New York Anime Festival

With the availability of free tickets from my advisor, I decided I wanted to go to the Anime Festival. Besides, it's anime, and it's free and there are sure to be nifty people there - right?
Nifty is one word for it :P

My anime history is as such, I grew up on Dragon Ball Z and Gundam Wing and that's really how I grew into role playing games on the internet and that is one of the major reasons why I'm so internet/tech-savy. I've been playing games/making websites/games with random people I've met on the internet since I was 11. I still have some of the friends from when I started today!

So in any case, I love DBZ (Dragon Ball Z), Gundam Wing and from there I went on to view Full Metal Alchemist, Naruto, Bleach. I've also seen Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, Ghost in a Shell, Spirited Away. So I've seen a fair few, but none of it recently, mostly while I was growing up.

So I was looking forward to the Anime Festival and while I was at work Friday a co-worker mentioned that she wanted to attend and was looking for someone else to go. That was awesome because I didn't really want to attend the festival by myself. Things worked out really well in that regard.

I attended the festival with my friend, we ended up arriving around 3pm and shopped around the different vendors for a while. There was some good art there, some interesting clothing, some neat accessories and of course some anime to buy. The best thing about the festival was the people dressed up. People were dressed up from all the popular anime, lots of people dressed up from Bleach and Naruto. It was a lot of fun to see them walking around.

We tried to go to a few of the events but they were either full or not interesting to me or my friend. We did end up going to the main event Saturday night which was the Anime Masquerade event. Pretty much it was anyone who wanted to dress up and perform a skit.

There were some really bad skits, only maybe 4 or 5 of them were actually decent/good which made the event interesting to say the least. The beginning was hilarious because it was opened by 3 songs from this well known voice over actress. The guy in front of my friend would go nuts whenever she sang or whenever he recognized a song. He got her to say "thank you" when she was leaving as he professed his love for her and he did an anime melt to the floor. I don't think an artist could have drawn it any better. Besides that and the few actually funny skits the event was a bit of a let down.

Overall, the anime festival was neat, but I would definitely not pay $50 for it. If it was like $10? Maybe. But they expect you to pay extra for the cool merchandise that you could pretty much find anywhere else and the events were intriguing but I would have had to come specifically for ones that I wanted to see in order to it to have been worth money. Perhaps then it would have been, but I have trouble thinking it would be worth $50 even then.