After months of anticipating the return of conventions, April hit me like a truck, bringing the full force of con season back into my conscious. Castle Point’s 2022 iteration is the first true convention I’ve attended since November 2019, a whopping 29 months prior. Before that, I did go to a smaller-scale local convention on April 2nd known as EMCon and its small scale was a good warmup, even if I personally don’t think it should be called an anime con from how much of it leans more greatly into general pop culture and doesn’t embrace the anime theme as much as these larger anime cons do.
So April came and went, and on April 30th it was time to make the drive down to the Meadowlands Exposition Center to attend the convention’s first day. As the pandemic was still a large concern at that point, vaccinations and masks were required by all attendees inside the building (thank god), but since everything was jam-packed into a very small venue, some parts of it felt rather cramped, especially in the first few hours. The dealer’s room and artist’s alley were tightly packed from the morning and early-afternoon crowds of attendees and it wouldn’t be until the early evening when it felt comfortable enough to walk through without having to dodge everyone. Because of just how ridiculous things could get at this convention in particular, there were lines to get into the dealer’s room and the artist’s alley and people sat at the entrances monitoring the number of people entering and exiting the respective sections, and unlike in 2019, you were allowed to exit from the entry point instead of a dedicated exit.
The artist’s alley was easily the highlight of the convention, as it’s been for most of the cons I go to year-by-year. Being able to meet artists, check out their artwork, and socialize with them about various topics is what drives me to attend CPAC every year, and once the crowds dissipated it was fun to stroll through, as I did several times. The dealer’s room has always been a hard sell for me since I usually don’t come to conventions to buy merchandise and other physical media that I can (usually) just go and buy online. Making matters worse was that while the line for the artist’s alley was rather short and constantly moving until emptied out, the dealer’s room had a constant line for a much, much longer period of time, and it would go from double to even triple the length of the artist’s alley line in the convention’s opening hours. The dealer’s room also didn’t have any big booths of vendors suspending tall stacks of merchandise or posters/wall scrolls to serve as sort-of landmarks or focal points, and this, combined with the outer two isles being significantly shorter than the middle isle, made the dealer’s room a big slog to walk through.
In stark contrast to the dealer’s room and artist’s alley, the gaming area had a very large amount of space to roam. Multiple different console games and a few PC’s lined the left half of the space, offering multiplayer titles (mostly fighting games) like Smash Ultimate (twice!), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Kill La Kill If, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Dragon Ball FighterZ, and Guilty Gear Strive. On the right was the arcade setup and the lineup consisted entirely of, with a few exceptions, Japanese rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution, Pop’n Music, Sound Voltex, Project DIVA Arcade, and Taiko no Tatsujin. I didn’t play any of the machines because they had pretty lengthy lines and you can already find most of them at Round 1 arcades all-year-round. In fact, most of the console games that were in the game room fell under this too, whenever they be one of the many modern titles or the rare retro game. Thus, except for a session of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with three others in the final hour of the game room, I pretty much just watched all the action and used the chairs to take a brief break from walking around.
Tucked into the back of the main convention area was the live stage, which housed various vocal musical performances for all to hear. And I really do mean “all”. The volume levels for the speakers on the stage were set so high that you could practically hear the beats even if you were all the way on the opposite end of the convention, and at that distance you couldn’t understand anything besides the thuds of the speakers and the high notes of the singers’ voices. Everything else was inaudible and it made talking and hearing in the convention much more difficult, as I had to raise my voice through a mask to the point that I begun losing my voice, and my inability to step out of the artist’s alley and drink water on the fly only made it worse. I’m convinced if there was a possibility the stage could be moved to a separate building so it wouldn’t interfere with the rest of the convention, it would.
Despite the sounds of the stage blasting through every inch of the convention it was still a good time, spending most of the visit snapping pics of the many cosplays at the event, chatting with artists, buying commissions of my characters, and spectating the games in the game room. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be all colors and rainbows, as one of the attendees would sneak into the artist’s alley and snatch funds from one of the artists, causing bag checks to be temporarily enforced for those entering and leaving the artist’s alley. Second, the convention’s main area has practically no seating options besides the gaming area’s console gaming half and the food court, which can be absolutely painful when you consider that all these conventions opt for floors made of concrete and don’t have anything to accommodate for handicapped attendees or those with leg injuries or problems walking besides the wheelchair ramp. And even if you could get a seat, the chairs were very small and I swear I managed to break one by accident just by sitting on it. I ended up having to lug around a camping chair to sit and take a break, and even then I still ended up with both my legs absolutely wrecked from walking 8,000 steps on pure concrete for 9 hours.
During the endurance through the expo, I took a grand total of 120 different pics of cosplays. As typical of a convention all the “recent big hits” were represented. Lots of Genshin Impact, lots of Demon Slayer, lots (and lots) of My Hero Academia, some Jojo and Persona, and a few surprises and weird picks that nonetheless come off as brilliant. Is it my biggest collection yet? Well, not really. Looking at my statics from past cons, I took more at CPAC’s 2019 event, but more than 2018’s, and as for the highest amount that record still goes to AnimeNEXT 2019. I don’t focus on the photos I do take of cosplays at these events as much as dedicated photographers do, considering I don’t really experiment with different, more dynamic views of the cosplayers or edit them later before posting them.
So what’s next? Well, as you can see from the schedule I posted above, AnimeNEXT got the axe and will not be happening this year. I considered a few alternative conventions that took place around the late May/early June but none of them struck me as intriguing enough to want to attend, especially when I’m still recovering from CPAC 2022 amongst still trying to get back into the swing of drawing art and writing down character bios and game design concepts. That said, my next large event will be Eternal Con 2022 on the first weekend of July, and after that will be Long Island Retro Gaming Expo in August.
As part of the parting words for this post, here’s a link to the gallery of cosplay photos and the art commissions I received by several artists during the event.
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