As I elaborated on in my Castle Point Anime Convention 2023 blog entry, I decided this year to give each convention I attended its own dedicated post so I could voice my full opinions while the conventions were still fresh on the mind. And this time, AnimeNEXT was back from a three-year-long hiatus to bring together anime fans in the tristate area and beyond. However, this year would mark a major change for the event, and it’s not exactly one that was entirely welcomed by attendees based on comments that I’ve seen online and live on-site. Due to various circumstances including rising costs for the venue and not being able to enforce rules about masking up and being vaccinated (since 2022 was still swamped by waves of the COVID-19 pandemic at the time), AnimeNEXT abandoned their previous home at the Atlantic City Convention Center and instead set up shop at a different, but smaller and less expensive location, once again intending to have masks as a requirement before suddenly removing it before the convention started.
The event would find a new home at the New Jersey Convention and Exposition Center, and while it has a decent layout, it would serve as the root for the main issues with the 2023 incarnation of the convention as a whole. First and foremost, the quality of the convention center was leagues behind that of the Atlantic City Convention Center and it did not have the pleasant and inviting atmosphere of its former home, feeling less clean and more like most other older convention centers I’ve been to in the past few years, mostly Castle Point’s current venue since 2018 and Eternal Con’s former venue before the 2020’s. It also was just not big enough to have the grand scope of a convention its hosts wanted it to have especially coming of the heels of the Atlantic City Convention Center. The new location ultimately forced the con’s hosts to split the experience between two different buildings: the aforementioned convention center, and a hotel (with paid parking!) that’s 20+ minutes away. To try and alleviate this and make transfer between the two places seamless, you could grab one of three shuttle buses and travel there, but even with that aspect you still need to wait for a shuttle bus, then wait 20+ minutes for the bus to get there, and when you’re done at the hotel with a panel or a console/board game, you have to wait again and then travel for another 20+ minutes just to make it back to the convention center. Not to mention the convention center was located in the middle of nowhere and it’s quite the drive if you want to get food outside the convention’s cafeteria or return to your hotel room.
And if you’re wondering what the shift to two separate venues feels like to someone that went there, I’ll give you a brief snippet of how it was laid out: At the convention center, you had the vendors and artists, the main stage for live performances, the car show, the arcade games, the charity auctions, the card games, and several different cosplay-themed activities and events. Then at the hotel, you had all the convention’s panels, video and tabletop games, tournaments, karaoke, AMV’s, the manga library, and cosplay repair. You can tell that they tried to give each venue equal importance but in reality it makes it even more time consuming if you want to see a panel, play some console games, or, if you’re a cosplayer, repair your cosplay. Add on that this information about the convention being split between two different locations not being made clear to attendees until literally the week of the event, and you can see why people were understandably critical to the decision to divide the convention. And sure, Castle Point Anime Convention would also divide its features between two different buildings, but at least they’re within walking distance of each other and they still managed to fit the bulk of the event’s panels inside the main building and kept all the main activities in said main building.
So as you probably would have expected, I stayed under the roof of the convention center the entire time, never once considering the idea of driving or taking a shuttle bus to the hotel to see a panel and play some console games. The artist’s alley continued to get the bulk of my attention as it does in most other conventions as I met several new artists and encountered others that I have not seen since the end of the 2010’s and the start of the pandemic. It was honestly an exciting artist alley filled with great talent, and it helped alleviate some of the poor design choices in regards to the convention’s layout. The vendor’s hall, or the dealer’s room as this event calls it, was pretty much the same as ever, though their policy on “no photos in the dealer’s room and artist’s alley” was very inconsistent. I was able to snap pictures of cosplays all over these oh-so called “no photo zones” (ironically, there was literally even a photo booth at one of the booths in the vendors area) and pretty much nothing consequential happened, aside from one staff member saying they would have to remove people from the event. In comparison, whenever or not the rule exists at other events I’ve been at over the years, the staff in those venues aren’t as strict or blunt with reminding people to be careful where they point their cameras in the artist’s alley. As for me, I avoid snapping cleanly-visible art at people’s tables and the artwork of said tables when I take snapshots of commissions and pose with artists for selfies out of respect for the people that make them.
The rest of the main venue was the food court, cosplay wrestling, the arcade, and the car show. The cosplay wrestling was thankfully not as loud and obnoxious as the concert stage at CPAC (in fact, AnimeNEXT saved their music performances for after the vendors and artists’ areas closed for the night) and it was fun getting to see people get in character as various different Nintendo properties, though it got too clustered around the ring that I wasn’t able to watch up close except from a distance. The arcade was reasonably small, especially since the console games were in a whole different venue, but it had some proper candy cabs of both the retro CRT and modern flatscreen variety, the latter mostly for fighting games, alongside the expected rhythm game cabinets that populate every anime con and the not-so-expected pinball machines. One game sadly spent most of Saturday being repaired while one of the pinballs broke down in the middle of the day, and a lone Ms. Pac-Man machine pretty much spent the entire event unable to be played. I was actually surprised when it was announced that the arcade would be closing at the same time as the dealer’s room and artist’s alley, considering at most events I’ve been to, the gaming areas usually close much later into the day (for reference, CPAC’s arcade and console games could be played on until the day ended, and the same was true for Long Island Retro Gaming Expo last year).
Overall, AnimeNEXT 2023 was a fun, albeit flawed convention. I’d say I preferred the artist’s alley of this event over that of Castle Point Anime Convention’s and this event had the benefit of not taking place during very bleak and miserable weather, but CPAC did everything this event did and did it better, using the limited space of its location much more wisely to offer up everything one would expect from an anime convention. The convention definitely has a chance to improve and/or find a better venue more suitable for housing everything the event wants to do and so much more, but the location it ended up with feels more like a temporary bandaid from losing the ability to host the event at the Atlantic City Convention Expo than the exciting new home of a great convention that everyone likely wanted it to be. If they wanted to stay where they are now, maybe if the main attractions that people associate with anime conventions (like the panels and video games) were at the convention center while the more niche activities that don’t have large audiences were at the hotel, and if the shuttle busses were quicker in bringing guests between venues, it would lead to less frustration to those repeatedly trying to move between the two.
Well… that ended up being a far longer summary of the event than I would have liked. I promise that I won’t have this much to burp out about EternalCon next month, but after hearing “you have to be willing to critique the things you like if you want them to improve” from another source, I figured maybe a long post like this would be necessary. And that leads us to the cosplay photos and the art commissions. This time there wasn’t really any consistent theme or trend among the cosplayers and artist’s alley, but what I was most surprised to see was a sudden influx of Trigun cosplay thanks to the new Trigun Stampede anime that aired earlier this year. The traditional Shonen shows like Demon Slayer, Jojo, and One Piece still had strong showings, plus the continued surge of Genshin Impact. The final count for cosplay photos totaled to 104. Not as many as CPAC due to the strict policies regarding the use of cameras in most of the venue but still a respectable amount at the end of the day.
Anyways, here is where you will find the gallery of cosplays I snapped at the event, and here is where you can find the round-up of convention commissions. I am still looking to get some new blog posts up that aren't event-related but we'll see where this year goes from here. Until then, I will return sometime next month for an in-depth summary of EternalCon 2023, or as much as I can squeeze out.
