So as I alluded in the last post, I popped down to Akihabara in the middle of my work day to see where things stand with game shops around there. First, the good news: a lot of the staples that have been around forever survived the pandemic and, impressively, still by and large sell the exact things I've known them to specialize. But the bad news is, prices in general are so obscenely high for just about ANYTHING that it's abundantly clear that they're targeting absolutely undiscerning foreign shoppers who don't know about or can't shop on Yahoo Japan and Mercari. We're talking 20,000+ yen boxed copies of Pokemon, 130,000+ yen copies of LSD and Serial Experiments Lain on PS1, and plenty, plenty more. We're talking differences of like 4x market price for common fare and 1.5 to 2x market price for rarer stuff. Just absolute madness, even with the current strength of the dollar against the yen.
It's the exact same thing as what's been going on in Den Den Town, but markedly worse because of the higher tourist population, which are still flocking to these stores in droves. Things had been trending in this direction well before the pandemic, but I was just left genuinely flabbergasted this time around. It's that flagrant. There are still fun things to do in that area, but if you're trying to shop for retro games on any semblance of a budget, quite frankly, you shouldn't even bother there at this point. The only real exception I found in the entire area was Beep Akihabara, whose PC and arcade-centric selection means it's pretty slim pickings for most other stuff, but they were the only ones that weren't out to fleece customers based on the games whose prices I knew off-hand. Suffice it to say, I was happy to give them my business, largely in the form of a bunch of doujin books, which I'll likely show off when I'm back home.
Anyway, I hate being such a downer about this stuff because there is a real joy to going into a lot of these iconic stores and thumbing through their inventory. I missed it a lot when I was living in the States, especially because US shops obviously don't tend to stock the kind of stuff I'm remotely interested in. But I can't in good conscience recommend seriously shopping at any such places in Akihabara, at least without browser tabs open for recent prices on Yahoo and Mercari. The genuine deals I found were so far and few between, exercising any less caution is just asking to be fleeced. As I said before, even with proxy fees and shipping, you'll still save a ton of money over these stores just going the online route and never looking back.
Here's hoping places one day come back down to earth, but as long as tourists keep flooding them and popular Vtubers give them the flimsiest excuses to inflate things to cash in on trends, I ain't holding my breath.
I really do want to stress that as bummed as I was to look around most of these places, the Beep Akihabara really was a fantastic exception and is worth visiting even if you're not all that interested in retro PCs or arcade PCBs. (But you'll be surrounded by so much of the former in particular in some spots that you might very well be made into a convert.) Just a lot of fun stuff to peruse, some rare, some not, some crazy rare, within such a tiny footprint of an underground store and the staff is super nice and helpful as always. I had a back and forth with one of them about the one game I actually did purchase from them to make sure I was understanding what I was getting and their answers were frank and honest. (I ended up getting the game in question since they told me what I was expecting, but just did due diligence because of a note mentioning it was a store sample copy specifically, which threw me off.) They were even pleasantly surprised and chatty when I also asked whether they had any stock of some doujin arcade hardware I was looking for, which was super nice.
I've honestly always had nothing but good things to say about them over the years and that remains true now. For a certain type of person, even amidst a sea of other increasingly mediocre shops, at least in terms of pricing, I would say that the Beep Akihabara is worth the trip down by itself. Plus, if you buy stuff from them, they continue to have killer custom bags, which is a plus, too. It's never the most popular store in the area by any means, but you can tell it's well-loved by its staff and even if the rest of the area goes to hell even further, I'll still stop by there whenever I make the trip to Tokyo. In fact, in all likelihood, I'll be going back there later this week to buy a Capcom CPS-2 motherboard from them. They weren't the only ones selling them, nor was it the cheapest, if just by a slim margin—that goes to the Surugaya directly next door to them above ground, which I will say was one of the less egregious stores I saw on the whole and still has a truly fantastic selection from floor to ceiling worth checking out—but after my experience earlier this evening, I'm happy to give them even more of my money before I leave town next week.
