The only booth balloon at AFA08.
If only the other booths did balloons, AFA08 hall(s) would have looked much more impressive.

Sorry for my slowness, been busy this couple of days ^^; As mentioned earlier in Panther’s previous AFA coverage post, I will be covering on booths that were on the convention. I know this sounds boring I was forced by panther to do it but I guess some will be interested. Anyways I did not really pay attention to the booths other than the figure stores since I was searching for rare figures or good deals amongst the stores. True enough, I got my Kemeko Nendoroid for $50, which KazeArashi also wanted but I got it first! Muahahaha! It was probably the only Kemeko Nendoroid sold at the convention and got it from Rapid Culture which I will show a photo of the booth later.

Panther will be doing a post on the Figures display of TOYNTOYS, thus I will not be covering it. Do take note that I will not be covering every single booth, that would be very tedious it will also look like another Panther essay and as mentioned earlier, I personally did not visit every booth as well ^^; I will be covering those that are of certain interest to me. You can have a good picture of what booths were at AFA08 from the scan below.

Scan of the AFA08 layout. Higher res here

Once again, same as Panther, I would like to thank the photographers who kindly provided photos in order for me to cover this post. Thank you very much Setsuna-san, AK, Squee, Wcloudxkumo ^^ Some of the photos were taken by myself too. My excuse reason for not taking photos of my own is that I basically have no photography skills and my camera is also fail with short battery life; after taking around 60 shots, its dead…

Now time for Photo Spammage with short description every now and then.

Above is the Rapid Culture booth where I bought my Kemeko. Got it on the second day of AFA at around 9.05am. Actually saw it on the first day but they said it was reserved. I guess I was lucky ^^ They sold bishoujo figures, figmas, nendoroids, gundams and other stuff as well. I think my favourite booths for figure stores was La Tendo, TOYNTOYS, (sorry, did not took photos of their booths) and Rapid Culture as their variety was not bad and they had quite a few figures at good prices.

The long queue at KKnM

Gundam 00 shirt from Cospa. If only they had an “Ore-wa Gundamu” shirt ^^

Above are photos of the KKnM booth. They sold various anime/manga merchandise such as Cospa brand shirts, mobile phone straps, cushion covers, posters, stickers and many more. I personally did not enter the booth due to the long queue, the queue was always about 20-30 metres long ^^; but I could still see what they sold because they had a staff to hold up a list of goods sold outside the booth. I think it was a good idea as it became easier for people to scan through the goods. I had a hard time browsing through the other figure stores because the space was cramped. Seems like there is a large market for anime/manga merchandise here.

Above are from the Sky Crawlers (anime movie) showcase booth, it seems like a great movie. For those of you in Singapore you can watch it at Golden Village (GV) cinemas now. It is a GV exclusive and was released on 27th November 2008. I am going to watch it on this coming Wednesday (3rd Dec) with Wcloudxkumo and KazeArashi, time not confirmed yet, anyone else want to tag along?

*Geass* “I, Lelouch vi Britannia, command you to buy our DVDs!!!”

Now for the Odex area, they took up quite a large area with sales of VCDs/DVDs and experience areas of anime such as Code Geass, Shakugan no Shana and a few others. I was surprised that they were airing the new anime in Okto channel (Singapore channel) within the same week as Japan, namely, Toradora, Casshern Sins and Skip Beat.

Arcade area had competitions for
Street Fighter IV, King of Fighters 98 & Tekken 6

There were other casual games as well such as Initial D and Maximum Tune

The Manga Kissa booth where you could sit down and read manga for free for the first 15 mins

Custom Gundam kits display area from BAKUC competition

Display booth of figures such as Dragonball, Saint Seiya & Kamen Rider

Manga sales booth by Chuang Yi

Artist Alley where illustrations from
Collateral Damage Studios, Ctrl+Z and other illustrators were being sold

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Ok now this ends my incomplete booth coverage! There are many other booths that was not mentioned such as Animax, Imaginary Friends Studios, H.I.S. International Travel and so on. Again, you can see them at the layout map here. For the next post, I will cover the onstage events of AFA08.

Generally I think AFA08 was a success, I was happy to be there with Team Blue and various other new people that I was able to meet there. Let me share with you an interesting incident that happened to me on day 2 of AFA. I accidentally met with the GARsome Aniki (Ichirou Mizuki) in the toilet. I said Hi! to Aniki and we shook hands (after we both washed our hands of course). As he left the toilet, I said to him, Good Luck! and then he replied, Thank you! Aniki is a very nice guy indeed ^^

And again, for more coverage of AFA done already by other blogs within and without the Team, check out the aggregate post over at Team Blue’s blog.

Related posts:

1. AFA ‘08 Report Preview
2. AFA 08 Part 3 – Onstage
3. AFA 08 Part 1 – The Coverage & Feedback
4. AFA Cosplay Part 2
5. AFA Cosplay Part 1