I have now written probably around 10,000 words of various Japan report posts (and I'm still not done askhglkas), but to save all that tl;dr, there can be no better way to summarise the trip than this. Marvel at our lame attempts to stay in time with either the music *or* each other for more than two hip-wiggles in a row! And you probably all thought I was kidding with that post title back there. ^_~


Edited by k_chan009 (<3<3<3), staring everyone who came with us on the trip plus whoever else we could talk into joining in. In the end I don't think we covered even half the places we visited in Japan - so much running around that sometimes it was so very hard to remember to spare ten minutes to line everyone up in front of the camera. But this is a pretty decent subset, and no prizes for guessing what we were singing at karaoke that day. *g* Missing from the final cut: at least one take of me in front of the Udogawa mural losing it completely after making the mistake of glancing over to see what our Sho cosplayer was doing on my right. Aargh so many more photos still to come!

ETA: Because I just remembered that not everyone on the web has heard of the whole caramelldansen thing yet, have a wikipedia entry for context. ^^; Also, you should all go watch Where The Hell Is Matt? not simply because it was relevant inspiration, but also because I have not done enough yet today to spread laughter and warm fuzzies.

As mentioned in previous Japan trip reports (I've only got a couple left to go now, I swear!) one of the many trip highlights was personally getting to see the trailers shown in Squeenix's closed theatre at the Tokyo Gameshow. I'm not going to bother going into too much scene-by-scene detail, since my memory is not that photographic and there'll be places all over the web you can find those kinds of summaries by now (not to mention low quality video versions all over youtube). But I (and the rest of our party) did come out of there bursting to talk about it, and we all know how much I love editorialising, so I'm going to focus more on what we thought of it all.

Like many Square Enix fans I’ve had some mixed feelings about a lot of their recent products. They’ve been responsible for producing most of the games that have ever made my all time favourites list (Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII and X, Kingdom Hearts II, The World Ends With You), but also a lot I’ve never managed to muster more than ambivalence towards at best (most of the rest of the FF series, including spin-offs) and a good few others that have made me want to take to their lead designers with the Clue-bat of How Not To Destroy Everything I Ever Loved (Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy X-2 and XII, everything they’ve done with FFVII since 1997, and the last five minutes of WEWY). Each to their own and all that, since even most of the rest of titles have their own devoted fans out their somewhere, and their good games still remain really, impressively good – but the bottom line is that it’s very hard to be impressed by the shameless hype-mongering they’ve been keeping up in recent years by releasing all their newest trailers only in the UBER EXCLUSIVE closed theatres at events like the TGS, for which seats are so limited that we missed out on them completely on the first day and had to leave the hotel at 5:30 AM to make it through the queues on the second. The point I’m building up to is that those trailers were going to have to be really damn awesome to make all that bother seem worthwhile, so getting halfway through the show and already finding myself thinking “Wow, this was completely worth everything!” in between a whole lot of completely fangirlish incoherence was a very welcome surprise. Whatever’s actually in store for us once all these games make it to the shelves, they definitely know how to put on a good show.

( Assorted KH mobile games )

( Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days )

( Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep )

( Dissidia: Final Fantasy )

( Final Fantasy XIII )

( Final Fantasy Agito XIII )

( Final Fantasy Versus XIII )

And that was it for the trailer session (please make sure you’ve picked up all your belongings and head for the exit to your right, and oh, btw, the large guy in the Squeenix shirt wants a word with you about that camera he saw you sneakily trying to use in there…) To summarise, really looking forward to Birth by Sleep and Dissidia, definitely interested in all the FFXIII games, not especially fussed about the mobile phone games or Parasite Eve, and majorly disappointed with 358/2 Days and the idea they want us to buy yet another version of AC.

To round off the day later on, most of our group headed on to the official Squeenix Store in Shinjuku (excluding me and velithya who were camped out by the ArcSys booth asking their staff difficult questions MORE ON THIS LATER), and came back laden with bags in which the full ‘Square Enix Projects’ name had helpfully had the letters ‘A’ and ‘R’ partially blacked out to demonstrate the correct spelling.

The same thing again courtesy of the official website

Leaving all those Japan posts for a bit to try and clear out some of my posting backlog. Time to share a bit of what we were doing in Melbourne last month, starting with the Amaranth Ball.

( The Manifest Ball - cosplay photos galore, a little image heavy )

(Ganked from aphelion_orion.) I don't often make whole posts just to plug cool stuff from out on the web, but these were worth making an exception for. These are fan-made videos at their mind-blowing best.

Dead Fantasy I
Dead Fantasy II

People Who Should Click These Links:
1. Anyone who has ever played any game in the Dead or Alive or Final Fantasy series.
2. Anyone with a particular love for the female cast of either series.
3. Anyone who did not like the female cast and felt disappointed that so many of the FF girls do not live up to their full potential for awesomeness.
4. Anyone who likes massive, beautifully scripted team vs team battle sequences. Including anyone who does not yet know how much they like massive, beautifully scripted team vs team battle sequences.
5. Anyone who got bored during the neverending fight scenes of Advent Children, and/or seriously fed up with the failure of the fight choreographers to figure out how to work magic into a hand-to-hand battle. (Dear Squeenix: THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT RIGHT.)
6. You.