Otaku-Complex.com – Your Portal to Japan!

After 3 days of just wasting my life away at AB09 and about a day or three of rest, I’ll get to give everyone a small peak of AB09. Please forgive my if stuff are not extremely descriptive or anything like that. Also, please forgive me at the lack of pictures. If people really want picture’s just comment and I’ll sent some.

Thursday – PreCon
So, since I did a group registration with a bunch of people a long awhile back, I decided to go down with a few people to pick up our stuff. For the most part, it all went pretty smoothly. The lines were not as bad as I’d thought they would be… after experiencing LineCon Anime Boston 08. Mild problems arose, but that was settled and everything went smoothly.

Friday – Day 1
Sadly, I still had classes that day, so I didn’t skip school just for the sake of going to the con. I got down at around 4 or so and just headed straight for the dealer’s room to look around. Did not pick up anything though. Quite sad, since I couldn’t find what I wanted after, but it’s all good. Managed to stay late and watched the AMV Contest, but I watched the Anime Unscripted thing before that (which is essentially Whose Line is it Anyway? but with the voice actors/actresses. It was quite funny and entertaining to watch. Now, on to my ramble about the AMV finalist.

I am very, very disappointed with most of the finalist. Now I do give my regards for people trying at least, but some of the AMVs were very very bad in my opinion. Action was quite lacking and in comparison to last year’s AMVs most of the categories felt like they were lacking. I must say though, the ones who were on my list of decent to good AMVs were quite well. Comedy and Upbeat/Other were the two categories I really struggled with on choosing who to vote for. The pre-show for the AMV Contest was quite silly too. The major thing I should cover is Monty Oum showing his incomplete version of Dead Fantasy III and a pretty decent size trailer of Dead Fantasy IV. I won’t spoil much, but I will say this. It…was…so…good…I like…almost cried manly tears at its sheer awesome. Despite it being incomplete and me being somewhat unsatisfied with it being so, I still give a lot of props to Monty for even doing this in the first place. Being a busy man and trying to meet and exceed both ours and his expectations, he really has done well. I will look forward to the final product in July, which I may post about. After everything was over, I headed home with a few people.

Saturday – Day 2
Saturday, I didn’t really do much. For the most part, I did some mild shopping, but mostly just walked around with people, so there’s not much to post here. Friends wanted to leave after the rave, which ended at 2am. The rave itself was alright. In my opinion the music was okay. Then again, I’m very picky when it comes to these things. I felt like a lot of the stuff near the end was just random bass. It was nice that there was a remix of Tank from Cowboy Bebop, but the bass that they threw in was, to me, really random and not well executed. Then again, by this time, most people are already mentally gone and ready to pass out.

Oh, before I forget. I went to the Kalafina concert, which was amazing. Berklee’s Video Game Orchestra opened for Kalafina, playing many famous pieces from games such as Final Fantasy VII battle theme, Metal Gear Solid theme w/ Snake Eater (which was so good that I almost teared), Halo theme and a Surf-Rock version of the Chocobo theme along with many other game songs. They also played two pieces by Yuki Kajiura. They were Himeboshi (which is a very beautiful piece in my opinion and one of my favorite Mai-HiME songs) and Song of Storm and Fire (which was good too, but i have never seen Tsubasa Chronicles, so sad.) After all this was over, Kalafina came on stage and performed. Starting with oblivious and moving on to some other song. I was really sad and confused to see that it was only three members and I was going crazy, but then realized that Maya was announced that she would not be with Kalafina as of May of this year. I was happy that they showed clips of Kuroshitsuji and Kara no Kyoukai when they performed the related songs for them (or well, they showed KnK clips when Sprinter was performed). The performance was amazing despite the lack of the 4th member. I’m quite sad that I didn’t get any autographs and the fact that not as many people knew about Kalafina as much as the pillows from last year *sad face*.

Sunday – Day 3
With much great sorrow, the last day of the con arrived. Getting down there fairly late, I managed to get my shopping done (surprisingly pretty well too) and wandered around some more. Day went by really quickly. Managed to see the closing ceremony, which was good and bad. Good in the sense that I got to see the winning AMVs (which at the same time disappointed me), got to see Dead Fantasy III stuff again, and also managed to see Yuki Kajiura and Kalafina appear again (along with the rest of the guests that I don’t really care for.) With closing ceremony over, the convention center was cleared and everyone went their separate ways. Went to dinner with a small (well still pretty large…) portion of my group and then went home. Carrying my winning loot from the con. Until next year.

EDIT: Instead of uploading pictures to here, I might as well just link to my facebook album. So enjoy.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=126285&id=552536744&l=49974055ea