Anime Festival Asia’08 (Day1)
Aching body, headache, sleepy and dazed. That’s what I felt when I woke up that morning. I was supposed to join Silencers and a few others to queue up at the Suntec Convention Center to get the tickets but I decided to take it easy a bit and just take my time. After a light breakfast of ‘Wan Tan Noodles’ at the Albert Center Food Court next to Bugis MRT we took a bus to Suntec after meeting up with Silencers and gang. On the way he mention that the event is held at Hall 404 Error. I was afraid that we would not be able to find it but it was easy enough to find. But as we came up the escalator we saw this…
Oh…
my…
GAWD!!!!!!
There’s even a queue on the OTHER side.
When we finally got our 2 day tickets and went in the fitst thing that greeted us was…
a 1/10 scale Exia!!!
There were variuos displays the Gunpla Bakuc competition corner, the exhibitors showcase row, and even works by various local mangakas. There were so many booths selling stuff from card holders to PVC models at such great prices I had to stop myself short of using all my cash on it. Even Chuang Yi Comics, a local manga distrubutor also had a booth there too bad they had nothing that I wanted though when I was there. I heard that they had a bigger selection but it was mostly in chinese unfortunately.
The gunpla works submitted for the competition was good. So good in fact I had an itch to suddenly go assemble one. I wanted to get a VF-25F Ozma Lee Custom but due to a lack of funds I had to resist the temptation of getting one. Damn…
I did not attend the Goda Gundam designer Kunio Okawara’s talk but I heard it was interesting and that he had some brilliant powerpoint presentation slides. If only I knew what my friend meant by that. Darn it, I knew I should have made my shopping till much later.
The various product displays by figurine companies like Alter, McFarlane, Figma, Goodsmile, Revoltech and even SquareEnix just to name a few was a real crowd puller. Visitors were snapping pictures faster than you can say “Kyah~~”.
I like the lighting reflection on the Ironman.
The details on the figures are simply in lack of a better word “mind-blasting!”.
Amazingly but not surprising Odex had open up shop there and looking at how it was going it seem that the locals do support Odex in one way or another(in buying anime related merchandises). I had assume that the booth would be ignored by anime fans due to the controversies involved with them but to my surprise it was pretty packed with people. They were selling Domo-kun related items, anime t-shirts and erm… bad subtitled font anime vcd/dvds. It would also seem that they had also licensed Toradora, Casshern Sins and Code Geass to be distributed in Singapore. I just hope the Japanese companies know what their doing.
Most of the cosplayers I’ve seen are some of the best that I’ve ever seen so far. High quality costume, a fine attention to detail plus a suitable personality to fit into the character really pulls it off. I’m pretty sure they are some Malaysians there cosplaying too but it goes to show that ACG has no boundaries.
When I first saw these guys I immediately went *clickety click*. I *heart* Macross.
A friend of mine has that very same banana.
Thats more or less day 1 for me. I skipped the Mizuki(Aniki) concert that evening because I was too tired. Day 1 was okay in my professional opinion but they could have done better in getting the crowd more excited by having more of a energetic MC’s and on the spot games instead. Until day 2 of the event, I now leave you with the best cosplayer of the day…Bakucman!!! (Isn’t he just awesome?)
Just kidding.
