Goods

Paper

Doujinshi. The one on the bottom left explains global warming through the universal language of schoolgirls.

Book 3 in the tanpatsu Tenko series. A great coffee table book containing cuts from a fictional movie about Tenko leaving on a journey. Comes with mock up movie tickets. Mines is somewhat worse for the wear after the rain on day 2 of Comiket.

Kikuchi Seiji. He’s really gone up in profile lately, but his books are as lazy as ever.

Production and animation notes for Madoka, Hidamari Sketch and Bakemonogatari. I stood in line for 5 hours at Comiket to buy this stuff from the SHAFT booth, but you can actually get most of it in stores. The exceptions are the sketch board on the left, the big Sasami-san bag and the white book which contains a bunch of great illustrations from the Madoka key staff.

N-type’s tasteful Kumin-senpai bag. The thing on the bottom right is (appropriately enough) a mini-pillow case. I really like how his bags are always simple, cute and not embarrassing to carry in public.

Utsura Uraraka’s set. The thing on the bottom left is some kind of phone holder. For your phone holding needs.

Expensive but lavishly produced set from the multi-talented Kanzaki Hiro. Not only does he do the illustrations for Oreimo, but he’s also a popular vocaloid producer. This package gives you the best of both worlds by including an illustration book and a vocaloid CD.

Big r;n poster I bought from a store in Nakano Broadway. They had the official promo posters for pretty much every recent series for less than 1,000 yen each.

R;n booklet containing the details for certain locations in (real life) Tanegashima where you can, using your iPhone’s camera, bring up AR commentary from Akiho.

Totally legit doujin regarding the reception of the Madoka movie in Paris from @toqmitz.

Linework and design material books.

Production materials book for the Idolmaster TV series. I have very conflicted feelings about this franchise, but there’s no arguing that the production values for the TV series are top notch. This is the special edition which contains part of the materials in the very expensive doujin put out by the staff.

Production materials book for Ano Hana. This book has been out of print for a while, so I was ecstatic to find it in an obscure shop for a fraction of the market price.

Graphigs are little papercraft characters which you can assemble in about 10 minutes without scissors or glue (ie. suitable for complete amateurs like me). Some even have replaceable parts like exchangeable faces. I wish they’d sell them online as PDFs.

Plastic

Some stuff I won in UFO catchers. If you would also like to try your hand at this noble pastime of gentlemen, here is some advice to live by (derived from bitter experience):

Not all machines are created equal. Some machines give up the goods relatively easily, while others will only devour your hard earned cash and will to live. Good machines include the ‘box on two parallel bars’ (assuming the gap in between is large enough for the prize not to jam), ‘half-ring on plastic ball’ (not cheap, but easy to make steady progress) and ‘box on shoelace’ (generally only cheap prizes in this one). Bad machines include the ‘box on two angled bars’ and anything which involves inserting a stick into a hole.

If you’re in a place like Akihabara, check out a few different game centres before deciding which machine to play. New or popular prizes will often be available in many different kinds of machines, some of which are easier to win at than others.

When assessing a machine’s difficulty, be sure to inspect it from all angles. Many machines have hidden platforms which provide additional support to a prize, making it harder to win. Others might have a box which is too large to fall through the most obvious gap.

Decide what your strategy is before playing. You don’t want to be making it up as you go along. If your strategy isn’t working and you’re not seeing any progress, stop playing and think it over before continuing.

Arcade staff are friendly and want you to win! Try to play near one whenever possible. If you’re doing badly, they might move the prize closer to a winning position. This works especially well if you’ve completely messed up and moved the prize to an unwinnable position, or are playing near closing time when they want to get you out of the store.

If there’s a prize in the machine which you want but isn’t set up to be won, you can often ask staff to set it up for you.

A lot of machines offer an extra credit if you put in a 500 yen coin (depending on the machine, you might also be able to do this with 500 yen worth of change). You can get 500 yen coins from the change machine which every arcade in Japan seems to have.

If you run out of money while playing, a lot of arcades will have a little plastic cover you can flip down over the coin slot to show that you’re just running off to get some change. Other people won’t play the machine while it’s in this state. You have about 3 minutes to get back before the staff flips the cover back up.

If you really want a prize but are hopeless at UFO catchers, you can usually just buy it from a second hand store in Akihabara (especially if it’s a figure). Good places to look include Liberty, Ekkusu, the third floor in the Cultures Zone building and the remaining part of the Radio Kaikan building. However, if you’re determined to win the prize fair and square like a real man, do yourself a favour and don’t look at the price tags for the prizes in those places. Just don’t.

Some great little Working Nitengo mini-figures which I found on sale. I’ve always thought that the smaller, cheaper figures should focus on SD rather than being poorly-made versions of larger figures, and the Nitengo series tend to be amongst the best in that regard. Unfortunately, this also makes them relatively hard to find and expensive.