Tourism by Matt S.
One of the features of Tokyo Game Show over the years has been the booth ‘babes,’ or women and men that are dressed up in costume (or, often, dressed down to as little as possible) in order to manage the booths, help players get into the game demos, and hand out leaflets to promote the games.
Love them or hate them (and they’ve been banned from most western conventions, so these days their presence is a bit of a culture shock to some), it’s unlikely that they’re going away any time soon. And to be honest I rather enjoy their presence. With the rare exception of a costume that goes too far, it’s fun, rather than sleazy, and the audience plays along in the spirit of it all. In fact with a lot of the costumes these days they’re closer to hired cosplayers than anything else. I’ve not been to the show during the public days, but I imagine that the models stand out even less then, given what the cosplayers get up to.
As always I’ve pulled together a couple of galleries of the weird and wonderful booth costumes from the year’s TGS. Enjoy!
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| Atelier Firis! Koei Tecmo is in the habit now of having a cosplayer for its upcoming Atelier games. Sophie was last year. I approve of this trend. |
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| For the ladies, there was a section of TGS that focused entirely on dating games for women. In this booth male models play-acted as characters from a game. It was wildly popular. |
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| Another one! |
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| Meanwhile, over at the Sony Xperia booth with have really-real gravure models in a bath because reasons. |
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| I can only begin to imagine how hot it must actually be in those costumes. |
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| Konami had a thing where it got all the baseball team mascots together with its own baseball series mascot. That was pretty cool. And popular. |
– Matt S.
Editor-in-Chief
Find me on Twitter: @digitallydownld
