After attending Otakon, I have to say that it was a friggin’ huge convention and was significantly bigger than the local A-Kon I’ve grown accustomed to. I’m also reminded that I have a love-hate relationship with these kinds of things. On the one hand, big cons means more vendors and more events. On the other hand there are crowds and queues for just about everything, even the bathroom at times.

The following is a short recount of my experience, followed by the real reason you’re probably here, pictures and stuff. Here’s the standard 56k disclaimer for whomever is still stuck in the internet’s dinosaur age, because it’s still sort of an obligation to say it. Rally ho then!

Friday:

This was my primary shopping day, and damn, the dealer room was incredibly huge. I can’t say about how big the entire room was, but it felt like it was as long as a football field with vendors packing the room from front to back. Spent a good 4 hours alone scouring every vendor’s wares looking at merchandise. Made some small talked with vendors about this and that, including the guys at the MangaGamer booth. The ecchi dakimakura they had were nice but pretty pricey too. Almost bought a Da Capo shirt to support them, but then I remembered I don’t like Da Capo that much so ended up passing on it.

Saw Touhou games at a couple vendors but had to pass since they were pretty expensive. ~$25 for the older games like Scarlet Devil upwards to ~$45 for the newer stuff like Mountain of Faith. Saw an old copy of Melty Blood for a reasonable price, but I don’t really care for the MB series. I was also pleasantly surprised to see Eternal Fighter Zero in the doujin game pile… for $45. Thanks but no thanks. I… ahem… Already have a “copy”. There were a couple other game vendors selling old-school games for exorbitant prices. Valkyrie Profile for $150, Ogre Battle for $100, FF7 for $80, that kinda stuff. None of those games are worth that kind of money.

Among the things I saw that was a relatively good deal was a Max Factory Kasumi for $65. You know, the one with her bending over with breasts ready to pour out of her kimono. That one. Normally I’d have bought it, but suitcase restraints proved otherwise. It was probably for the best since I’m trying to get over my past figure addiction anyway. Did yet more walking and ended up buying Kino’s Journey: The Beautiful World and AIR Memorial artbooks. Spotted the Kanon Memorial and Clannad Memorial artbooks too but figured they’d be around the next day since there were a lot of copies of both.

Also bought a Lucky Eva shirt (absolutely love it) and felt obligated to get the Otakon 09 shirt to say, “Look, I went to Otakon!!1″. Contemplated getting more novelty shirts, but I don’t exactly wear geeky shirts all that often. You know, because they produce weird stares and I don’t really like attention of any kind. Didn’t take a whole lot of pictures since I spent most of the time shopping and didn’t see a ton of great cosplayers anyway.

Saturday:

Planned to take a lot more pictures than I did. I saw a lot of good cosplayers walking in the halls but couldn’t get many opportunities to hold up traffic to take pictures.

Notable cosplayers spotted but not photographed:

-Several P4 cosplayers including a crossdressed Yosuke during “that” event
-Decent Tsukihime cosplayers, most notably a wicked Ciel
-4chan meme cosplayers like Raptor Jesus and co
-A damn good Noel Vermillion
-Your mom

Cosplayers seen but generally not photographed because I don’t need/want any more pictures of these characters/series:

-Kingdom Hearts
-Most Final Fantasy
-Guilty Gear
-Naruto
-Cowboy Bebop
-Trigun
-Bleech
-Gurren Lagann
-Desu Noto
-Team freaking Fortress, most notably the bevy of Medics (running around without Heavies no less)
-Master Chiefs
-Phoenix Wright
-Haruhis
-Gothic lolita
-Fat Kenshins
-Your mom

A list of cosplayers I’d like to see in the future:

-Hawt Kirika Yuumuras
-Anything KEY, preferably Misuzu or Kotomi
-Youmu Konpaku
-Shiki Ryogi
-Akiha Tohno
-Eve/Golden Darkness
-The K-ON gals
-Fate Testarossa
-Yukkuris
-Ein (Phantom)
-Sola

After I was done looking for cosplayers, went back to the artbook vendor to claim the Kanon and Clannad artbooks. Got the Clannad artbook, but alas the Kanon artbooks were all gone. I made a sad face and went along my way, thinking that I could just get it online anyway, but it’s more fun to buy spur of the moment merchandise at a con.

Explored the con a bit more and wound up at the ridiculously huge game room, where I spent the rest of my day at the con. I’d have to say the game room was probably as big as the vendor room, and there had to be about 80 TVs with games hooked up to them with the full gamut of genres, though fighters prevailed over all else. Watched some killer matches at SSBB, SFIV, MvC2, Guilty Gear and BlazBlue. The lines for the popular games were pretty crowded, so I opted to play the less popular games. In Last Blade 2 I actually held my own despite not remembering how to activate the specials. The fast paced fighters are all the rage, but slower fighters like LB2 have their charm too and can be more fun if you prefer to think more than rely on dial-a-combo memorization to win.

Basically spent the rest of day at the game room, and that was it for the con. Coulda, shoulda, woulda taken more pics but didn’t. Oh well. Overall, the con itself was pretty enjoyable, dare I say actually better than A-Kon, but the other things involved in the experience like air travel and staying in a hotel (and their subsequent fees), will probably keep me from returning next year. If I lived closer, I’d come back in a heartbeat though. Otakon, you were a good con, but looks like next year will be same old A-Kon again for me. I’m heavily contemplating doing a cosplay, nothing too high profile though. Something along the lines of a uniform, such as Gintama’s Shinsengumi or the Clannad male uniform for a Sunohara cosplay. Either way there’s plenty of time to decide that later.

tl:dr: Otakon was fun. Bought artbooks for Kino’s Journey, Clannad, and AIR as well as a couple t-shirts. My legs are tired. Now here are pics lolol.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Conventions.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.