Games shop in Tokyo

Hi,

I'll be going to Japan for 5 weeks on Saturday and I would like to know if there are any good places to buy retro stuff (apart from Super Potatoe).

I've heard of Hard Off but I don't know whether there are any in Tokyo.

Can anybody please recommend me any places?

Thanks!

 

Hard Off: http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-...split=1&gl=us&cid=17052947215123218921&li=lmd

Here's an video to give you an idea what your in store for:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9IFBC4acjQ

 

Plenty of people here already have.

 

Wow, you're an @ss. Do you have any idea where that Hard-Off you gave him a map for is, in Japanese no less? It's a good hour west of the centre of Tokyo. As far as I know there are no Hard-Offs in Tokyo proper. You need to get into the suburbs at the minimum. Not only that, but the majority of Hard-Offs are nowhere near a train or subway station. For a tourist, that's not likely ever see a Hard-Off.

To the OP, there are already threads here on the very first page of this forum on this very topic. As Gaijinpunch said, this has been asked many times already. Please take a look at the other threads on the topic. Basically, most of the game shops in Tokyo are in Akihabara with a few decent ones in Nakano.

 

So because I linked him to a map of Tokyo's nearest Hard-Off I'm an ass? Cool story bro.

 

That isn't the nearest Hard-Off to anywhere in Tokyo 23.

 

wow that is miles from anywhere, but after watching that youtube vid i'm going! it'll probably take me an hour to walk from the nearest station but it'll be worth it.

 

It might be, or it might not be. Hard-Offs are a total crap shoot. Sometimes they have tons of cool stuff, and some of them are duds with nothing but crap Famicom, SFC, Saturn and PS1 baseball, soccer and pachinko games. You have been warned.

 

Hard Off stores vary by location and some are huge and some are tiny. Sometimes the games in the non junk section of the store are generally more expensive then what you could get them in Akihabara for... The junk section may indeed have junk, I've been to a number where I've spent less then 15 minutes inside and walked out with nothing... As a general rule, the futher away a Hard Off is from a train station the more likely it is to have something decent. Why do you think me and Tatsujin have bikes?

 

If you had a car you could go further and bring back more I visited a Manga Soko in Ube last week and came back with some great deals. Ube is in the middle of no-where in Yamaguchi Ken. I normally visit the main Manga Soko store in Shimosone in Kita Kyushu since they have all the quality shit but at very high prices. While the Ube store is a lot smaller and with less cool stuff they also have much more acceptable prices. Yes, the further out you go the better deals you can normally find.

Yakumo

 

I don't know about you, but I'm not sure what to prefer. ^^

 

If you go to Tokyo for the first time and only have knowlegde of Super Potato please don't even try finding or going to Hard off. It's not worth it with having enough shops in Akihabara that will satisfy your retro needs.

 

had some decent luck in Book-off's recently, and a couple of Tsutayas.

Seems like everyone is cleaning out whatever they have left in the PS1/Saturn inventory.

50 yen for Sonic Wings Special, 50 yen each for three Tanto-R titles, etc.
Picked up a ton of crappy PS1 stuff that i'd heard of but thought about buying due to clearance prices (Love2Truck, couple of mini-game titles)

5-days off - considering going to see what i can loot from the nearest Hard off.

 

Well it's my second trip to Tokyo, and having looked at the logistics of getting to the hard off mentioned above, i'll deffo go if i have a spare half day. It's only an hour out of shinjuku and a 700yen train journey, it will be nice to see some of the burbs.

 

And me!

The best Hard-Offs are near highways and outside of walking distance (aka. 10/15 minute walk plus) from a train station.

 

Half hour out of Shinjuku, plus a bunch of walking and trying not to get lost I'm guessing? Maybe you'll have fun.

 

Sorry a 10-15min walk is outside of walking distance?

 

There are stations everywhere. 15 minutes walk from one can be considered far...especially the further out from the city you are. Although 15 minutes walk from Shinjuku station and you may still be in the station.

 

You've obviously never been to Tokyo...

Almost nobody walks that far. Every 10 minutes is a station. In the outer areas of the city, the roads and streets are so windy and crazy that if you were to walk 15 minutes from a station, you could easy be lost for an hour. I'm not being sarcastic. U2 sang about Japan with the lyrics, "where the streets have no names."

 

You know there are these things called maps... even with no street names there are lots of ways to get you bearings, for example a lot of main roads are numbers and do have signs in both Japanese and English of where they will go... being serious, walking in Tokyo is fun. I've walked from Nakano to Akihabara and passed a lot of things that I would never have seen before. When I go to Tokyo I get off at Ueno and generally walk to Akihabara, if I am in Shibuya then I will happily walk to Shinjuku and vice versa.

Back to Hard Off, give the average person walkes about 3.5mph (or about 5.63 kph) it means in 15 minutes they will walk 0.875 miles or 1.41 Km which having a rough look at a random selection of Hard Off stores in Tokyo, Saitama and Kanagawa is generally shorter then the distance between a train station and a hard off, the average distance being 2km. One of the hard offs was 5.5km (3.4 miles) or nearly an hour walk...