These are some images from a trip out to Hard Off in Chigasaki that I took last year. Just wanted to give a shout out to the smaller towns around Tokyo. You have to go pretty far out West if you visit Tokyo to find this place. It’s just an enjoyable experience to get away from the big city and to walk around a smaller neighborhood to find some retro games.
What I’ve really noticed in all my time in Japan is that the further away you get from Tokyo, the cheaper the games are. You also are less likely to find some of the rarer games. You definitely can find boxed copies of many of the popular titles, usually for a really good price.
Every Hard Off you go to will have a retro section that includes Famicom games all the way to modern releases. Saturn games are usually plenty, with 3DO, Sega CD, and stuff like that being more rare, but not impossible to find!
The older RPGs and retro games typically do not support English language, only a few, like Super Metroid, will have an English option. So seeing games like Final Fantasy 7,8, and 9 for three dollars may seem like a good deal, but would you even be able to read the text?
Just a view of an aisle showing off the Dreamcast and Saturn collection. You’ll have to fork over good money to get most fighting and side-scrolling shooter games as they are still popular in Japan.
A look at the other side of the aisle showing off a portion of the Famicom games and going into Super Famicom. They have boxed and loose carts.
Famicom Disk games are an actual thing at most Hard Off’s. It really does depend on the store and the day how many you’ll come across. Typically they are priced around the 20-50 dollars for most titles.
The funny thing about getting consoles at Hard Off are that if you keep looking, you’ll usually be able to find a boxed system for the same price you find loose systems. Not sure who would go for the loose over the boxed.
These are old images from last year, and I’ve been back to this location recently. So I know that the price of the PSVR units are dropping drastically in price now that PSVR2 is out in the wild.
Just a look at the train station and how chill this location is. Hopefully this little town and taking trips out here stays this way now that Japan is opened up again.
Ghost Ba Bomb 