Hello! It has been a few days since the last entry as I have been preparing for each comiket day and been thoroughly beat after each day! As of right now I’m on my shinkansen to Nagoya, though I fucked up trying to bring 4 (four) pieces of luggage onto the shinkansen. It’s not allowed, so I had to bring my pieces to Haneda Airport, repack my stuff and leave two pieces with of luggage with the baggage storage. It’s 700 yen per 24 hours for each piece; not necessarily expensive but does provide convenience. Good piece of information to note for the future for traveling…! I was a little stressed getting separated from my travel partner but I think I made the best that I could of the situation.
Anyway, back to December 29! Not too eventful overall; since the two of us are still jet-lagged we agreed to wake up at 3 AM to get in line for Sushi Dai in order to retain our jet-lag buff for Comiket. It seems people either love it or hate it – It’s omakase sushi at a decent price (~7000 without extras?), but you have to show up when they start taking reservations in person early in the morning. Most agree at about ~04:00 to get a seat; we got there at ~04:20 to be able to get a table for 09:00. Since we’re up at this time anyway as of right now and we can walk to the restaurant, it’s not difficult for us… but I can see it being difficult to make the trek out here if you’re not already on Daiba/Ariake since the trains don’t start running until 05:00.
I ordered a tons of extra bells and whistles to make it expensive, but I don’t mind… The special orders were tuna cheek steak, cod milt (the brain looking ass thing), and the clam in the shell. I like the staff’s enthusiasm for foreigners (because i am a filthy 外人) and had a good time the last time I came last year, so I really looked forward to coming again and had a good time!
Grim Aloe recently got a christmas outfit on Mahjong Fight Girl this month, so we needed to visit an arcade to roll… We visited Round1 at Diver City and walked past Sega Joypolis (which has paid admission… which we didn’t want to pay to find out if they had cabs or not), so the only reasonable course of action was to…. go back to Akiba! lol
(pictures of the grim aloe cards go here after i take them out of the bag when i get to the nagoya hotel)
Friend’s preferred arcade is Tokyo Leisureland, which is on it’s own building (the Leisureland on top of the previously mentioned Don Quicote is known as Leisureland 2). I was able to get both skins within 35 rolls, though my friend wasn’t quite as lucky and had to get around 120 pulls (though he wanted the other rate up cut-ins for Grim Aloe, so kinda bad but he got everything now). I suspect we’ll be playing more MFG when we have nothing to do in Nagoya, so let’s get to know Aloe-chan better…!
I picked up the Akihabara Bento lunch box I wanted. It seems kind of generic with just the logo of the visual novel slapped on top… But it’ll be fine. Friend did a first round of Melonbooks 1, and we went back home to our hotel. After not being able to find anything particularly interesting to eat around our hotel, we settled on eating at the nearby Saizeriya. Most people seem to enjoy ragging on Saizeriya, but after trying it, I don’t think it’s bad Italian food for the price. Is it amazing? No, not necessarily… but for the price you’re paying each item, I think it’s a good value. Obviously if you want something a little more gourmet then sure, stay away, but if you need something convenient, why not?
Day 1 for our interests is mainly the Blue Archive section, and for me West hall for two corporate booths. We lined up at 03:30 AM like I had planned for east hall, though we found out that that is actually not the play for getting to the front of line to enter Comiket first with the AM wristband. It’s a weird system where they take everyone who comes early and puts them in a separate standby area, while they start to allow anyone who walks up at around 05:45 to start waltzing in to the waiting area… It’s puzzling and makes no logical sense, but we’ll try to take advantage of this fact tomorrow…
We pared our lists down between us such that we split about 3-4 wall booths each, allowing us to move to our own individual aisle booths quickly after picking up our items in common. If you’re not familiar with comiket booths, popular booths get placed along the “wall” of the convention center – the idea being that since longer lines will form for these booths, being placed against the ‘wall’ allows for space for lines to form either within or outside of the building to facilitate order and reduce congestion. So, if your circle is along the wall (for this comiket, section A or ア), the circle you want to visit is probably at least moderately popular – so you need to plan carefully in how many you want to pick! Both of us got what we wanted on our initial list in about an hour, allowing me to move to West hall for the two corporate booths I wanted to visit.
The line for my first booth was cut off shortly after I entered it, but I didn’t know it at the time and was so confused as to why no one else was lining up behind me shortly after I got in. I was thinking to myself, man maybe lining up for this first was a waste of time if no one else wants this shit, but it was only later that I saw other people get rejected trying to enter the line. I eventually made it to the booth counter after about 2 hours, so I was lucky to have made it in time! I initially just wanted to pick up a full graphic parka, but I ended up adding a few more things after I realized how much other people would have wanted to join the line…!
We split our loot back at home and planned our approach. Since the adult section was split into two different halls (456 and 78), we agreed that I would take halls 78 and he would take halls 456. I ended up with wall booths only in 78, and for him a mix of wall booths and fighting his way through ロリ島 for some isolated aisle booths. Our plan for entry this morning would be to watch for when entry to the east hall waiting area starts and dash in – we started to see people entering the line at 5:45 AM, but we didn’t have the courage to jump out of our spot in the ‘early’ standby queue until a few minutes later. This put us immensely ahead of where we were on the prior day, so I was hopeful to get started. Unfortunately I made it to my first booth and saw how long the line for only that one booth was despite making it there at about 11:06 and my emotions were starting to sink as this would jeopardize the rest of the booths I planned to hit. I finished that one at about 11:35, finished another at 11:45, then got stuck in the next one until 12:30…. luckily my friend finished his side of halls 456 quickly, so he was able to jump in and finish the rest of the things I hadn’t been able to get to yet. I did miss a few items from the first and third booths, but all in all I think it worked out since he was able to get everything else. Having a partner for comiket is quite useful…! thanks bwo
With my newly found free-time, I explored 456 for myself. I wanted to visit しらたまこ, but the line for that was quite literally the longest line I have ever seen for a wall booth and immediately noped on getting in line for it, as I would most likely be there for the entire day and only needed some acrylic keyholders from her booth. It proved to be a good choice as there were a number of things I was able to pick up that I initially passed on to not overburden my friend’s first route through the hall. For this event, the touhou section and doujin music CD was across the convention center in south hall, so I made the trek across. Their hall is so nice and empty without having to push and fight your way through crowds… But that just means that r-18 goods are the most powerful, right? hehe
After wrapping up my final items, my friend said he likes to go to melonbooks afterwards to pick up any loose items. Like bro… you just spent 6 hours waiting out in the cold to shop for 3 hours… and you still need more? So Melonbooks normally has 2 stores in Akiba, the ‘1st’ store in the main street, and the ‘2nd’ special event store a little ways off the main street. But for Comiket specifically, they open a pop-up 3rd store, this time at the 4th floor of the UDX building. There’s specifically some melon-chan goods I wanted to pick-up, so we went there and found the area to be quite spacious, even if the line to check out was absurdly long. It’s definitely a contrast to the normal Melonbooks shopping experience, where you gotta maneuver around other people looking for cunny goods with you.
After picking up our items there, we attempted to go into melonbooks 1st store but balked at how long the line was, went through 2nd store really quick then had C&C curry before heading back home to pack up to leave early the next day! (but then the first paragraph happened lol)