FanimeCon 2010

Day 4

Day One     Day Two     Day Three     Day Four

Day 4

Thanks to its Memorial Day Weekend timeslot, FanimeCon has a fourth day. While the convention may not have featured many industry events, even this final day carried on with panels, screenings, and cosplay gatherings through 4pm.

My time, however, was devoted first to an interview with Daisuke Ishiwatari and Toshimichi Mori, who had a lot to say about the video game industry, fans in Japan and the US, and why the popularity of fighting games never seems to wane. The interview is available here.

After the interview came time to wander through the artist's alley and the game room. Trends in Artist's Alley this year seem to include a greatly increased amount of plushies and a slight decrease in the number of sparkly, feathered cat ears. (Slight.)

The 24-hour game room featured a twist on the crane game that seemed new: a "clipper" that you must position in two button presses, one to move it to the right and one to move it forward. The prizes for it included an iPad and a PSP Go, and it was quite popular.

Beyond that, standard fighting and rhythm games were in effect, including BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, which is currently only available in Japanese arcades; PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions will be released in Japan and North America this July.

Also available was a giant chess board on the floor for cosplay chess, which was also being used for the game "Ninja" (in which players attempt to tag each other moving only from one stable ninja pose to another). And finally, there were a large collection of board games-- classics like Monopoly and Chess as well as Apples to Apples and even CSI: The Board Game --that could be checked out and played by attendees.

Even at 3pm on Monday the game room was full of people trying not to go home, but within an hour the events and rooms had all been shut down, at least until next year-- FanimeCon 2011 will be held on Memorial Day Weekend, May 27th to 30th.