I had no idea you could win crane game prizes in Japan the way my friend won this Dragon Quest Slime

This black Slime plushie had become his white whale until something I’d never experienced before happened.

A friend of mine recently visited Japan, and since he’s an avid gamer who runs a video game website, we hit up the local arcades while he was here to see what sorts of cool prizes they had in their crane games/UFO catchers. As we made the rounds, my friend got really into collecting Dragon Quest Slime plushies. For example, here he is posing with a compact keychain-strap Slime, one of several he won from the machine in the background, which, you can see, was empty by the time he was done with it.

However, during his trip one prize would become his white whale, and it was, in a bit of linguistic irony, a black Slime.

That big fella there is the Slime Dark, not to be confused with the Dark Slime, which is a separate monster within the Dragon Quest mythos. Also called the Shadow Slime in English-language versions of the games, the Slime Dark is easily distinguished from the regular Slime by its black color, but this plushie was also very, very big, measuring about 40 centimeters (15.7 inches) in diameter. It’d make a great interior accent and conversation piece for the home of anyone with cultured tastes, but there was one problem.

It refused to get in the prize redemption hole.

Time and again my friend put a coin into the machine and carefully work the controls to grab the Slime right where he wanted to, only to watch it slip out of the claw’s grasp and fall back down. He wasn’t discouraged, though. Winning at crane games is all about having patience. There’s a certain amount of random variability manufacturers are allowed in setting the grip strength, so no matter how good your technique is, an occasional dropped prize in unavoidable. Oftentimes, winning a prize is more about making incremental progress towards the drop area, then managing to hook a corner of the hole so the rest of the prize falls through too, or maybe getting the item to bounce in after slipping out of the claw right next to the opening.

However, even after about a dozen tries, my friend hadn’t made any discernible progress. Possibly due to a combination of the Slime’s shape, slickness, and weight, plus the soft pillows at the bottom of the machine, the Slime always ended up in the exact same place, falling out of the claw before establishing any sort of lateral momentum. About all it was doing was randomly rotating, which at first gave us a glimmer of hope that maybe a firmer grip could be achieved depending on whether the plushie’s point part was pointing up, down, or to the side, but nope. After each try, the Slime ended up right back where it had started.

▼ I can’t remember if this was try 1 or 12, but that makes no difference in terms of where the Slime started and ended.

Now, not everyone knows this, but at arcades in Japan you’re allowed to ask the staff to reposition the prizes inside the crane games to make it easier to win what you want. However, we hadn’t bothered asking for help, because there are basically two kinds of repositioning you can request. One is to have the prize returned to its starting position, which is useful if it’s happened to bounce or roll up against the glass or beyond the possible positions for the claw, making it impossible to grab. The other thing you can ask for is for the staff to move the prize closer to the hole so that it doesn’t have to be carried as far the drop zone or has a better chance of bouncing in.

Like I said, though, the problem we were running into was that the Slime wasn’t moving or bouncing at all, repeatedly falling directly down with a gentle thud that could be heard even outside the machine’s housing. It was already in its starting position, and getting it moved closer to the hole wasn’t going to do us any good if we couldn’t get it to budge even an inch closer after that, so there was no point in asking for help.

Still, my friend really wanted that Slime Dark, and so, rather than switch objectives and go after the Lazy Gorilla plushies in the next machine over, he made multiple trips to the change machine (shown by the arrow in the photo below) to get more 100-yen coins so he could keep chasing the Slime.

After yet another frustrating failure (probably number 15 or so), an attendant came walking up to us with a serious-looking expression on his face. “Okyaku-san,” he said in a somber tone, meaning “customer” or “sir,” in this context, followed by a long pause, and I fully expected him to regretfully inform us that we would have to move along and give other customers a chance to play on the machine, since it was clear we weren’t going to be winning the Slime Dark.

It turned out, though, that he just needed a moment to figure out how to say what he wanted to in broken English, since he wasn’t sure if we could speak Japanese or not. He wasn’t kicking us off the machine at all, and instead said…

“I…support.”

He then opened up the case and, with no prior prompting from us, moved the Slime so that it was now sitting right next to the prize drop hole.

As explained above, my friend and I were pretty sure this wasn’t going to do the trick. Still, I’d never seen the arcade staff themselves be the ones to initiate this kind of assistance. It was an extremely thoughtful gesture, especially considering that the employee had assumed there might be a language barrier between us, so I thanked him sincerely, and when he realized we could communicate with each other in his native language, he said “I can see that your friend has been trying really hard to win it. Good luck!”

Unfortunately, though, just like we’d feared, repositioning the Slime like this didn’t end up being any help at all. Instead of dropping straight down into the center of the machine, it was now dropping straight down right next to, but still not into, the prize hole. Figuring this was a sign that luck just wasn’t on our side today, it looked like my friend was finally almost ready to give up, but it turned out we didn’t need luck on our side when we had our new ally.

Having kept an eye on how we were doing after the repositioning, the attendant came over once again, this time too with no prompting or pleading from us, and opened up the case again. This time he pulled a second Slime off the rack and put one right up next to the prize drop. He then stacked the second Slime on top of that one, sliding it to the left so that almost half of it was over the hole. The second Slime actually fell into the hole the first two times he did this, as he slowly edged it back to the right so that it was at the last possible millimeter before it would tumble in. Then he closed the case back up and told us to aim the claw at the bottom Slime so that as the claw lifted it up it would flip the top Slime into the hole.

And that is how my friend finally won his Slime Dark.

Like I said, I’ve honestly never seen the arcade staff be the ones to propose repositioning the prize, let alone have them do it twice, with the second time being in a way that all but guarantees the player will get it to drop. Thinking about it, it really is a win-win, as there’s a benefit for the arcade too.

While crane game players are braced for a certain number of failures, they obviously don’t want to feel like there’s no hope at all of winning. Seeing one customer making repeated trips back and forth between the change machine and crane game with no prizes to show for it is probably discouraging for other customers too, making them less likely to drop a coin into a machine of their own and try their luck. From the arcade’s perspective, after a certain point the optics of a happy customer who’s won a prize, and as a result also ending the disheartening scene of someone continuing to lose, are going to be worth more than squeezing a few extra yen out of a single customer.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if this arcade, and possibly others too, have a rule where management says that once a customer’s losses start to get too visible, the staff should start making moves to try to get them to win what they’re after and move along. Or maybe we just lucked out and happened to be at the arcade when their kindest, most proactive attendant was on duty. Either way, my friend had a Slime Dark in his luggage as he flew back to the U.S. and while it’s important to remember that UFO catchers are not vending machines, there just may be a point where, in the arcade’s eyes, you’ve paid enough to deserve a prize.

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