
Ever wonder what happens when neither you nor the crane game is the outright winner?
UFO catchers are easily the most aggravating machines you’ll find in a Japanese arcade. Behind their glass walls, tantalizing prizes wait for you to pluck them up with the mechanical claw, but even if you manage to grab ahold of your target, you might have to contend with diabolical last-second barriers and other unforeseen obstacles to claiming your booty of anime goodies or snack foods.
But apparently some UFO catcher machines aren’t completely ruthless in their competitive spirit. Japanese Twitter user Recchi (@zxcvbnm37458) recently stepped into an arcade where a figure of Toru Oikawa, one of the high school volleyball players from sports anime Haikyu!! caught his eye.
Figuring he’d try his luck, Recchi dropped his coins into the machine, grabbed the controls, and made his play.
His positioning may not have been spot-on, but as the claw pinched closed and began to rise it still managed to grip Toru. At this point, Recchi was probably thinking he was going to be taking home a new figure to decorate his room with.
He was only partly right.
UFOキャッチャーの奇跡w pic.twitter.com/TITgvXsGNm
— remove_move (@remove_move) February 15, 2016
Instead of picking up the entire figure, the claw popped Toru’s head clean off his shoulders. It then dutifully dropped the disembodied portion of the star of the Aoba Josai High School volleyball team into the prize redemption slot.
This sort of seems like cheating on the arcade operator’s part, since you could make the argument that the figure is too heavy to be properly picked up by the crane, and is therefore unsuitable as a prize to encourage customers to spend their money trying to win. But rather than get bent out of shape about how much of the figure he didn’t get, Recchi decided to use the part he had won to make a very unique keychain.
キーホルダー化 pic.twitter.com/Ft6YoRpRik
— remove_move (@remove_move) February 15, 2016
Because when life hands you severed heads, you make severed head-ade.
Source: Hamster Sokuho
Images: Twitter/@zxcvbnm37458 (edited by RocketNews24)





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