The above pic was borrowed from the latest blog post by the owner of Role and Roll Station. “Role and Roll” is an imprint, a company that makes various tabletop games and RPG-related media items. Their public site is here: http://www.arclight.co.jp/r_r/. I’ll talk about some of their excellent games later. Role and Roll Station is R&R’s brick and mortar gaming store in Akihabara. It’s one of the best gaming stores in Japan, right up there with Yellow Sub and Daydream Cafe.
Anyway, I’ve always been a fan of the owner (“Tencho”; or loosely “Shop Boss”) of the store: He’s really creative, extremely public and prolific with updates and blogposts and the like, very transparent with the good and bad things that happen as a store owner (including his struggles to find a new storefront when the previous one was pretty much destroyed/unusable after last year’s earthquake). This latest Valentine’s post is just another example of a good store owner creatively generating some buzz and goodwill, and not just falling into a slump of day-to-day sales.
Here’s what he did: He went through his catalog of new products, and ranked them (with hearts) on a Valentin…ian(?) scale. Check this out:
So what he’s got there is one of the pictures from his store, the New Game/Materials shelf. It’s a mix of TRPG, replay and supplement there.
Those cards each have three categories with hearts in them, then a somalier-style (but with games instead of wine) description of the game from a Valentine/lovey-lovey point of view.
The three categories are:
TOKIMEKI: It’s an onomatopea which basically is the thump-thump of a heartbeat. It’s used in “sparkly innocent love stories”, like the “Tokimeki Memorial” game series or other school-days-era love stories. Indicates the amount of innocent sparkly happy love that can happen in the game.
Edit: Thought of a better way to call it: “Hugs and Kisses!”
RABURABU: “Love Love”, yeah. Indicates the amount of more serious love that can happen in the game: Love between adults (not sex per se, just a more mature kind of love; kissing, etc), etc
Edit: Probably better to call it “Hot Romance!”
Then the third is something else/different special for that specific product in order to show off what it does. The bottom left one’s third column is “Heroine Power“, the middle one has “Incredible Story“, the third one (Shinobigami!) has “This Can Make You Cry“.
Anyway, that was a pretty creative thing for them to do, I thought, and deserved a shout-out. Just a little fun activity, nothing too serious, that tied holidays and games together. I’d love to see what they come up with for Halloween. Or perhaps Respect-for-the-Aged Day!
[Just an aside, as a Shinobigami fanatic: Yep, that’s pretty accurate! Unless you really gun for it, the romance in the game is going to be more mature than schoolgirl/schoolboy love, and yeah the kinds of romances that develop in the game are more often than not tragic, hence the “crying” thing]
Anyway, Role and Roll Store Boss’ Blog is a Regularly Followed Blog for a bunch of us. Check them out if you’re interested in what’s new and on the shelves in Japanese game stores! http://rrstation.blog40.fc2.com/
Also: SORRY MARLA in NC! Looks like your comment got false-positive’d as spam. I corrected that. Good to hear that there are gamers/J-speakers in the RTP/Triangle NC area. Hit me up with your contact info and we’ll hit you up when we playtest/run a Japanese RPG locally.