It's been an exhausting day at Tokyo Game Show... the first day the public were allowed at the show, and tens of thousands of Japanese gamers of all ages flooded the Makuhari Messe. I happened to get caught in a traffic jam between the Monster Hunter 3 Tri line and the Square Enix booth, after a bit of pushing, pulling, crowd surfing and panic I pulled through, but it was a close call. Imagine what would have happened if Square Enix had decided to put a playable Dragon Quest IX in their booth. Lives could have been lost.
At noon the wait to play Monster Hunter 3 Tri on Wii was five hours, which meant you had to spend the remainder of the day in line you just to play one game. Plenty of other games had lines of more than an hour. It was one and a half hours to play Phantasy Star Zero on DS so I lucked out on that... I did get to tap my fingers in Yuji Naka's latest game - Let's Tap. The mini games I played involved tapping certain rhythms to lure out fish, creating cascades of fire works and making ball bounce into cups. It is hard to tell how deep the gameplay is from a brief test, but the man who helped me with the controls pulled off some rather elegant displays.
The most breathtaking part of the day was without a doubt the 45 minutes I spent inside the Square Enix "Closed Mega Theatre". New trailers from all the Final Fantasy XIII projects, a beautiful trailer for the new Hexa Drive developed The 3rd Birthday, there was also some beautiful trailers for the new Kingdom Hearts games and Dissidia Final Fantasy, as well as Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete. Personally I think I'm more hyped for Final Fantasy versus XIII than the main game at the moment, even though the latter had a beautiful in-game trailer.
There is plenty of gameplay footage and interviews to look forward to that we have filmed over the last few days some highlights include an interview with Devil May Cry 4 and Resident Evil 4 producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi on Resident Evil: Degeneration and the relation between game companies and the movie industry, gameplay footage from The Last Remnant, Halo Wars and Castlevania Judgement. Other games that we will have a closer look at on GRTV are Sonic Unleashed, Prince of Persia, Valkyria Chronicles, Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of a New World, Edge of Twilight, Ninja Blade, Star Ocean: The Last Hope and Bionic Commando.
A commercial for an upcoming game just flicked by on the TV. Litterru Biggu Pranety. Go sack boys!