Purikura! Print Club Fun!

While in London The Ashes and I stumbled upon a shop full of Print Club machines. In Japanese it's known as Purikura, which is really just a Japanicized version of Print Club... yeah it's really not that creative. If you've ever done those photo booths that take four pictures and print them out it's sort of like that. Well it's sort of like those photo booths on crack and pixie sticks. You have about 8 pictures taken and then you are prompted to choose your favorite six. After the selection you are given menus full of crazy, uber-cute Japanese clip art in order to decorate the pictures. Using the pens and touchscreens you pick what you want and where to put it. All the while there's peppy music, colorful designs and a sugary female Japanese voice prompting you to do... well I'm not sure. I'd only read about them online before, so it was pure luck we came across the shop.

It was one of our days in London and we were having fun exploring near Covent Garden when we happened by a shop full of "kawaii" imports. Browsing around I noticed some rather large machines in the back of the shop and upon closer inspection we saw they were Purikura machines. "What the hell, why not?" we decided and gave it a shot. Getting in the booth we were met with... Japanese, naturally. So we asked the employees for help figuring them out. Here's the thing though, they were Chinese and knew what they were doing only slightly more than we did. It was comically delightful as both us and they tried stumbling our way through the directions. Eventually we got it figured out and took our pictures. When it came time to decorate them we had some fun! There were foolish time limits which rushed us to make decisions in a language neither of us spoke, but even that added to the experience. Ridiculous pictures + uber-cute Japanese clip art + travel adrenaline + fits of giggling = FUN.

Here are a sampling of the pictures we took. The quality is poor, but only because the scanners at UMaine suck panda balls.
























































The craziest thing about these machines? One of the main developers and purveyors of this hobby in Japan is Atlus! Atlus! One of my favorite video game companies. The one that brought the likes of Odin Sphere (which I'm gonna play, fo real), Persona series, Devil Summoner and Devil Survivor.