Day 0 at WCS2012

Hi everyone, here is DSummon reporting in at the end of a very long day 1! It has been a pretty long day today what with my plane ride then heading out around Tokyo the entire day! As usual, please click read on to check out the info.

On a seperate note, FYI for everyone for everyone, there is supposed to be a live streaming for various feature matches of the tournament for both days! Interested japanese readers can check out the info here,if you are just lazy and want to go straight to watch the videos, its a ustream link. (You will have to get the timings from the website though)

Just 1 last shot that I didnt get to update previous, this is of all the people who were at the airport. I am with Wesley Seek, the Singapore representative and those are all the people who came to send him off. Plane ride was ok, though I dont really sleep well on planes so I ended up with only about 2 hours of rest.

Just in case everyone doesnt know who is taking part in this year's program, I would recommend you to check out Akira's Road of the King blog to see who are all the players who qualified from their individual countries and the various decks they qualified with.

So this is our ticket to travel from the airport to the hotel. We had to pay for our own train ride down since we came 1 day early. Pretty expensive ride which comes up to about SGD$37. Honestly doesnt really make sense to me why they couldnt just pick us up, since several players from USA and Europe were coming in 1 day early too. We even met the tour rep in the airport! Problem is our name was on their list so they couldnt take us...

Customary drink of champions! (Sparkling version! Though i prefer the normal version.)

So after a 70 minute train ride with us catching up on sleep, we arrived at our hotel, the Shinagawa Prince Hotel. I must say it is really quite convenient since it is just a 5 minute walk from the train station. The Shinagawa train station is also on the Yamanote main circle line so it easily links up to other major spots, especially with holy land Akihabara being a direct ride 15 mins away

So there was a YGO counter at the hotel, where we received a badge to wear along with the updated schedule. However noticed that somehow our TCG friends had their checkin being settled for them which was really a nice touch. I was somehow made the contact point and checkin IC for the asia players so I had to handle it myself lol.

Heres my interpreter badge, and Wesley's representative badge. Nice touch with the national flag, though i really think they should have printed the names for easy recognition. (Yes, thats the Singapore flag in the top right corner which our TCG friends wont know, you see my point?) Further more it was a pretty flimsy piece of credit card size paper printed into a tag which we can wear so honestly felt just abit cheapo

Anyway since checkin was at 2pm onwards and we had arrived at the hotel with lots of time to kill, we decided to head out according to my original plans. Germany rep Joshua Schmidt with last year's Germany rep Michel Gruner (who accompanied him), Spain rep Angel Matas and Malaysia rep Tan Sung Lee decided to join us since I obviously had some kinda idea where I was gonna go and Michel and Sung Lee remembered I could speak some Japanese lol.

First stop, Ameyoko at Ueno! Readers might remember that I came here last year with Baha and friends. I made this my first stop since I wanted to go grab some road side food and it is quite close to Akihabara anyway.

Checked out the arcade, they had a new Square Enix online game which featured some Final Fantasy elements which seemed pretty cool. Some of the reps also bought the Dragonball can drink hoping to get the Kame can drink, though they sadly got other stuff. All of them were pretty amused when I showed them the table flipping game (link to old?) LOL. So we basically just walked around and got some snacks and they got a look around before we headed off.

Heres we are at Kaminarimon! After i gave a brief explanation of the various Japanese prayer culture for cleansing and removing bad luck, everyone seemed quite enthusiastic at doing some cleansing themselves. Above is a quick photo of everyone washing themselves lol.

After the cleansing session, everyone tried to check out their fortunes. Heres a quick list of everyone's fortunes.

Bad Fortune – Malaysia, Spain and Germany reps

Regular Fortune – Me and Singapore rep

Good Fortune – Michel Gruner

Somehow the person who got the best fortune is the one who needed it the least lol. Hopefully regular fortune is good enough for Singapore this time in WCS.

Finally after going around the shrine, time for some Akihabara action! First stop of course was me and Baha's favourite Mochi shop. It still as good and yummy as before with everyone enjoying themselves.

YGO scene was of course still going strong in Akihabara lol. I tried to show everyone to the various places in Akihabara such as rental case stores, Cospa and figurine stores too, but everyone wanted to just concentrate on the card shops lol.

We decided to have lunch in Akihabara where I offered my 2 favourite choices of japanese soba or curry. Everyone opted for curry so where else but on to my favourite Go Go Curry! Everyone agreed that it was really nice and they wouldnt mind coming again if they come to Akihabara in the future.

In the end I felt abit bad though, since the TCG players with us did not have as much things to see, since TCG cards sold in Japan are obviously at exorbitant prices and they wont buy OCG cards since they cant use them, so its basically a tour for them, while us OCG players knocked ourselves out buying stuff. Eventually think they got abit tired since they didnt have as much stuff to see. Either way we headed back to the hotel to handle our checkin at about 7pm.

After checking in, I was finally tired so I slept about an hour while Sung Lee came to our room and did deck testing with Wesley till I woke up and joined in the discussion. On an extra note, it was very weird this time round, since the asia players had to submit our decklist in by 31 July, even though the tournament policy document stated the usual submission over the welcome dinner. Apparently this was requested by the Japanese Konami side which is weird but really pretty unfair but not much of a choice about it...

Finally hungry at 9pm, the 3 of us hit the streets to find food. As luck would have it, we actually found an honest to goodness roadside ramen stall, wow! Even I havent seen one of these over my last few years. All of us thoroughly enjoyed the Cha Siu ramen going for 850 yen. (Sorry no photos of the ramen since all of us basically slurped it all up)After dinner we headed off to walk off our food to the local cinema nearby to check on what was showing. There was a cool billboard showing the upcoming Resident Evil movie (Name in Japan is Bio Hazard), along with posters of the latest Pokemon movie that just started showing last week, the Doreamon movie coming next month and even info on a IRL version of Rurouni Kenshin (USA anime and manga lovers will know it better as Samurai X) showing next month. Real good stuff here, though sadly I wont really have time to catch a movie in Japan this time round.

Tired out but satisfied, we headed back to our hotel... Stupidly though, their room lan does not use the typical ethernet cables, while their room wifi apparently only works using a router terminal which you have to rent from their counter... Which was all rented out! Poor me was forced to type this all out in my room before heading downstairs to the internet terminals available for rental at a crazy 10 mins for 100 yen, zzz. Ah well, hope I have better luck with the router tomorrow. Meanwhile I'm off to bed, see you tomorrow!
(Finished finally at 2am Japan time, totally tired out, especially since I just heard from Michel that there WAS the wifi code with no crazy terminal and it was just the old staff who gave wrong info, sigh. 500 yen wasted on struggling using the hotel computer wihtin 50mins when I could be doing this slowly on my Macbook for 24 hours)

PS: Not going to do my usual hotel room review this time round even though I'm in Japan, since its pretty much a boring standard Western style room with nothing interesting...