By Gaudy6523 1 year, 5 months ago
Atami, the seaside resort town, a favorite of lovers and honeymooners, is welcoming the digital age by partnering with Konami Digital Entertainment to create a resort for fans of the overwhelmingly popular Love Plus game franchise. To those unfamiliar with the game, Love Plus is described as an open-ended “communication game” where the user plays as typical high school student in a relationship with a virtual girl. “The goal,” Konami representative Kunio Ishihara told Discovery News, “is to see how good you can be to her [the virtual girlfriend] and to build a relationship.” Not too different from your typical dating sim, right? This is where Atami comes in.
The latest version of Love Plus features a “field trip” option and thanks to Atami, 2D barcodes are scattered throughout the town and when you scan it into the game, it calls up images of the ladies in the game (mandatory wardrobe change included, of course). The local Ohnoya hotel has even put barcodes in the rooms, allowing players to see their ladies in casual summer kimonos. As per the usual for Love Plus, everything is about as ridiculously innocent as imaginable; this is a DS game after all.
Just as Lucky Star put the Washinomiya Shrine on the otaku map, Atami is basking in the increased tourism that their Love Plus partnership has brought them. As of the end of the promotional campaign, more than 200 Love Plus fans have stayed in the Ohnoya hotel while more than 2,000 have visited specifically for the campaign. For a resort town that has seen its annual visitors decline some forty percent since its 1970s heyday, the entire event was a welcome reprieve.
I’m all for creative means of boosting the economy during an economic slump, so I find this story rather amusing. Japan has often vilified the otaku sub-culture as a blight on society and here we have a quaint seaside town, blatantly taking advantage of their pocketbooks. Of course, with people like Sal 9000 so willing to publicize his dedication to a few pixels on a screen, I’m slightly disturbed as well.
With that being said, Miku is ‘mai wai-fu!’
Source: Discovery News via Mashable
Love Plus, Lucky Star
SparkNorkx
4 months, 1 week agoCool back then.