Hey Hive!
Sorry for the short break but it was over Chinese New Year so it's understandable I hope? Hope everyone had a prosperous Lunar New Year celebration with lots of food and fun with family and friends! We had lots of gatherings and food over Lunar New Year and I almost got a sore throat from all the snacks.
But anyway we're back to our regular postings and if you missed the last few posts, I started sharing about our anniversary trip to Tokyo back in Feb 2023! It'd been at least 3 years since we visited Tokyo and the last time was pre-covid so we decided to go back and find some new places to explore while revisiting our favourite hot-spots.
Last time, we started Day 3 of our trip by visiting a very big UNIQLO! It wasn't the biggest one in Tokyo but it was still pretty respectable.
After that we took a train from Ginza to anime heaven, aka Akihabara!
We went for lunch first at one of our go-to places; Sukiya, and Sean got to order his favourite underrated dish - sukiyaki hotpot!
After that we stopped by a pet store/cafe and fawned over all the adorable puppies in there!
We left off in the special Donki Hote in Akihabara with loads of anime merchandise, so let's continue!
4 Feb 2023. Saturday.
This was back in 2023, when I still barely played Genshin Impact, an open world RPG game with lots of anime characters and waifus. So when I saw they had a whole Genshin Impact section I was so hyped! It was my first time ever seeing Genshin merchandise irl so I was sorely tempted to buy quite a lot of things.
We've been to Japan quite a few times and I've seen plenty of merchandise from other anime that I've never seen before but rarely from games, much less games that I know.
I don't normally play the popular games that everyone knows, with Genshin being the first exception. So I was pretty excited to see all the merchandise they had.
A lot of them were pretty similar though, just badges or keychains of the many characters in the game. They did have different styles though but the chibi ones seem the most popular.
There were also more expensive merchandise like acrylic figures of course. I think these were bookmarks of the different musician characters in unique outfits that I thought were cool too.
They also had some special merchandise from the Genshin concert back in 2021 in Shanghai I believe.
I think this was a special edition Mona figurine at over 7,000 JPY, or SGD$68!
There were a bunch of cardboard standees around as well, and I feel like people would've loved to buy those as well. I remember reading about someone who stole a cardboard standee at a Genshin event once.
Especially this Zhongli one, since a lot of people like him. I like how I was even wearing my own special merchandise at the time which was perfect.
The figurines for sale were on display in this glass case and of course the most expensive one was of Ningguang at 30,000 JPY, or almost $200 USD!
They had these very cute chibi figurines as well but I think it was a blindbox thing and I was quite tempted to get it if they had other characters available too (not just the Mondstadt ones).
After that we headed to the other floors of the Donki which was an arcade! They had lots of crane machines and other games available too.
Sean wanted to play some DDR of course, and they had the special gold machines here! He played a few games while I watched.
Even Sean was in perfect attire with his DDR shirt that I made for him! I think he said the machine wasn't very good but it looked really cool though!
He played some games while I looked around at all the other machines and it wasn't as crowded as I thought it would be.
There were some unique crane machines like this one where you actually try to win a toy crane which I thought was pretty funny.
I went to look at more merchandise in the meantime since a lot of my viewers also like Genshin and I thought they would love to see all the merch too.
There were these box sets that I thought were pretty cool but it was just a picture of the character with the badge, which I thought was quite meh for such a nice box.
There was just so much stuff and they even had some exclusive skins for the characters from previous events which I thought were cool.
After Sean was done playing I told him I wanted to try this crane game with the cute kirby plushies in different horoscope hats! I thought it was quite cute and maybe actually winnable so we tried it since we got a free ticket to play.
Unfortunately they didn't have either of our horoscopes but I was just trying to get for whichever was easiest to win. I miraculously managed to get this Kirby cancer plushie in one try!! It was amazing and such a rush to actually win! I can see how people can get addicted to these machines.
On the way out we saw they had these Mario figurines on display. I think they were from Super Mario 3D World and they looked quite cute.
There was also this huge Figure display and of course they had some sussy figures available for sale.
I'm surprised there weren't more of these tbh since you know, waifus and all.
By the time we left the building it was already dark out. In Akihabara it's really common to see people in cosplay outfits like maids etc. standing along the street promoting maid cafes to single guys. It's funny since Sean doesn't get approached because we're always walking together.
Akihabara also has these shops with photobooth machines called purikura, where you can take photos with friends. The curious thing about these though is they don't really allow guys to use it. Or rather, if guys want to use it they have to have at least one girl present with them. I'm not sure why but I think it's because they're anti-LGBT. But they allow girls to take it so..
Sean and I always make it a point to take at least one but the problem with these that we don't really like is because they have weird filters that really make you look weird.
We weren't really hungry for dinner yet so we went around looking for another arcade that Sean heard of that apparently has much better DDR machines.
It's this building called GamePanic that has 9 floors of various arcade machines!
We went to go see the Music Game floors of course and Sean played a few more games while I took a break on the chairs. I thought this arcade was a lot better since they had lots of seating here.
We left after a while back out into the cool night air and saw even more Genshin ads! It was pretty insane just how much Genshin stuff was around.
It was pretty cool to see though and I was quite happy I was finally able to recognise some characters here.
This lady named Ganyu is my favourite because she's really sweet in game.
This entire area looks so different at night with everything lighted up! It's when you see the iconic Electric Town come to life.
Of course there's also some naughty stores like this one that sells... adult things.
You're not allowed to take photos in there of course, but they had various items on each floor. There was also some floors that forbid ladies to go to, which was curious.
We left the store after looking around for a bit at all the naughty things, then went out in search for food.
We ended up at one of our favourite burger places - Lotteria!
It's actually a Korean burger chain but they have quite a few outlets in Japan and it's one of our go-to places for burgers every time we're here.
This branch was underground, and they have quite a few different burgers to choose from, including rice burgers. I ordered one of my favourite ones which is this bacon burger that also comes with onion rings inside it!
Sean bought the rice burger set that comes with fries and onion rings too, and the rice burger was not bad but I personally prefer the regular burger with bun.
It was still a satisfying meal nonetheless, and warm after walking around in the cold. After that we returned to our hotel and this was my haul from today!
I bought some merchandise for my VIPs on Twitch and some small things for myself. Most of these were from gachapon machines though so I didn't spend too much.
But I think that's all for today! Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
TacoCat’s Travels #270 (Tokyo): Unique UNIQLO and Anime Heaven 🌟