Momentum is Building for the Xbox 360 in Japan
Far away in a land called Japan, a nation that retains a disproportionately large level of influence on the global games industry, there is an annual exhibition of new games and hardware. This event is the Tokyo Game Show, which runs for a few days every September, and it brings together most of the Japanese videogame scene (only Nintendo is consistently absent).
Representatives of Western developers and publishers also turn up in their droves - wearing suits and positioning sunglasses on their heads to give an impression that they are businesspeople but also ‘down with the kids’. And then, after a couple of business days, the rabid gamer public is allowed entrance and the suits disappear in a sea of odorous geekdom. It’s quite something to behold.
The Microsoft Booth
This year, your hardworking correspondents (without a suit between us) landed in Tokyo and took a train out to the suburbs, which is where the Makuhari Messe venue is located. Tokyo Game Show kicked off there and we eventually made our way to Microsoft’s glowing white stand, where Halo 3 was being promoted loudly because … well, it’s Halo 3. It won’t have as big an impact in Japan as it will have elsewhere, but Japanese players (and Japanese members of the press we spoke with) have a great respect for the quality of the Halo series. It’s just not really their cup of tea.
Lost Odyssey, though? Now you’re talking the language of Japanese gamers (Japanese, presumably). Hironobu Sakaguchi, one of the biggest (and longest) names in the history of Japanese games, was at Microsoft’s booth - moustache in tow - to demonstrate how much progress his Mistwalker team had made with its next epic RPG (its last project was the three-disc marathon of Blue Dragon). It appears that Lost Odyssey’s scheduled December 8 release in Japan (February in Oz) is a realistic target, because the Tokyo Game Show build was already looking complete. Fans of Sakaguchi assembled to gawp at him, poor chap.
Read our exclusive interview with Sakaguchi here.
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