This article was originally published on October 3, 2025 - read the full issue

By Wes Fenlon

"TGS kind of fell apart for a few years there," admits veteran indie developer Jake Kazdal as we stand in front of a statue of Final Fantasy's Fat Chocobo. Even though it's 15 minutes from closing time on one of Tokyo Game Show's business days, attendees are crowding around to take photos in front of TGS's portliest bird, just like they are the yokai schoolgirl twisting her body into freaky poses in front of Konami's towering Silent Hill F booth. Over at Sega's, Sonic and Shadow mascots are graciously sharing space with CrossWorlds guest racer Mega Man.

It's the perfect crossover for a fan-bait TGS photo op. Looking at the bigger picture, though, the entire convention floor, which covers more than ten football pitches end-to-end, feels like a team-up for the Japanese game industry's biggest names, with enormous booths from Capcom, Bandai Namco and PlayStation never far out of view.

If you'd formed an impression from afar that Japan's answer to E3 and Gamescom was long past its glory days, having failed to recover from the years in which the region struggled to adapt to the growing budgets and demands of the increasingly global industry, well, you might not have been wrong even a few years ago. In 2025, however, Tokyo Game Show is jubilantly alive.

"The PS3 era is famous for Japan having struggles with new tech, new engines," says Kazdal. "There were a couple years where [TGS] was just mobile games from other countries, and the Japanese stuff was getting smaller and smaller. It condensed down to a shadow of its former self. But I come every year, and over these last couple years it's been getting a bit bigger – it's got a bit of pop in its step back. I'm talking to a lot of friends who are old-timers now, and we're like, 'Wow, TGS has the energy of the old TGS again.' I'm so happy to see it come back."

Based in Kyoto with his indie studio 17-Bit, Kazdal's been coming to the Tokyo Game Show since he joined Sega in 1999 as an artist on Space Channel 5 and Rez. At his first TGS he barely spoke Japanese – a bit more of a problem back then, when Rez creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi sent him out on the show floor to demo the game. TGS was very much by the Japanese industry, for the Japanese industry. But today it's visibly and enthusiastically international, with publishers from around the world flanking the big Japanese booths.

Microsoft paid for primo advertising spots for Fallout 76 and its "Everything is an Xbox" campaign right outside the convention centre, despite unceremoniously shuttering its award-winning Japanese studio Tango Gameworks last year. Annapurna Interactive is at TGS with a booth for the first time. Indie games, which barely had a presence in Japan a decade ago, now have their own dedicated space with the 'Selected Indie 80'. Chinese giant NetEase, which recently invested millions into a new studio led by Like A Dragon creator Toshihiro Nagoshi, splashed out on an enormous booth for Ananta. Before the show floor even opens, an hours-long queue of attendees with all-access exhibitor badges has formed to play the game, whose design ethos seems to involve throwing in everything but the kitchen sink. The free swag on offer certainly didn't hurt the game's chances of grabbing attention.

Every trade show has its share of free tchotchkes, but I've never seen one that doles them out as zealously as TGS. It makes perfect sense for a country that unashamedly embraces all things cute – a salaryman in a navy suit is just as likely to have an anime hero on his keychain as the woman sitting beside him on the train in a frilly skirt and platform boots. Between gachapon machines, pop-up cafes and new toy lines for every popular seasonal anime, merch is a cornerstone of Japanese capitalism and fandom, and TGS is weaponising that skill to highlight the appeal of the convention itself, not just the games its exhibitors are there to show off.

Compare the sober official show merch of Gamescom or the outright embarrassment of 2010s E3 to the dozen artists TGS partnered with to make wildly distinct T-shirts for the show; for the first time in my 15 years of attending these sorts of conventions, I stood in line to buy some merch. I wore it three days later on my flight home and had to stammer out a surprise thanks when the United Airlines pilot said "cool shirt" while I was boarding.

The generous exchange rate made it an easier indulgence, and TGS's upswing with international attendees surely has some correlation to the country's record-breaking tourism numbers. This year's event logged more than 260,000 visitors, a drop from last year's record-setting attendance on the two public days but a notable increase on the first two business days. Next year it's expanding to five days to help ease the crush of bodies stampeding the concrete jungle.

If there's one thing still missing for a return to Tokyo Game Show's true glory days, it's organisation around the event itself reinforcing its relevance. Instead of a unified front of announcements from the big players delivered in something like Gamescom's Opening Night Live, there's currently a disorienting mess of livestreams from Square Enix and Capcom and on and on. Even more confusing are the strangely disconnected announcements slapped with TGS branding – Microsoft, for example, revealed Forza Horizon 6, despite the game having no presence on the floor.

For years I assumed that the lack of juggernaut announcements at TGS meant the show was no longer worth attending. But it turns out the opposite is true: seeing Japanese devs thriving on their home turf is a blast, even when they aren't dropping a nonstop stream of world premieres.

This article was originally published on October 3, 2025 - read the full issue