Keshi Toys with MrTalida of Keshi Corner, Super Mario RPG Final Thoughts

[00:00:00] Welcome to Tokyo Game Life, a Tokyo-based video game podcast focusing on Nintendo and

[00:00:13] gaming culture in Japan's capital.

[00:00:15] Your host Mono here to bring you a slice of gaming life from Tokyo.

[00:00:20] Today's feature is about Japanese kashi toys, small rubber eraser figures that were popular

[00:00:24] in the 80s and archivist. As I just mentioned, I run the Keshe Corner Preservation Project. Thanks for joining me. I explained it a bit at the top, but you can provide way more insight than I can. I think many people are fairly unfamiliar with the concept. So what is Keshe?

[00:01:41] So these are eraser-like rubber figures.

[00:01:45] As you mentioned, Keshe means eraser and gomo means rubber.

[00:02:45] I was very intrigued and kind of discovering this whole realm of merchandise.

[00:02:50] One thing led to another and I kind of discovered other

[00:02:56] catchy figures and catchy lines is coming on and I've been to Japan a few times and each time I go there I end up at a space called the Kano Broadway. Yes, and there's a whole bunch of different kind of nerd oriented

[00:04:10] Yeah, they were predominantly distributed through gotcha upon machines, those gumball machines you drop 100 yen or 200 yen into a crack open and surprise what's inside there.

[00:04:18] Or they were distributed through blind box have boy candy combo things that I think of a name show go. Standing project is I'm looking for new things to kind of interest people and present to people I'll say oh well I should probably pick up a couple more of these ocarina of time cashier maybe some of these have obscure Zelda to Keshe Hmm, and the Zelda two ones in particular not too fond of they're very

[00:05:45] amateurly kind of sculpted I crudely sculpted and I didn't think I would often made from these solid colors, like one will be completely green or one will be completely blue. I think that's probably just easier to make, but I think that is part of its appeal. Are there multi-colored Keshe or all of them just these monochromatic figures? Or the most part, they are this monochromatic eraser-like rubber material.

[00:07:00] A few sets were released that were painted.

[00:07:04] It wasn't super common because I do think it probably it's more like this PVC, a little bit more sophisticated design. They even released them for games as recent as Breath of the Wild. And with these, they are full color. They'll have Link just wearing his green hat and his hair is brownish blonde and he's got his eyes painted in everything. They probably apply like a preformed decal. They are much more sophisticated.

[00:08:23] Let's go back to a bit of the historyann, it's Ultraman, Godzilla, SD Gundam, Super Deformed Gundam, the little chibi miniaturized Gundam,

[00:09:40] you can get a hundred of those for a penny apiece

[00:09:43] or whatever.

[00:09:44] Those were some of those that were quite popular

[00:09:45] and of course, the Nintendo ones Mario, a lot of Mario, Mega Man, Bomberman, Toyo, Toyo, and countless others. Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, or Dragon Quest. Yeah, there seems to be a ton of Nintendo figures based around

[00:11:00] Mario, Zelda, there's Pokemon ones, Kirby, Donkey Kong ever before the project. And in the process, I certainly developed some new favorites. The Poiopoyo ones, I think, are just adorable. Anytime you have these, I mean, those characters are so funny looking in the actual game, and they really are captured very well. It was a series put out by Kavaya, I believe, as a Shokugan, a blind box, several series, actually.

[00:13:27] There's a level of sophistication in material and sculpture and details that is really impressive. I think as we've gotten into kind of the modern era, the thousand and beyond,

[00:13:31] there's still a lot of joy to be found with these new figures. Again, they're more like PVC figures.

[00:13:36] But what I've found is that the manufacturing process is so sophisticated now that it's almost

[00:13:43] like the game companies can hand off that high-poly model of the actual character to

[00:14:45] released in a blind box that had just the figures, and maybe like a little ID card for the characters

[00:14:47] since they're artwork.

[00:14:49] And then they separately Bandai released a separate run

[00:14:53] a few where I wanna say maybe it's more like 10 characters

[00:14:56] for this, but they were paired with a play set,

[00:15:00] a little miniaturized play set,

[00:15:01] the game world in Mario RPG is separated

[00:15:03] into like five different zones.

[00:15:05] And so they released these five different areas, and they list them $1,500. It's never going to happen. Let's talk about your Keshe Preservation Project, Keshe Corner. What's the goal of the project and how did it come about in the first place? Yeah, so Keshe Corner is my attempt to, after preserve the Keshe Experience,

[00:16:20] this aspect of the games that starting to become more and more feasible for people to preserve things like that. I myself use a dental scanner. It's meant to scan you teeth and dentures and that sort of thing

[00:17:41] to create accurate models of inside blitz of uploading these around the launch of the remake, a few people kind of reaching out and being kind of surprised by these toys and, flip him upside down so the scanner can see his feet. That's the most kind of naive or optimistic type of scan. If you're really lucky, that will be enough. You'll have gotten

[00:20:24] every facet of the figure. More often than not figures. But that was very tedious. I thought I'd just not produce anything fast enough to keep the upload spent on a good day 15 to 20 minutes on a single scan. A bad day with one of these problem scans it can take up to two hours. Well, yeah, I did not expect a dental scanner to enter 3D program, but a 3D skeleton inside them and animate little simple motions, which is pretty fun and exciting, sometimes very silly. I've also done things where I've digitally painted them.

[00:24:22] Instead of printing it out and physically painting it,

[00:24:24] I will paint it in the computer,

[00:24:26] just to see, well, if it were a painted figure, So they're they're listening for five hours or more. So it would be really wonderful to stumble upon that in Nakhana Broadway sometime, but those people know what they have as well. So yeah, probably not going to happen. I'm actually missing one or two Mario RPG figures. I mentioned that there were like 20 some odd figures and then another maybe 10 for this playset version.

[00:26:46] top tier series that get these. You'll see new figures from Mario or for Zelda. I just don't feel like we see it too much beyond that. I think it would be fun to just have a throwback to these

[00:26:51] sorts of products in general. I think this one I'm trying to say for modern games,

[00:26:56] something that's hand sculpted would be very cool. And just with all the inaccuracies or

[00:27:02] wonkiness that comes with that, I think it will be a breath of fresh air. and upon release and when I finally got my hands on the title via my good friend Mr. ZSNES, I only played maybe about an hour or so. It's mostly a completely new experience for me. And I'm happy to report that I loved the game. It was a delightful adventure from start to finish. Though I don't have nostalgia for this specific game, I did get hit pretty hard with nostalgia

[00:29:40] for this type of game and the classic era of JRPGs. A lot of people have said that the game is hammer, which has a completely different timing, and then you also get a shell, which also has different timing. All characters kind of cycle through these different weapons with new timing mechanics, which helps battles stay fun all the way to the end. Plus, there are triple attacks where you can do a super move, there's fun items to use, like one that summons Yoshi, each character has a very specific role in the battle thanks

[00:31:01] to their unique special attacks.

[00:31:03] I just never got bored of doing battles. episode of an anime, but I think this game does an even better job of tying the town's unique story in with the larger one. In Dragon Quest, it often does feel like, okay, a new town back to square one, I gotta meet like five new people and then listen to them prattle on until I go to the boss and then rinse and repeat. The second you enter a town in Super Mario RPG, you get its deal.

[00:32:22] You understand that the Mushroom Kingdom is prosperous.

[00:32:24] You know Moleville is a guide for some. But part of the fun of JRPGs is being amazed at just how much fun stuff the game is hiding from you, and when you do find it, you get that sense of satisfaction. You feel like you are getting one up on the game when you get that secret weapon from Mario after uncovering a secret.

[00:33:42] Super Mario RPG is also filled with dungeons and puzzles, something a lot of elements of the genre, that doesn't mean they just took them out of the game. Instead, they adapted these classic JRPG ideas into new ones. And there was a bunch of fun one-off ideas as well, like having to ride a Yoshi to talk to other Yoshi? They could've just had you talk to Yoshi's, but the devs went the extra mile to make you feel more authentic and memorable.

[00:35:01] The game is fairly short for a JRPG.

[00:35:03] I wrote credits after about 13 hours and after a ton of cool places, and the story while basic. Hey, it had a satisfying conclusion, and it was filled with a lot of fun moments. Isn't that what we want from a JRPG?

[00:36:21] I honestly wouldn't mind more from the game, let's say an extra 5 hours of content, whether

[00:36:25] it means more towns or dungeons or whatever. all the weapons. Is this some sort of meta commentary on Mario not needing weapons? Or pushing against the concept of a JRPG needing your typical fantasy armory like swords and spears? I suppose Square owns all the original characters, which is why we haven't seen them, but I would love to see them appear in more games. Can't they just do like a handshake deal? No one is making money off of Boshi, when they should be bringing in

[00:37:42] millions of dollars each year through Boshi merch tournaments to watch, and at night there are live concerts.

[00:39:00] Last year had Deep Cut from Splatoon 3, and this year they returned, along with an orchestrated

[00:39:04] Zelda concert. Pokemon centers in Japan now have Hyper Beam themed merch. This includes merch featuring art of Pokemon using the iconic Supermove Hyper Beam, or Hakkai Colson, as it's known in Japanese. This translates to Destruction Beam, so they did soften it a bit for the localization. Dragonite, Snowlax, Poragon, Gyarados, Eredacto, and Taurus are featured, which I would say are fairly iconic Hyper Beam users.

[00:40:22] Who's the most iconic one though?

[00:40:24] I think a lot of people slapped Hyper Beam onto Mewtwo back in the day, Most Gemini are now on Nintendo Switch Online in Japan. What took so long for GoldenEye? Well, it and Jeff course Gemini, called Star Twins in Japan, are rated Cerozi AKA 18+, and Nintendo has released a special Nintendo 64 18 plus NSO app in Japan to house these two fiendish titles. Will there be more added? I'm never really familiar with the Cerozi rankings for other Nintendo 64 games.

[00:41:43] I'm sure they exist, but will sky, Instagram, just search for Tokyo Game Life, or find the links in the podcast description. If you liked the podcast, be sure to share it with your friends and on social media. If there's anything you want me to talk about or cover, don't be shy, just message me on

[00:43:00] Twitter.

[00:43:01] The next episode will be on December 17th.

[00:43:03] It'll be a Game of the Year episode, so get hyped.

[00:43:06] See you next time.