Japan Travel Tips – What Games To Pick Up July 27, 2021

It has sure been a while, hasn’t it? Welcome back to Japan Travel Tips, where we highlight some of the best independently produced travelogs for people who may be interested in visiting Japan some day. Today’s article is going to be strictly for the gamers, but hey this is after all a gaming website.

In one of our earlier articles, I mentioned something called region locking, where an electronic entertainment device (like a game console or DVD player) will literally lock-out a piece of content (like a movie or a game) for no other reason than it was manufactured in a different region of the world than the one that the person who wanted to watch it lived in. This is a despicable anti-consumer practice and thankfully over the past few years it has slowly been phased out.

However, while companies like Sony and Microsoft no longer choose to region-lock the majority of games on their modern consoles, Nintendo has traditionally chosen not to. While most of their classic handheld games could play on any region’s handheld for the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS generations, Nintendo would not allow DSi or 3DS handhelds play games from other regions. When I posted about Pokémon Centers, I warned tourists not to consider picking up any video games or game consoles from them, as I didn’t believe they would play on alternate regions. Then, a friend of mine sent me these pictures from games he has just imported from Japan.

It turns out the Nintendo Switch does NOT region lock, and Japan has some exclusive retail games you can’t get in the US. As a penance, I have decided to post an update in the affected article and wrote this new article. So let’s get started, shall we?

While shopping in Japan, it’s always a good rule to ask yourself, what game do you see on a shelf would you expect to import? More importantly, what can’t you get in your region that you can find in Japan? YouTuber MetalJesusRocks, who has a great channel where he discusses classic and modern video games, answered that question for me. Give it a watch!