo from AkibaBlog.
