Journey to the Japanese Playstation Home

One of the nice things about the Playstation 3 is that if you’re a fan of imports, the PS3 has no region lockout, meaning that a Japanese PS3 game plays in a US PS3 just fine. You can also, with a little Google searching and a few minutes worth of setup time, set up your own Japanese Playstation Network account, which allows you access to the Playstation Store to try out the latest Japanese demos available, or even download entire games if you wish. One thing I’d wanted to try for a while was visiting the Japanese version of Playstation Home (Home is basically a virtual space for players to meet and waste time), so I downloaded it to my Japanese account and fired it up.

One thing I immediately noticed upon making my character and entering the Home space was that everything naturally loaded much slower; when you enter Home, all the other avatars look like ghostly mannequins until their features load. Since I was now accessing a server in Japan, it took a lot longer for everyone else to load up. Their main plaza is much larger than the US version, in terms of space. The mall, the theater, everything is spread out more. However when I visited there weren’t many people there, so it made it look strangely empty and quiet in comparison. I had a hard time finding the mall, which was in a small plain looking building, though to my disappointment the interior of the mall is identical to the US version.

The theater is where I ended up spending most of my time. The inside is very dark and at first I wasn’t sure what building I was in. I entered a room and saw the movie screens so I decided to wait around and see what was playing. It took several minutes of loading for the movie to start, once again because of the distance of the servers I’d imagine), but I was happy to find anime playing on the screen! It turned out to be an episode of Macross 7, which I’ve never watched (and from what I gather was not well-received). Though lacking subtitles, I watched it all the way through, intrigued.

Too bad you can't see what's playing on the screens

I exited the theater and ran around a bit more through the main plaza taking some pictures before leaving. Unfortunately, the in-game camera does some things that made for some lackluster souvenir photos; first, any videos playing on any screen shows up as a blank screen, so many of my pictures I look like I’m staring at a blank TV! Second, it automatically erases the screen names and chat window you’d normally see on the screen, leaving very little to show that this is in fact the Japanese Playstation Home! Oh, and I was also surprised to find that my keyboard now typed in hiragana characters instead of alphanumeric ones, so I didn’t spend much time talking (I’m sure there’s a way to type in alphabetic characters, but I haven’t figured out how to do so).

I plan on going back in there and seeing what other Home spaces are in the Japanese Home that are not in the US one, and maybe even working up the nerve to try talking to somebody in Japanese and catch some more anime in the theater. Anyone looking for a slightly foreign Home experience should Google how to set up a Japanese PSN account and comment about your experiences!