Short reflection about AFA 2010

Uh, didn't post about AFA which happened 2 weeks ago. Best shit ever. I paid for the VIP seating on Saturday (all JAM Project's fault) but on Sunday my friend bought me standing tickets so all was good.

JAM Project concert songlist:
MAXIMISER
Nageki no ROZARIO
Garo ~Saviour in the Dark~

MAXON
Rocks

Individual member's songs:
Yuusha-Oh Tanjou! -- Endoh Masaaki
Makka na Chikai -- Yoshiyuki Fukuyama
We Are! -- Hiroshi Kitadani
Rinbu Revolution -- Masami Okui (I should listen to more of her songs admittedly)
Cha-La Head-Cha-La - Hironobu Kageyama

RESCUE FIRE
Transformers EVO
SOULTAKER
VICTORY
SKILL

Gattai with Aniki:
STORM
Hagane no Messiah

...Will update once I remember better.

Second day was cool as well. angela massed their Fafner, which was great (We also learned a new MOEEEESSU greeting from the awesome guitarist, KATSU). atsuko was so excited she sounded rather breathless at times. Scandal played a lot of mindless J-Pop (well I didn't recognise any of it) until they finally played Shoujo-S and called it a day. You could tell that they didn't really know how to interact with the crowd so they just kept playing, which was fine by me. The drummer is also the hottest. :D Last was May'n. She stuck to more Macross this time around, but she didn't perform more than 5 songs before she went backstage, then we called for encore and she came out to sing Lion and show us a promotional video for the 3D biographical movie on her before they called it a night.

This year's AFA was kind of messed up. It's like they couldn't find enough exhibitors and also had to pay much higher premiums to get people to come this year or something. You had to pay extra to get to the main stage. Quite a bit of space was taken up by cars, which could have been used for booths. There were some random little enclosures in one corner of the exhibition hall with posters for Gundam 00 and some other anime on them. No idea what they were for, honestly, though the masses of people taking photographs there is probably a clue. The karaoke booth was there but it kinda sucked; the selection was half that of last year's and consisted of a lot of vocaloid, a sprinkling of Haruhi, a little Gundam SeeD, a few Nanoha songs, and a bunch of other songs that were popular recently. It got upgraded slightly the next day, but the only new songs of interest were Higurashi songs. Animax's anime dubbing booth seemed okay, but everyone seemed to do the Fairy Tail scene, so either that was the only one or that was the best. The organisation for the Project Diva arcade machines wasn't bad, but you couldn't insert your arcade card in, sadly. Drawing booth was kind of okay. Didn't check out the graffiti walls; there was a lot of space which was good.

The concert was stage-managed pretty badly. The emcee appeared only once when Aniki took his first break, and never appeared again after that, even after we called for encores twice. Kageyama had good English so she wasn't needed during that segment, but she could have at least come out to signal that the concert was over and not leave us calling for encores and making Aniki feel bad and have to come out twice. Otherwise JAM Project and Aniki used their time really well and every moment was packed. Second day was worse; the transition from angela to Scandal took 25 minutes and during that time no one appeared at all. The instruments were being tuned on the stage itself, which shouldn't be happening since instruments should be tuned backstage. The emcee didn't even bother coming out to say anything, we just sat and complained amongst ourselves. At least at the end of May'n's performance she came out and prompted an encore, but I suppose that was planned.

Well, this year wasn't that great overall but JAM Project is a major win. Also, at least I got a Konata in wedding dress T-shirt as well out of it. Showing my true otaku colours!