On May 24th-27th, 2019, Fanime Con celebrated 25 years of this annual event on Memorial Day weekend. Once again, it was held at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in Downtown San Jose, California.  There were lots of new experience I had to have for this occasion.

I ran three cosplay gatherings with one per day. Day 1 was for “Cells at Work” while Day 2 was for fighting games. Day 3 was “Sailor Moon”. It was exhausting especially for my voice as I needed to project. A lot of people showed up for all three events while the Sailor Moon one had an engagement occur which made this particular gathering extra special.

I usually like competing in fighting game tournaments. After the fiasco of last year’s tournaments, I opted not to enter anything. Tekken 7 actually ran smoothly, and it gave me hope that other tournaments would be ran the same. Unfortunately, Soul Calibur VI’s tournament fell flat causing me to miss other events I could have attended as it ran way behind schedule.

This also marked the first time I was a planned participant in a gathering as I was one of the Bible Black extras for the Hentai review panel which included the sequel to Bible Black. I also attended the JAV idols panel which pretty much was Japanese porn.

For the first time ever, I tried cosplay chess. I was unable to in previous years due to it running at the same time as other events. The dialog between the players and game itself was already predetermined. It was up to the chess pieces in combat to provide the theatrical performance. Each piece was portrayed by someone that was in cosplay.

I also did some commentary for Kingdom Hearts 3 in the middle of the night for about 5-6 hours on Stage Zero. It was fun to talk to random people without making it awkward and got to meet some friendly people with one of my favorite video game franchises being played.

One of my goals at this edition of Fanime was to try new things. I was successful and am looking forward to 2020 where I will also once again try new things.

Written by: Timtastic