Are pre-releases worth it?

I wish more card games in Japan did them. Only Magic really does it. I think Flesh and Blood does too, but that is more niché here.

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Oh, I didn't realise people were talking about Japan in this thread.

@PokemiiAC

I've lived and worked here for the past ten years now. I live in a rural and relatively geologically inactive region, so large earthquakes are pretty rare. There has only been one major one I experienced in all this time.

Of course, even in parts where they are a regular occurrence, and major ones can still be quite devastating, the country and its infrastructure is well tempered against them.

I think people in other countries get a pretty distorted image of Japan. The language barrier is a big part of that, along with cultural dissonance.

And people don't tend to report on the mudane. Only the most extreme or bizarre elements.

They hear about technological wonders in niché parts of Tokyo and assume the whole country is like that. My prefecture only got Starbucks the year before I arrived, and the train network still uses cash and paper tickets.

They see anime and gaming things and assume that it's everywhere and everyone's obsession.

They hear about bizarre vending machines and maid cafés and robots, and think they populate every street.

Drinks machines are literally everywhere (I bought a hot tea from a vending machine on the summit of Mt. Fuji) and you might see the odd ancient beer and tobacco vending machines in little rural villages, but for the most part businesses are about what you would expect anywhere.

They hear on the news about the worst natural disasters and assume Japan is besieged all year round with devastating earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides, etc. But the news, especially foreign news, doesn't report on every other perfectly normal day here.

They hear about the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in history class, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and think parts of Japan are irradiated wasteland. Obviously that is not true. (That might be more due to poor understanding and fear mongering surrounding radiation more than a Japan specific thing, however.)

Information on Japan abroad is repleat with exaggerations, misinformation and outright lies. Again, a large part of that is the language barrier and mistranslation. But also the fact that only the most extreme elements seep through into foreign media.

And unfortunately there seems to be a large portion of the expat community who are dissatisfied with their experiences here and tell others back home only their worst experiences, with a great deal of personal bias.

Part of the reason I wanted to live and work in Japan, other than my interest in it and my desire to immerse myself in the language, was a desire to get a real experience of the country. Not a two week holiday where you only visit the tourist spots and garner surface level impressions.

Not that I am knocking people who come here for brief holidays. Not everyone can do what I did, or would want to. And it will give you a better impression of the country than reading Twitter or Kotaku.

Japan is like any other country. Not anime paradise. Not a disaster-riddled hellscape. Not a shining utopia.

It has its benefits and its challenges. Things I love and things I wish I could be a little better.

But whatever it is, you will not get a fair and complete impression from English translations of anime, social media posts about robot restaurants, resentful blog posts about how being an assistant language teacher is the worst job in the world, or disaster reports on the news.