Finals + Interview

What I should be doing...

So, today (Friday) was the last day of classes, so I'm pretty happy about that. I don't have to deal with not waking up on time for class and with classes that have participation points for going to lecture >_>. So now that's done, I just need to focus on finals and then off I go back home. I might end up playing through FF XIII through finals week if I can get suckered in, otherwise it'll just be typical slacking off while playing games.

In more interestingish news, I have a project in Introduction to Japanese Language and Culture (that I'm procrastinating on right now). I basically have the freedom to write about anything I want as long as it is related to Japanese Culture and what not. So I decided to focus my presentations on games. Firstly I went to popular games cause it would be easy to bullshit stuff about, but then I realized I could talk about fighting games and talk about the difference in scenes in Japan and America. So, I had an interview with Lord Knight over Skype about this since this September he went to Japan. I recorded it for anyone else who wants to see it if they're interested in Japanese scene and other random things that we talked about.

First of all, I apologize for the sound quality, I completely forgot to increase the sound quality to something better, but well can't really help that.

If you're too lazy to watch the video, I'll summarize what I found that would be interesting for my paper since it'll help me write it anyways. Some of it may be obvious and boring to read, so yea...

So what I found out that was that the “mysterious” Japanese arcades are pretty much the place where you go to play against other people. As an average player, it's hard to stay on a station even for more than one game, at least for fighting games. With games costing about one dollar each, it's really easy to run out of money. It's something that most high schoolers wouldn't be able to afford consistently. A run to the arcade would either be only a couple of games or a once in a while thing with friends. Watching people is something that people do so that they don't run out of money instantly since staying on a station is insanely hard.

Training mode, good for situations like these

Another interesting point that was made was that one thing that the Japanese want is training mode. They already have a place to play, but at the arcade, there's no real time to play against other people. When playing against other people, trying out a setup is much harder that way, so it makes it much more difficult to try out setups. This is interesting mainly cause it's kind of the opposite of what America wants. They already have a place they can gather, but here we don't have something like that.

Hanging with your crew :<

Groups at Japanese arcades work pretty similarly to how they do at Majors for American tournaments. Generally you hang out with the group that you came out with. Talking to other groups is possible, but it's only done by the outgoing people that actively try to talk to other people. Otherwise, there's not much interaction between groups. It's not until you become good at the game that other people will notice you and actively go to you. Then you have other people talk to you and you make friends. Otherwise going into the scene isn't very easy to integrate yourself into.

And that's the main points that I remember clearly. Hopefully there was something that you found interesting in my interview.