SDS 2.20 – Magnet

Guess which one I went to.

No, not the Borders one nor the one about some health thing. I think a lot of medical profession types were there that day. What I went to is of course the Anime Festival Asia X! Or AFA X cause you know, this year is 2010. I didn’t preorder tickets so I had to line up to get mine.

To see how long the line was, well just play the video. It was just around a twenty to thirty minutes wait though so it wasn’t TOO long.

I got my tickets eventually! $15 including the stage pass. $8 if I just wanted the main floor for one day. I didn’t go for the Anisong one and that one costs around $55 and upwards if I remember the base price right.

Then yesss, finally! Through the main doors!

And this is the programme for both of the days! Mind you, now I’m just gonna pic spam because there’s a lot to see and I’m sure you guys can tell what happens in the pictures.

Considering it’s the anime festival asia, you have tons more than just anime stuff. There’s travel agencies to get to Japan since the people who go to the fest are most likely to go on them especially when they have special packages to go around specific places for otakus. Heh even the travel agencies like the cosplayers to ask them for a picture with them.

Canon also sponsored photos for free! There were three dioramas which was really cool cause one of them was a Victorian setting. Good for cosplayers to pose in front and get their pictures taken! Even if you weren’t, you could still pose in front of them and get pics taken.

The Animax people got their usual voice over booth which is very fun. Looks like they’re really utilizing their sound booth for many anime or comic conventions because it must be really worth it for them to do so. A lot of people like trying it out cause you can pretend to be the voice over of some cartoon or anime characters!

Meanwhile, there was a Japanese Cool exhibition with various technology. They had a set done up so you could act in front of some 3d enabled video cameras! People got to see the effect on the tv screens by viewing through the special 3d glasses set up in front of them. Toyota had a lot of tech shown there including their latest line of Winglets. I don’t think it’s out in the market yet but it looks like a more portable version of the Segway!

Pretty fun, eh?

This was a Thailand cosplayer who came to AFA X, I think he was there to compete nonetheless, woaah look at the detail on his armour!

So anyway, lots of people bought toys, exclusive products and there were competitions there too besides the cosplay one. There were card game tournaments, a Street Fighter arcade game one amongst others.

Of course besides toys, there were props sold and nekomimi-s (cat ears usually on hairbands to wear) and other merchandise to wear like hats and masks!

There was also a charity auction for Gracehaven. That’s interesting since I haven’t seen this done in the previous conventions.

Meanwhile, there were also demos on new games like Project Diva by SEGA. The machines will probably be in the arcades sometime in the future here if they’re not already set up by now. The game stars Hatsune Miku and it’s one of those music and rhythm games.

This year besides the maid cafe (or rather this year’s theme for the maid cafe is School Days so they had a set up as if you were in a Japanese classroom), we had a butler cafe available! Lots of ladies of course queued up for this one so both cafes were pretty full with customers. No photos inside because it’s in the rules but you can check out Atelier Royale’s facebook page to see the butlers that served at the cafe. I like the cakes and the service was cute.

This was their first time serving lots of customers and I was a benevolent ojou-sama (lady). I had the urge to ring the bell to just drop a hanky or tissue and say that I had dropped it and would they pick it up for me? BUT NO, THAT WOULD BE EVIL. Hence, I was nice since they were doing their best anyway. Hahaha.

There was a Joy Sound machine too at the Brother booth! For those who don’t know, Joy Sound is like a karaoke game where you get scores for the songs you sing. However, it’s all in Japanese. This doesn’t stop it from being used at the convention cause it’s like one of the only conventions that there WILL be people around who are be able to sing in Japanese anyway. Oh yes, Brother is smart.

They have a booth there to show their sewing machines. Nowadays lots of cosplayers do buy sewing machines to do up their costumes. It’s like the number one big ticket item cosplayers will buy so heh, Brother, good show in making their brand known to people and especially to the younger set instead of the usual demographics who’d buy them! I wonder who in Brother’s marketing team thought of this.

Anyway, this one was fun. They’re singing Magnet, the NeruxGero version that is.

Besides the big name companies or shops like KKNM, Cospa etc, the artist alley was there for local and abroad artists to sell their artwork and doujins. Lots of Hetalia stuff this year. Heh, there’s the usual graffiti board too where you can draw on it. It’s fun to see the result of it at the end of the day because there are lots of good artists who contribute to it. Meanwhile, can you find the Bleach characters? Hahahaha.

Soon it was time for me to go. I didn’t stay around for the shows on the main stage though. Meanwhile, if you want to read more on the cosplay competition, read The Cosplay Chronicle‘s posts on it including the one with the performance videos!