Taito Station – Shinjuku East

Floors and floors of arcade fun. This place along with other taito stations can get really crowded sometime.
There are actually seats and benches around, but it’s not for resting, it’s for waiting to be next to play a game. Everything is so well thought out and planned.
Be careful with the claw machines. Many of them appear to be so easy and the prize is about fall right now, but it’ll take many tries before you’ll even get the prize. Definitely fun for all ages and worth a visit, since there are so many games.

These places are all over Tokyo! I mean, not as much as the Pachinko Casinos, but pretty close.
On our last day in Tokyo, we were just doing some wandering around before we had to head to the station to take the NEX back to Narita when we finally decided just to walk on in and take a look around.
It’s a different little set up to these places. It’s basically a bunch of these claw machines all set up with a wide variety of prizes in each one. Except they are not the crane machines we think of back here in America. These claws don’t exactly grab your desired item and drop it down the cute to you. These cranes do that very briefly. The startegy is to get the crane to move the item towards the opening and knock it to an area where it will fall through strategically placed sticks blocking the opening. I hope that makes sense. It is much tougher thn it both sounds and appears!
Each machine is programmed for 100 yen ($ 0.84 USD) per turn or you can get 6 turns for 500 yen ($ 4.21 USD).
We actually won a handful of small plushes, which made for cool little souvenirs, but all the higher price items just ripped the Yen right out of my hands! Grrrrrr
Another interesting tidbit: They have a drum version of «Guitar Hero» here! lol These two teenagers were just banging away at those machines!
It was a funny, cheesy little thing to check out while we were here… I just don’t quite get why they are obviously so popular out here.
Still, it was mildly amusing… so.
3 stars.
A-​OK.

Extremely crowded and cramped. They’ve crammed so many games in here that there’s barely room to pass through, and people attempting to squeeze by will inevitably knock into you. Not the best environment for gaming.
The place is also decidedly grungy, and the pachinko machines on one of the middle floors means cigarette smoke seeps to every level.
Granted there’s a large selection of games, and each floor is pretty much coherently themed around machine genre. Still, navigating around here is a real pain and there are plenty of other arcades with better atmospheres.

This review is strictly about the ground floor. So, the ground floor has various types of claw machines were you can get plushies, towels, and animated figures. I noticed that you can ask one of the staffs to come over to put the items you want closer to the drop box. They are more than gladly to help you. When you are getting close and still having trouble getting it, you can call one of the staffs over and they will move it closer to the edge and tell you were to put the claw so you can get the prize.

I visited the Taito Game station with Takuya. At the ground floor you can find different machines with Animefigures inside. You have to try to catch them out of that machine but it’s very hard. We have wasted too much money on trying to get them haha. Also there is one videogame to play where you have to hit drums in the correct rythm. Looked cool but we had no money anymore. It’s a very loud place, because of the played music so you better keep it in mind. In the 5^th floor (hope I’m correct) you can find the Purikura machines. Sticker pictures time! We took our lovely photos in one of the many sticker print machines there and decorated them cute. In the 6^th floor is a bar or casino something like that, and suddenly drunk people appeard and one woman fell into our photo cabin. That was very bad!!! So take care if you visit there. there are often drunk people coming and can’t walk straight anymore. We have visited there circa 6 times so I know what I talk about. Also not so good is that the elevator smells very strong, people might have smoked inside the elevator often. Anyway the Game station is definately worth to visit! I will go there again for taking sticker photos.