Warning! The following post only contains thoughts of the author, and not much of actual coverage.
If you’re looking for proper coverage, you could head over to Fabrice Requin’s blog. He’s done several great posts on the convention. Otherwise, read on.
The reason I’m not going to do a proper event coverage post myself is because I’ve already attended 3 times. Say what you wish, but anything gets old after you’ve done it for a while.
(also laziness)
Now for my 2 cents.
First off, I’m not too sure how it happened, but they managed to screw up the infamous first-day queue. Again.
It may have been due to Suntec organizing 2 other major events on the same day, though, but you’d think Sozo would’ve worked out something by now. Or maybe they can’t. Maybe it’s a staple habit of Singaporeans, or events in general. Someone do enlighten me.
Other than that, AFA’11 was pretty awesome. They managed to rope in Nico Nico Douga of all things, offering streams of the convention and parts of the concert on both the English and Japanese versions of the site.
Crypton also had a presence there, though they were restricted to the Cool Japan Forum and a tiny booth in the Cool Japan Pavilion, in the back of the hall. They were promoting MIKUBOOK like no tomorrow, what with the itasha on display nearby.
Even ODEX (of all things) got into the fun, expanding their movie selection from 2 to 5, though you have to buy $10 tickets for each and watch in a separate theatre. And I’ll bet most old-timers burn the posters once they see the ODEX logo on them. ^_^;
To their credit, they did still air the 2nd Mardock Scramble movie and the 4th Gundam Unicorn for free. Only watched the latter though, but it was awesome.
Chiwa Saito came to answer questions, and also did live dubbing of Homura. Great stuff, especially when she dubbed that Kyubey shooting scene. People who haven’t watched the show got spoiler-ed lol.
It seemed that the technical issues haunting the MikuPa concert on Friday night were also present during the concerts on Saturday and Sunday, as well as some of the daytime stage events. While I didn’t attend the Saturday concert, I thought that there was way too much bass and reverb during the Kalafina portion.
Performance-wise, though, May’n actually turned out to be disappointing; she ended up singing only a few of her newer singles. Milky Holmes was meh (given since I’m not exactly a fan of the show), though I did get to see true Japanese fanboys in the act.
I think I became an angela fan after their portion though. They had the most enthusiasm and audience interaction among all the performances, and they even threw in Cruel Angel’s Thesis for good measure. Fuck yeah.
All in all, I think AFA’s really improved over the years in that they keep bringing things to the table, though I think the management needs to iron out the problems that have been hanging around since the previous conventions.
Up next, the obligatory swag post.
Also, thanks for some of the images, Subarashinki! Check out his AFA album here!
2 Responses to “AFA’11 in a Nutshell”
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Hey thanks for the feature!
AFA11 was a blast!
yah ty too ^^