May You Live In Interesting Times
It's around 11:30 here in Japan. We just got back to our hotel around an hour ago; we left around 8:30 this morning. I didn't expect it to be this long of a day. The familiar Chinese curse is "May you live in interesting times," though, and I suppose someone sent that GameSpot's way sometime over...
It's around 11:30 here in Japan. We just got back to our hotel around an hour ago; we left around 8:30 this morning. I didn't expect it to be this long of a day. The familiar Chinese curse is "May you live in interesting times," though, and I suppose someone sent that GameSpot's way sometime over the past week, because, well, it's been a very interesting trip.
Anyway, not much time to blog, but I suppose we owe you at least one thing a day. This morning got off to an interesting start, as about half of the crew (we're staying in two hotels) had to get up at the crack of dawn to start weaving our way through the train stations to reach the convention center. Took around an hour all told, although it was mostly sitting on trains and trying not to aggravate the natives with our huge boxes of equipment. Luckily it won't be quite as crowded tomorrow and we won't have so much equipment to bring along.
After waiting in line for our badges and getting in line to wait for the show to open up, we finally got into the convention center. Luckily the line we were in was fairly close to where the Sony booth was, although it was walled off by an immense line of hostesses when the show floor opened up. Honestly, I don't even know when they started letting people in, as I luckily stumbled across the Devil May Cry 4 booth just across from the Sony booth and was the fourth person in line to play it. So I may have been the fourth person outside of Capcom to ever play the game, as far as I know. I got around ten minutes in with that before being ushered out, but I managed to clear the demo, at least.
Next up was a trip to the Microsoft booth to try and scope out Blue Dragon. That and Lost Odyssey are both in closed-off sections of the Microsoft booth, so you have to wait an hour or so to get in, but I braved the lines and managed to get a good fifteen minutes in with the game. Graphically it's fairly charming, though I'm not especailly a fan of Akira Tetsuya. Plays just like every Final Fantasy game I've ever played, although the combat is perhaps most reminiscent of Final Fantasy X.
(Super bonus for reading this post: a close-up picture of the only Habanero chips endorsed by a chili pepper version of Osama Bin Ladin.)
Solid stuff, all around. I toyed with the idea of getting in line for Lost Odyssey right after getting out of Blue Dragon, but I figured I should get back to the hotel and post up Devil May Cry as soon as possible. Wi-fi points have been impossible to find here; the only unsecured connection I've managed to find one has been the lobby of our own hotel. So basically we all crashed Justin's hotel room at the New Otani (which is around a quarter mile from the convention center), wrote up what we could, and headed back out to the show floor.
By this time, I knew I would have to be back at the Sony booth for a bus trip to their HQ by 3:45, so I didn't have much time to spare. I only managed to wait in line for the Square Enix "Closed Mega Theater" and see the new trailers that they put together. They had a short extended trailer for FFXIII, which was neat, a brand new one for FFXIII: Atigo, and the same old one for FFXIII: Versus. While I'm not an expert on Kingdom Hearts, they did have some new trailers for the new Kingdom Hearts II reissue, and the Re:Chain Of Memories game, as well. I'm not sure if I'm following the Japanese explanation of the plot, but it seems like they might be trying to tie together the worlds of FFXIII: Versus and Kingdom Hearts II somehow. The lead character of the Versus trailer and the black-robed nemeses from the new Kingdom Hearts II games seem awfully similar. I could be misreading that entirely.
We wound the day down with a trip to Sony headquarters for a bit of a closer look at some of the Playstation 3 games that they had on display on the show floor, the fruits of which I'm sure you'll be viewing soon. Previous to the visit, the only PS3 games I had played were Warhawk at E3 and DMC4 that morning, so it was nice to get my hands on Resistance, Motorstorm, Gran Turismo, Lair, and some of the other titles they had going on. I probably spent the most time with the new Hot Shots Golf, which is a neat little game.
Almost midnight now. Time to rest up, get up early, and head back to the show floor. First thing on my list of priorities is Lost Odyssey. Then, mahjong. Lots of mahjong.
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