For the first time since August of 2019 before Covid froze the world over, or atleast Japanese tourism, I have returned to the promised land of Akihabara. Much has changed, some has stayed the same and we will be exploring the new areas of Akihabara, as well as several others like Shinjuku and Shibuya in the coming days.

Arriving to Narita around 3pm Japan standard time, I was greeting with an absolute flood of tourists also entering the country, now to be fair, I have not particularly iculary done a April trip over here in the past, so its possible that this is just how April is. I figured the tourism would be in a dry spell between Cherry Blossoms and the upcoming Golden Week in May. The immigration line at Narita was easily the longest I have ever seen, and this is even with the expedited immigration process that Japan introduced.

I would not get to my hotel, The JR East METS Akihabara, until around 6:15pm, and I was mostly a zombie, a hungry zombie as someone at ANA needs to look up the word Food in a dictionary, cause the stuff that was served, I wouldn’t call food. Though atleast I did grab my traditional Chili’s at Ohare Airport.

The JR Mets opened in the Fall of 2019, and I had booked here back in March of 2020 and well we all know what happened around that same time, so I was hyped to finally get here. The reviews have been stellar and the location simply can not be beat if you are in Akiba and expect to spend a lot of time around the Akiba Strip. Expect a full hotel review later, safe to say though I am impressed with everything so far.

Managing to gather up a small bit of energy, I shuffled straight down to Pepper Lunch, the menu has changed a small bit since my last visit, but the core concept remains the same, cooking beef on a super heated cast iron plate.

Pepper Lunch granted me a bit of a second wind so I set doing some basic exploring and scouting before hitting up the arcades later on. A lot of stores have come and gone, and some new ones have taken their place. Same with Arcades. I am extremely excited for tomorrow and having a full day to explore.

After a bit of exploring, I had to get into some Arcade actions, full reviews coming later in the trip ofcourse. But it was good to see the Arcade seen having a bit of a rebound. Initial D Arcade is crazy popular at the moment, several places had up to 12 machines, and they were all full. Apparently Season 2 released recently? I’ll have to look into that more later, though I did get a few rounds in. It seems as if Game Nest in Las Vegas does not sync their data to the main servers or something as I needed to start from scratch. However… I did get a pretty cool bonus for having D Zero (the previous version) save data on my Aime… so thats nice I guess, I only played a bit of D Arcade, as it took awhile find an open machine.

D is a fun as I remember it being, and this Version is pretty much perfect, Very Accessible with a Gated Shifter and supporting 4 player battles and multiple modes to play in. I plan to have some good sessions with D in the coming days. One thing I did notice, Wangan is pretty non existent tant, where back in the day, it was the opposite, so I’m curious to see how Namco Bandai responds.

As always, I had to go back to the old standby Wonderland Wars, there was a major national event ending today, and I did not want to join the event considering I’m only 3.5 years rusty I was also glad to see the game still supported, it doesn’t have the presence of newer games for sure, but considering its nearing its 10th! Anniversary which is pretty much unheard of for an Arcade game, maybe we will get a sequel.

Heading back to call it a night, as I’m writing this my second wind has worn off, and I pretty much want to bury myself in pillows. Coincidentally I saw this “Chill Out Relaxation Drink” It may relax you, but it tastes pretty funky, and the after taste is 100% Pez.

Thats pretty much a wrap for today, as I continue to Chill out and plan tomorrow.