Throwing all my money away on merchandise once again, we visited the Bam Bam Game Monster store in Diver City, Tokyo, next to the Gundam.

It is without a doubt that the people behind this shop are big fans of the SNK IP, going as far as to make pixelated paints of their sculpts, which are based on the Fatal Fury sprites, making a huge bet on the retro appeal… and that these fans actually have money. The shop was fully kitted out in SNK gear, situated quite well next to an escalator, so a good amount of eyes would notice it, on their way to shop for more household brands. And that of course is an issue, there are no kids running around in this store or anywhere near it. Isla and Shun’Ei have a long way to go, if they did manage to bring in the younger crowd, and it will be too late for this shop, and the kids would certainly not be able to afford anything, bar the gacha capsule machine, but even that was still aimed at KOF98 fans.

So I bumped into this guy… for some reason I felt a very tense atmosphere.

Then, the world being as small as it is, I bumped into Kyo_kanon and Luna Yagami!  We then proceeded to fight over who would be the most annoying foreigner buying the most merchandise.

I did have an inconspicious video touring the store but as luck would have it, somehow it got corrupted.  Mind you, we still have some great photos of Luna’s tattoos, like, wow, that’s so awesome!!

And that’s not all!

Check out the fingernail artwork!! Such dedication!!!!

Lots of SNK staff and voice actors came to visit the store and sign artworks, including Bari, Ogura and and (edit: to be updated).

Eh, I also met the King of Fighters but I think he was more interested in a photo-op than an actual fight, typical Kyo. So, BamBam worked closely with figure producers King of Collectors ’24 so you could see the limited colour variants of Geese, Terry and Mai. They are going to be crazy valuable in the future.

OSAKA

So if splashing the cash wasn’t enough in Tokyo (prizes of which we gave away), we also visited Osaka, and on our way to visit SNK and the Esaka bridge, we popped into the Osaka branch which had finished the SNK campaign and moved onto Street Fighter, but still had the merch on the shelves.

Believe it or not, I have a soft spot for the Alpha series, and that game got rinsed, whereas I didn’t play Third Strike till many years after release.

Yeah, he’s short. I really liked these displays, which took up space that could be used to sell products, but gave fans a chance to take some photos to post on their social media.

So if you happen to be dropping by the store, they might have some stock remaining, but I bought up most of the key rings! The soft toy market seems quite competitive as there are a few different iterations to buy and while these are nice, the iijan releases are my favourite.

I still can’t fathom the financial risk undertaken by Bambam to open these pop up stores, the products are high quality but perhaps out of reach for the average fan, with high prices. As these are temporary sales, perhaps we will see the items quadruple in price in a few years, but that won’t help the store owners. Well, hopefully they broke even. Next, we’ll visit SNK’s headquarters.