You can’t buy a ticket to the Mushroom Kingdom, and there’s sadly no package holiday I know of that will whisk you away for a couple of golden weeks in the kingdom of Ivalice. You can, however, take a train to one of gaming’s great locations – although it’s hardly the most fantastical of places.
45 minutes up from Tokyo’s Shinagawa station on the Keikyu line is Yokosuka, one of the Kanagawa prefecture’s more unremarkable cities. It’s just beyond the point where the clutter of Tokyo thins, and just before the pastoral countryside comes into focus; an industrial hub, its shores are consumed by a US naval base, its outskirts hemmed in by factories while its centre is a world of humdrum shopping.
There are malls – there are of malls – but they’re not the kind of sparkling towers of commercialism that you’ll find in Shinjuku. They’re grubbier, more run down and crowded by members of the US Navy whittling through their shore leave. They’re the kinds of buildings that are visibly bored – all sullen, sagging concrete and featureless, clinical walkways.