So with a con somewhat close to home, this made for an easy event to participate in a day and experience everything it has to offer.  Unfortunately, that was not a lot.  This event proved to be a great con for the first time con going in our group.  However, in comparison to the execution of other cons I’ve been to, this con proved lackluster in comparison.

Guests:

This convention had some pretty awesome guests from stars of My Hero Academia, Lord of the Rings, Hocus Pocus and several other incredible works of entertainment.  It was nice seeing so many great people at this event, but I felt the guests were underutilized.  I will go over this panel wise later in this review, but this also adversely effected the autographs.  My fiance attempted to get an autograph that was advertised as $30 on the con website and at the autograph table; however, according to my fiance, the price was marked out and replaced with $40.  Now I did not see this change myself, but I’m sure it happened and I was shocked to hear that a con would just up and change an autograph price in the middle of the convention. Further problems included a very cramped space to see the guests.  It felt like the guests were just thrown in a corner and really they needed more space. I love it when there is a specific area for guests to sign that’s away from everything because it saves so much room in places like the vendors, but not enough room was given to these guests to have their lines.

Panels:

I actually didn’t go to any panels because I arrived at the con too later to attend the one panel that caught my attention which was the My Hero Academia panel.  I noticed that there were not that many panels in general and not many panels that featured the guests.  I honestly thought that the schedule just wasn’t fully updated till the day of the con and I realized there was no way they would update the schedule any further.

Vendors/Artist Alley:

I wasn’t a fan of the vendors either.  There were some nice vendors, but there wasn’t a lot of variety.  There were a few stand out booths but my group honestly got lost trying to relocate the booths that caught our eye because there were so many similarities in the merchandise spread out in the entire room. One person in our group wanted plushies and there was just not much to offer, but another wanted T-Shirts and there was plenty to choose from.  The merchandise was nice but I love variety.  Furthermore, space was very cramped and it was difficult to walk around everywhere which was odd considering the guests were tucked away in a corner out of the way of the vendors.

Overall: 

This con did something that I personally felt was disrespectful in changing the autograph price of a guest in the middle of a con, but that’s just my opinion and there may be details behind what happened that may change my perspective on the matter. I also found the locations of the guests disrespectful.  It’s one thing to allocate guests to their own area, it’s another to give them a tiny corner of the room tucked away to where the fans don’t have enough room to line up.  The vendors needed more variety as do their panels.  I don’t dislike this con, but I do feel like it needs to elevate every aspect of this event to better execute the con as a whole.  So my question is, what will it take to make me try this Cincinnati con again? Honestly, I don’t know.