Nova’s Singapore Trip Days 4 & 5 – Anime Festival Asia ‘09

Author: NovaJinx

AFA Day One

So the first day of Anime Festival Asia was at hand and I headed over to the Suntec Convention Center at 9am. And holy shit, the queue. Thankfully I was provided with a media-pass (really big thanks to the AFA crew for it) which got me past the line of camping enthusiasts and inside the convention hall before the actual opening. Which was pretty good, because once the doors opened to the public, the whole place was swarmed within minutes and taking anything but figurine close-up pics became almost impossible.

Now as for my first impression, it was definitely “Holy crap all this stuff for sale!“. Being an industry-driven event, the AFA hall was filled with booths selling more merchandise than all the Finnish anime conventions combined. Of course, the most popular ones (Cospa, KKnM) had pretty damn long queues. To me who’s born and raised in the periferia of global anime culture the sheer amount of merchanise was pretty much mindblowing and resisting the shopping impulse was almost impossible. Good thing most booths didn’t take credit cards and the ATM was pretty far away downstairs in the Suntec mall – otherwise I’d be living in the streets by now and looking for those shady chinese organ dealers to see how much my kidneys are worth.

I heard an estimate of 50 000 attendees and I can’t really say that it’s inaccurate, there was a whole lotta crowd around in the convention hall and immediately outside it. Still, I can’t say that I noticed any problems with the public order. Many of the attendees were die-hard enthusiasts for sure but there was hardly any running, screaming, blocking hallways and other disturbances that are rather common back home in Finland, one of probably the reasons being that the Singaporean convention audience was notably older than Finnish. And I suppose Singaporeans are more used to being in a crowd and behaving themselves, considering their population density.

I had the pleasure of meeting Impz, AkaiWolf, Kljigen, rankendrake, MistaYoh and DrmChr0 – in addition to Xak, Hakuro, jinyamato, ume and Bjorn whom I had already met shortly after my arrival to SG. I spent the first AFA day shopping and hanging around with acquaintances and friends. There was just so much to see and talk about that I didn’t even really think of attending any events that were going on on the other side of the hall. I did check out the Moe Moe Kyun maid cafe, since I missed the cafe in Desucon last summer and thought I’d need to try it out at least once. Since I’ve never been to one before I don’t really have any basis for judgment but it was quite nice. The maids handled their obligatory Japanese lines very well and seemed quite enthusiastic. Oh, and the cheesecake was good too. In the end I spent around 12 hours in Suntec and I was utterly exhausted when we finally left the hall late at night. For an aftergame I went out for a couple of beers with Akai and Kljigen and got some more first-hand experience on how damn expensive alcoholic drinks are in Singapore. As a summary saturday was pretty much a blast, especially the aftergame. Aside from that one certain picture that ruined my life, damn you Akai.

And now the obligatory loot picture:

AFA Day Two

As on saturday, I decided to show up a bit before the opening. After a morning of wandering around and getting myself acquaintained with the WeissSchwarz card game I checked out the K-ON! Experience with the seiyuu cast from the show doing a live-dubbing and Q&A session. To my disappointment Mio’s seiyuu Hikasa Youko was not present (heard something about a timetable conflict issue) but the show was nevetheless quite entertaining. The questions presented to the cast were mostly rather banal but I guess that’s pretty much how it always goes. The seiyuu seemed a little bit anxious at first but nevertheless delivered a very solid, energetic and upbeat performance. Not hearing Mio was a bit of a bummer but Toyosaki Aki’s cute raspy voice was already worth standing around in the general audience area with my feet feeling like I just walked on hot charcoal. The lucky bastards with numbered seats got to take part in a raffle for four panels signed by the seiyuu. Damn me for being stingy.

After the K-ON! show I decided to do a quick check back to the hotel to drop off some stuff and while there, I checked out the WeissSchwartz decks I had bought. I noticed that each pack had a coupon and one of them had a picture of a golden bag on it. I took this with me back to the AFA, intending to find out if it meant something special. I forgot the whole thing when I was plowing my way back through the crowd but it happened to occur to me later while I was chatting with jinyamato at the card tables. He said that the golden coupon was a pretty rare get and his expression was quite worth seeing when I told him that I just got one with the very first deck I bought. I whipped out my laptop and went online to pick the prizes of my choice (big thanks to Mista and jin for advice) and the guy at Bushiroad booth arranged to have them mailed to my apartment in Finland without charging me for additional shipping.

The final hours of AFA were dominated by May’n and I checked in for the first song. The show looked pretty damn awesome and the audience was absolutely hyped, at the end calling for encore like their lives depended on it. Personally I’m not very good with loud noises and my feet were hurting like hell, so I skipped the rest of the concert and decided to save at least a bit of energy for my visit to Malaysia on monday. All in all AFA was a great experience, though it really beat the hell out of me both physically and financially. I cannot really judge it fairly as an event as it was only the second anime-related event I have ever attended and my primary goals were simply meeting people I have known on the internets since ‘07 and looking for merchandise that’s hard to find in Finland – and as far as these two are concerned, AFA was a great success to me. I really wanted to stay around til the closure of the Festival site but I could barely even stand anymore and I’d have to get up at 5am to make it to the flight to KL. To those who I might not meet again before my departure for Finland on wednesday, it was a great pleasure meeting you all and I hope to see you again next year.

Sunday’s loot:

P.S. I took a whole lotta pictures but I have quite limited options with handling them on my netbook, so I will get them online later once I get back home to Finland. Oh and I said I don’t have any figurines and I probably never will get any. Well, guess I was talking out of my ass. Say hello to Yuki:

Tags: beer, loot, singapore, tl;dr