So this is my second year going to this convention and I had mixed feelings, mostly positive, about last year’s event. With that in mind I was really looking to see what the staff did to overcome last year’s short comings and honestly it had a really awesome guest list so I really wanted to go.

Note: I really didn’t take a lot of pictures this year as I didn’t spend as much time here as I did last year.

Guests

The guest list this year was absolutely amazing. Not only did the guest list really live up to the theme of Mechas versus Magical girls but it also took advantage of the recent success of #Persona5 and #FireEmblemEchos by getting several members of the phantom thieves and both Alm and Celica from Fire Emblem. I spent a lot of time getting autographs because there were just so many people here I needed for my autograph collection. You had people like Robbie Daymond, Laura Landa and other names like Kyle Hebert and Spike Spencer. It was really awesome meeting these people.

Panels

The panels were amazing and full of creativity. You had a voice actor lip sync challenge panel which was hilarious, several workshops, escape game sessions, discussion panels. I know most conventions have mostly Q and A panels and discussion panels but I really feel like Matsuricon shines best with the massive amount of entertainment their panels offer. You can tell the people who design the schedule know what fans want to see and try their best to provide the widest variety of entertainment. Plus this convention knows how to create panels that really allow the guests personality to shine, it’s one thing to see a guest sit down and answer the same questions from fans that you here at most conventions, it’s another to hear a panel all about the actors embarrassing origin stories.

Vendors/ Artist Alley

I greatly praised this section last year; however, this year I can’t say the same. The artist alley was still good but I found myself shopping at the same artists I looked at last year, so while I was looking for something new I didn’t. As for the vendors I was actually really shocked at the low variety that was present. I actually hyped up the vendors for a friend of mine that came with me and I honestly felt the need to apologize to him for giving his hopes up. I found the exact same #DragonballZ statues four times, yes I counted. Oddly enough very little Gohan merchandize even though Kyle Hebert was a guest.

Autographs

Remember how I said they really needed to work on this last year? Well they definitely made an effort. The problem is while they made changes to the autograph lines, they still seem to love having a lot of chaos. This year they had five voice actors per session signing in one room for an hour and a half. The way the lines work is everyone starts off in the same line and once they enter said room it diverges into individual lines for each actor. The problem is when you get an autograph from one actor you can immediately go in one of the other four. This meant the people in the room didn’t change often so if you weren’t one of the first ones in line you were out of luck to get a single autograph, which unfortunately was a lot of people.

Staff

I like how this convention gets staff that actually puts out as much effort as possible to help the guests and this year there were good and bad staff members. There was one staff member that managed inside the autograph room that really tried her best but she talked down to the attendees so much that many refused to listen to her which only created more problems. FYI, it was the same person I was talking about last year who just stopped talking to people when things got rough. The good news is they got other staff members that were amazing. One person managed to single handedly control the massive autograph line crowd to where it was as organizes as possible before going into the autograph room and he couldn’t even use his full voice. I looked for this person to thank him personally after my autographs but couldn’t find him so if anyone knows who I’m talking about feel free to share this with him and give him my sincerest thanks because he was awesome.

So overall this convention was fun but I only go to it because I need autographs because it’s nearly a five hour drive for me. This convention desperately needs to increase the number of autograph sessions it provides because too many fans leave this convention unhappy and the only way to get autographs is to get to each one over an hour early. This takes up a lot of convention time. I will still consider this convention because it’s a lot of fun with great guests. but it’s also such a headache. If the guests are not who I’m looking for next year I won’t be disappointed but if they get people I really want then I’ll go back and I’ll sure I’ll enjoy myself.