Let's you and I go on adventure. An adventure called Anime Expo, the largest anime convention in North America. It started a few days ago and ended a few days ago on the birth of our nation's birthday. Some might find it funny to celebrate anime of the Fourth of July and it is. It's really funny to be watching anime and having a BBQ. Still, for many when you think of the summer and the fourth of July you think of anime, you think of anime girls and giant robots and of course, Anime Expo.
I"ll be covering the big bad, South Hall, it housed all the big exhibits and hada hell of a lot of foot traffic. It's the main reason many go to AX. Maybe to grab special merch you can only buy online at crazy prices. It's alSO where you can run quests and see some fun sights promoting animes and different toy companies.
I started my first day in the main hall hearing a powering up contest like the one I created for
Q Pop's Dragon Ball Z art show, except this was being done by Toei's booth (cough)( stole it from me ) with the voice of Goku,
Sean Schemmel hosting it. I knew it was at AX as I heard a roar of a male fan and the whimper of a female fan givingup, too embarrassed to finish growling like Goku!
Toei's booth had some fun photo ops with Goku and Vegeta statues.
They also show some Di-di-Digimon love with puppets of the original digital monsters.
Not too far from them was GungHo's new game Ninjala. Fans ate up getting to win big blow-up sticks by coming first place on four vs four matches. I found the game kind of boring, but I wasn't the best at the controls. In the game, you had to blow a bubble and the bigger your bubble at the time of the creation of your weapon the bigger your whacking stick got.
Strange ninja game with some great scwhag to win.
J-List made me laugh with it's new Moe Booster drink which I was told taste a little bit better that Red Bull. They weren't selling as much as the normally due, but I did see them on the last day, so they might have sold out a lot of stuff...except that drink.
Not far at whatever Mighty Fine calls itself now (For Fan By Fans) the were selling cans of collectible pugs, which were kind of cute.
In the lobby outside of South Hall there were few booths offering chances at strange games to try in VR and photo ops. On and of course hundreds of cosplayers
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| Just outside the main hall |
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| The slow wait of getting in at the start |
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| Outside the main hall in the food truck alley |
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| Wow, they actually served Ramen this year |
As per every year there was tone of merch, like the the plush tail from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, but by Sunday some place were low on their goods. Bushiroad even sold out.
Dragon Ball Super may have ended in Japan, but we've got at least another year of episodes to watch. Here's some of the goods we saw for Dragon Ball around AX including figures that look like they came right out of the anime.
I saw some fun booth designs from Pony Canyon and Kotobukiya. Yes, you could pretend to have little girls cut off your head.
The XSEED x Marvelous booth had a behind-the-curtain demo of Senran Kagura Burst Remastered where you strike the clothes off big boobed girls and play as one. You"ll get those figures below if you get the special preorder the game. Also, whi knew the were working on Gungrave VR?
NIS America x SNK had a you questing for prizes again this year and promoted the silly new fighter of SNK Heroines Tag Team Frenzy, coming out September 7th. You"ll team up with other ladies in silly costumes to take down other sill costume gals. It looks like a lot of fun. It's kind of sad, but it looks like they haven't licensed any new anime since 2016. Though they didn't dub, they weren't bad at putting out really great editions of entire series, I still really love my Arakawa Under the Bridge Season 1 and 2 special editions.
Some cool art for Evangelion over at the Animate booth.
Gotta love the NERV athletic dept Ts.
They were selling the Sailor Moon Bra, which is just to nice.
Had to end with some good ol' Pop Team Epic photo shoots. You'd get a free mask of the shorter one if you took a photo there.
