Day 8: Comiket Day 2: Mostly Hell

In between getting out of Day 1 of Comiket and Day 2, most of my party members had come down with something horrible. The rest, which included me, were really tired. The night before, we came to a consensus that because there was nothing we wanted really badly and that most of us were feeling terrible, we wouldn’t go wait in line at 5am again. Instead, we would just stroll in around 11am or so. And so, that’s what happened.

When we got off of the train (too tired/sick/lazy to do the 20min walk from the hotel to Big Sight, lol), there were signs directing which hall to go into (East/West/Corporate). I wanted to hit up the Touhou stuff (which is one of the big things on Day 2), so I went into the East Hall line, which actually snaked around the venue.

Around Big Sight

On the way there, I saw this:

Idolm@ster CG Truck

It’s a truck for the Idolm@ster mobile game: Cinderella Girls that seems to be pretty popular. It even was playing music and everything.

Eventually, after standing for the long-ass line into the venue, I finally got into the East Hall, behind some dude with a bear on his head:

Dude, just look at it!

I ended up hitting a lot of the wall booths for Touhou stuff. Wall booths tend to be more popular and therefore have longer lines compared to booths in the columns. Famous circles and popular artists tend to have these booths. I also was helping grab stuff for a friend, and pretty much all of his requests ended up being from wall booths. Out of these booths, some of these are shutter booths, which means that they’re especially popular. That means that to accomodate, the actual booth is inside, where the door shutters normally are, but it faces outside and the line is also outside.

In particular, the wall booths I wanted to hit up were Lunatic Luna and az+play (for a friend). I also wanted to hit up GP-Kids, so that’s the first booth I ended up at.

Also, at some point it started raining.

Standing in the rain for a shutter booth

At this point, I don’t even remember which circle I was standing in line for in the above pic (笑). I just remember being worried about my nice paper bag and its contents getting wet.

I mostly walked around with a friend today, and we seriously made some of our purchases solely based on the paper bag that the circles gave out with their stuff. For instance, we would stand in line, see a paper bag that caught our eye, then go look for that circle’s booth.

After a few hours, satisfied with the new lightness in my wallet, I met back up with my party members and we made our way back to the hotel.

Along the way, you could see the crowd for the buses that were going to Tokyo Station:

Sea of umbrellas

The Yurikamame rail station was also packed with people trying to head back:

Line for the rail station

Here’s another quick 4koma done by one of my party members summing up the Day 2 experience:

Day 2 in a 4koma nutshell

After resting up for a bit, we headed to Akihabara, mostly so one of my party members could try to sell the Sword Art Online stuff he bought on Day 1 to K-Books.

(Btw, I want to point out that while playing otaku arbitrage seems like a good idea, I was of the opinion that you’re much better off just spending money on stuff you want. Even if you make a profit (which is not guaranteed in any way), you’re essentially trading money that you could be spending now in Comiket for money you can spend later. In my case anyway, I’d rather spend that money at Comiket.)

When we actually got to K-Books, they offered him significantly less than he paid for it (ha!). So he decided to hold on to the Asuna goods, in hopes that maybe the price will rise after Comiket. While there, I bought a Girls Und Panzer doujin from 薄荷屋 (Hakka-ya) and the Chuunibyou set from うつらうららか (Utsura Uraraka, Eretto’s circle) since I missed both on Day 1.

A few party members and I went to Mos Burger in Akihabara to grab some dinner. I had two rice burgers, one with pork shortribs, the other with seafood. Both kinda expensive, kinda small, but delicious as hell.

Rice burgers from Mos Burger

Before heading back to prepare for Day 3, a friend and I stopped by Club Sega to play some rhythm games:

Mai Mai

Mai Mai seems to be a relatively new game that lets people play versus or sync play. They even have the machines in pairs, and when somebody plays by themselves, the other machine is locked, suggesting that the machines are meant to be played by at least 2 people. They have Sweet Magic by Lon, which includes the adorable PV. They also have a bunch of other fun songs like the Carameldansen song.

Reflec Beat: Colette

Reflec Beat also seems to be a relatively new rhythm game. It’s… weird, you have to be able to judge the trajectories of the notes well (hence the “reflect” part), but you also can’t focus on one part of the screen since there are different note types with different points of the screen that you have to touch. In short, it’s kinda hard (笑).

Pop N’ Music

Also got the chance to play the newest Pop N’ Music, which is kinda like Beatmania, but sans the turntable and has 9 buttons. One nice thing about the Pop N’ Music series is that they have a bunch of anime covers, like Connect from Madoka and the Mouretsu Pirates theme.

One machine I played on a whole bunch but didn’t take a picture of is Jubeat. The newest one had a bunch of songs I liked, like the Symphogear OP and the Mouretsu Pirates OP. I seriously played at least one of those themes every game I played. By the end of the night, I was able to more or less clear Advanced songs, so that was nice.

Almost every single modern arcade machine in Japan now is internet-enabled. So, if you have a card, they keep track of your progress and let you unlock things like extra songs or bonuses. For the Konami games, they have the e-amusement pass card. Project Diva and Mai Mai (and Gundam VS EX) used the nime card. Most fighting games use NESiCA. I ended up buying one of each card for about 300yen each… just because.

Heading back to the hotel, we talked a bit about Day 3 tomorrow. Still feeling sick and tired (I was starting to feel it too), we again collectively decided to screw lining up early in the morning and just walk in around 11am again. I got all of the stuff I really wanted for Day 2 and the circles I really wanted weren’t super-popular, so this strategy was fine to me. (Though, a part of me wanted to go wait in line just because. Oh well, probably for the best that we decided not to).