The road to TGS always starts with a local express train to the nearest bullet train station.  That takes about an hour.  Then it’s a long trip on the fastest train in Japan to Tokyo.  TGS tends to happen on a three day weekend so all the trains tend to be very full and if you don’t have a reserved seat then there is a very good chance that you won’t be sitting down.  The bullet train I took was packed with families travelling to who knows where.  They all had their little kids and all those little kids did lots of crying.

On the train, I played a bit of the Frontier Gate demo. I hit the demo cap about a week ago but there are still a lot of weapons I need to cap out so I worked on that a bit.  It’s kind of dull work but since everything done in the demo carries over to the full version, it’s a good way to get a leg up.  Playing it started giving me motion sickness about an hour from Tokyo, I so stopped and listened to some music till the train arrived.

After checking in to the hotel, which happened to be across the street from the sumo arena, I wandered around Akihabara for a while and picked up an indie PC shooter and BRS for PSP.  Then it was dinner at the curry place in front of Akihabara station and back to the hotel.

TGS is held in the Makuhari Messe International Convention center and is rather popular.  But so is Tokyo Disney Land and if you go to the convention center by train from Tokyo you’re going to run in to people going to both.  It’s quite easy to spot which is which though.  Families and couples get off at the stop that goes to Disney.  The nerds get off in a herd on a slow stampede toward the convention center.  I was among that herd.  Even though I got up early I was far from the first person in line.

About fifteen minutes before they started letting people in, I noticed the fellow in front of me retweet some disappointing information: all the tickets for the playable Vita games had already been completely distributed.  I knew the Vita was going to be popular but I didn’t think the tickets would run out so quickly.  I had to skip the Vita.  The other games I wanted to see were still open and I headed to the PSO2 booth first.

The PSO2 booth was pretty popular though.  People were lined up from the start.  Much like last year, Sakai showed up soon after the show started and spent some time chatting with the booth staff.  Like the pictures from Twitter and Facebook showed, it had enough computers set up for 24 parties of four.  Each particular computer had a preset character and every character in the spectrum was represented.

The first charactor I was able to play was a RAmarl.  The TGS mission started out in a multi-party area.  The characters were several levels above the monster’s levels so things were pretty smooth until the two Rock Bears showed up.  But even then, the bears were no match for a full set of Arks chasing them down.  After that, each party moved off in to their own area to fight the dragon.  The first time around, the party I was in was able to defeat the dragon but weren’t able to stun it or break off it’s horn.

After my round of PSO2 was done, I grabbed a ticket to do it a second time.  They weren’t handing out tickets when I first lined up but now they were.  My ticket was for 11:30 so I needed something to do while I waited.  I circled the Sega booth once.  Both the Binary Domain and PSP Yakuza sequel were pretty busy so I skipped those and went to try out the “Ragnarok: Empress of Light and Darkness(ラグナロク：光と闇の皇女)” strategy game.  It’s a basic turn-based strategy game in the Ragnarok Online world.  Or maybe it’s just based off it, I don’t know.

The demo was a small battle with some mini-boss kind of ogre thing and if you could defeat it, then you would get a special keychain in addition to the fan and CD they were giving out.  It wasn’t too hard with the three characters provided.  After the boss was defeated, I went to check out some of the other booths.  All the popular ones were pretty full but the Frontier Gate demo less crowded than some of the others.  Since it was almost 11 at this point, I made my way back to the Sega booth.  Nearby was a smart phone game booth and to burn the rest of the time till I could use my PSO2 ticket, I tried out one of their games.

The game was called “Our Cavetown (ぼくらのcavetown).”  It was another social game and I really don’t like social games.  It wasn’t horrible but it’s just not something I enjoy.  For playing the game, I got to take a chance at a slot machine to win a prize.  I got lucky and hit the 777 and won a t-shirt.  It’s too small for me to wear so maybe I’m not so lucky.  The shirt is pretty poorly sewn too.  But it killed some time.

While I was in line for the second go at PSO2, Dragon Sakai and Nagori Toshihiro of Yakuza fame were being escorted away by a gaggle of comely hostesses.  Anyways, my second trip through the TGS demo was as a FOcaseal.  The new costume looked pretty nice.  Force isn’t usually a class I play so this was a new experience for me.  The controls were the same as they were in the alpha.  As we were taking on the Rock Bears this time, I noticed that charged techs were pretty powerful, moreso than the ranger’s grenade or piercing bullet.  I couldn’t change the pallet from hold to click though so it made fighting difficult.  I’m positive this feature will be in the full version though.  Since barta was on the second pallet, I ended up accidentally using fireballs against the dragon more than once.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to defeat the dragon so the quest ended in failure.

To remedy that failure, I went to try out Konami’s  Frontier Gate demo.  It was pretty much the same as the downloadable demo only with a few TGS-only missions and higher leveled characters.  Some of the missions included things like hunting a yeti, mammoth or even a T-Rex.  I chose the yeti mission and since I had put a fair bit of time in to the downloadable demo, it was no real problem to find and finish off the yeti.

The next part of the day was the one I was dreading the most: lunch.  I had thought about bring in my own but didn’t really have time to buy it before I got to the convention center.  After I finished cutting up the yeti, I made my way over to the food court.  The food court was on the other side of the convention center from the Konami booth but it was surprisingly smooth sailing between the two.  Last year it was push, stop, push, stop, push, stop until the food court and then push, push, push, push in the food court. This year, there were a few more shops so people moved got done quicker and there was really no pushing at all.  I had two slices of pizza and a cola and wandered back in to the main convention hall.

Somewhere in the day, I played a Mass Effect 3 demo at the Sega booth.  It was the main character saving a chunky female alien and some other alien from men with guns and robot suits.  It was the first time I played a Mass Effect game so I don’t know what exactly was going on but I did manage to defeat the pod-like robot at the end of the demo.  I don’t know if I’d play the game normally but it wasn’t horrible.

Amongst the various unwashed hordes at the game show were cosplayers.  I don’t really care about cosplay or people who do it except when they are doing a character from something I’m interested in.  I saw two cosplayers from Phantasy Star this year.  One was a woman in an Ethan Waber costume.  She had on shoes with heels at least three inches sick.  The other was a guy in what I hope was a FOmar costume.

Some time after lunch, I decided I had seen enough and went back to the hotel and rested.  I went back out to Akihabara again later and picked up one of the Toho shooters and a used copy of Grand Knights History for PSP, had dinner at the hamburger place near the train station, and returned one last time to the hotel to retire and watch Casablanca for the first time ever.  The next day was another long train ride back home.

Some swag and fliers and stuff.  From top to bottom, left to right: Ragnarok flier, PSO2 mousepads, Xeperia Play Flier, Sega TGS 2011 program, Accquire promo DVD, Kingdom Conquest flier, TGS 2011 program, Our Cave Town t-shirt, Binary Domain bag, TGS official notebook, Capcom Press Booklet and DVD, smartphone screen cleaner from Gree, Puyo Puyo fan, Japan Game Awards Fan and glowstick, M:TG promo deck, Hanbit booklet.

Robotics Notes flier and sticker, Sega mug cup and replacable outside designs, Ragnarok fan, keychain, and charm, Dengeki Playstation booklets from Accquire, idol cards from Accquire promoting Gladiators, 7th Dragon 2020 plastic folder and booklet.