Rising Star Blog

New Year's Day is one of the most important times of the year in Japan. While Christmas is not even a public holiday, New Year is when the roads come to a standstill and the trains become packed with people returning home to their families, to spend their time drinking sake, eating traditional foods, and visiting temples to make wishes for the coming year. This year I joined them all, forgetting about games for a while as I spent the time with my wife's family in Tokyo.

But it's impossible to forget about games completely. My sisters were visiting from England, so, among other things, I decided to take them to the bar at the top of the Park Hyatt in Shinjuku. Shinjuku is one of my favourite parts of Tokyo; the top of the Park Hyatt is one of my favourite things in it. It's famous for the amazing views that stretch all over Tokyo in every direction, and because it was the bar used in the movie Lost in Translation, and it's also a bit of a people-watching spot - the last time I was there I saw both Nicolas Cage (in town to promote National Treasure 2) and Mr Bean (presumably in town to cause some sort of harebrained silent ‘comedy').

The real celebrities, however - and the reason it's one of my favourite parts of Shinjuku - were the developers behind several Square Enix titles, who were there for a round of press interviews. One of the perks of being a videogame journalist is all the free trips to swanky parts of the world, but that jaunt to Tokyo was certainly one of the more memorable - if only because of the karaoke every night.

This time around, Square Enix seemed to have monopolised this particular corner of Tokyo. Shinjuku might be more famous for providing the neon-street setting of Sega's Ryu ga Gotoku/Yakuza games, but just round the corner from the Park Hyatt you can find a pretty standard-looking office block that houses the offices where many of the Square Enix games are made. Further down the road, at the old Enix offices there is a bit more fanfare thanks to the Final Fantasy stands in the window. And then there are all of the screens outside the various Yodobashi Camera stores which spent New Year showing Final Fantasy XIII on a constant loop (so convincing, by the way, that one of my sisters did a double-take while walking past).

It's not quite a total monopoly though. A few bottles of wine after the Park Hyatt, we had our own Lost in Translation moment: falling out of a karaoke booth and stumbling past an amusement arcade full of families and young couples banging Namco's Taiko no Tatsujin drums. Which, actually, is a pretty neat way to usher in the New Year.

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