I was at Anime Central earlier this month. It was a blast, but I have to admit I was just a little disappointed about a few things.
First of all, people say ACEN is disorganized, and it’s absolutely true. The “word on the street” is that Gencon is much better, but being focused on gaming rather than anime, I’m not all that interested.
The scheduling was not bad, but was less than stellar. The very first panel that I tried to go to simply didn’t happen, and locating rooms was downright nightmarish. The Acen forum indicates that they tend not to post signs because they get stolen. I’m not certain what the correct solution the situation is, but not having them at all is not the answer.
There’s also been a lot of talk about Acen’s Incident Response Team (IRT). I found the IRT people to have a good but polite presence, but I’ll admit I did have a run in with one IRT member that claimed to be guarding a set of stairs that was “for staff only.” This is, first of all, very much the type of thing you use a sign rather than a person for. Secondly, I didn’t see any stairs in the area – someone else also complained about IRT members being somewhat disoriented. I have nothing but sympathy, however – in a normal security situation, you might look for someone that was acting strange or carrying a weapon, but that pretty much describes half the people at ACEN. On a related note, it doesn’t matter how popular anime becomes, the sitting President of the United States will never visit an anime convention, because the Secret Service would flip out every 30 seconds or so.
I saw some Fruits Basket, Inuyasha, and Bleach. Good stuff. Alas, Inuyasha is not my thing. I loved Bleach – I was expecting something more comic and lighthearted, so the ghosts and supernatural storyline caught me off guard. Fruits Basket was clever and original.
A lot of the more popular events (e.g. Soap Bubble) were damn near impossible to get into in any reasonable amount of time. For the most part, I didn’t bother.