This was my 10th time participating in Anime Revolution. Some of my friends and I decided to splurge a bit this year, and bought the premium badge.
On day 1, I spent quite a bit of time and money in the vendor hall. Many artists were running stamp rallies, where if you visit and bought stuff from the participating artists, upon completion you would receive a small prize. I participated in two rallies: one that was hololive-themed, and another that was Blue Archive-themed. I generally bought a bunch of prints. More on that later.
The only panel I went to was the hololive Gigi-Cece panel, where hololive -Justice- members Gigi Murin and Cece Evergreen held a quiz panel where one Justice member would ask a question about themselves and the other plus a member of the audience had to answer by writing on a sheet of paper. If the audience member failed, they would be subjected to a batsu (punishment) game. It was a pretty nice interactive panel. They also did sing a bit of karaoke for the last 15 minutes. Overall, it was fun to watch!
On day 2, AniRevo held their now annual Animusix concert, which featured Japanese VAs Kuribayashi Minami and Tadokoro Azusa. Each of them did an hour long set with encore included, which was really nice. There was a makeshift line at the front for premium pass holders, but it was kind of scuffed. AV/tech equipment in the ballroom was a bit lacking: the bass was extremely overpowering at the front. It’s something that has generally plagued AniRevo and/or this venue hall for the past few of years. Aside from that, it was a great concert!
Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the hololive World Tour Synchronize 2025 concert on the final day of the convention. AniRevo was the host of the Vancouver location, and they were charging between $60 to $199 before taxes and fees for general admission through Diamond tier admission. This part was expected and on par with other venues along the tour. Additionally, attendees required a valid AniRevo badge to enter. I, alongside some of my other friends, purchased a Silver tier badge, which mean we were third to enter the venue. Doors allegedly opened at 15:30 as per when we purchased the badges.
Until the night before the concert, we had no additional information of where to line up and when to start lining up. We received an email the night before that told us that general, bronze and silver pass holders were to line up outside by Jack Poole Plaza, but no indication of when. Nonetheless, my friends and I went to check it out at around 13:30, and bam, the line had already started forming. We found a bunch of people we knew near the front of the line, and thankfully were able to join them there. We had a couple of folks hold the fort while myself and NekoDiv went to drop some stuff off at my car and grab food for others. By the time we came back the line had started to overflow and wrap around the street side of the convention centre.
At some point, the diamond and gold pass holders were let into the venue hall, while silver and others were held outside, and the head of the silver line was let into the convention centre building, only to be held up for approximately 30-40 minutes. I didn’t mind too much since we got to literally chill inside with the convention centre air conditioning. From what we could gather from people already inside the hall, there appeared to be some mix up with not having enough chairs for the gold section.
In the end, the concert started 45 minutes to a hour late. That didn’t stop people like myself from getting to know people nearby. I ended up talking to a guy named Jeff from Florida who came up for this concert. He was an older guy that had never been to Vancouver before, and got to enjoy biking around the seawall, among other things. It was pretty cool meeting someone else out of town and talking about vtubers and other related things.
During the concert, there was some double echoing overlap during the performance of Suspect. It seems like the audio/video (AV) team tried to fix the issue, and “scrubbed” the concert video, which essentially broke the immersion. The screen blacked out after that, and there was five minutes of downtime where the audience tried to keep the spirit going by shouting “synchronize, synchronize!” to an ironic situation where the feed was basically unsynchronized. I found that to be quite amusing :). Umamusume EN release was also a recent fad, so some people were doing pulls and the surrounding audience members were hyping up the gacha rolls: that was pretty fun.
Eventually, the concert got back up and running, but the entire situation did leave a bit of a sour note. In the end, I still had a great time, and the hololive girls were awesome! Given how these issues (line management, AV issues, etc) have manifested in the past, I wasn’t surprised it happened again this year: I was just more disappointed that after doing these types of events for many years, the same recurring issues still haven’t been solved. It did seem like there might have been some issue from the JP broadcast side, as that’s what seemed to be indicated from AniRevo staff at the time; so we as the audience don’t have much to go off on. I do think the event organizers need to do some hard reflection on how these issues unfolded to begin with and come up with remedies/mitigation strategies to ensure this doesn’t happen again. That said, I still had a great time, so all is well. 🙂
The annual rave was also a blast! I had fun jamming out to anisongs and whatnot. I also discovered some new anime while having fun, including the currently airing Bad Girl! anime since one of the DJs played the opening for it. I also enjoyed DJ Fortify and AdvanceRatio’s sets. Overall, I had a great time waving penlights and jamming out to songs.
Anyways, aside from the convention itself, this is the wallet damage: a bunch of prints from various artists, including gyool, cauli, houkisei, Miuki, Shirakawa Fel, and Klaius, along with some postcards and stickers from DarknedStar. Also got a few things from _Machi0910.
Anyways, that’s all I have this time around. I did also go to Animethon as well, so I’ll have a summary of that soon.
Until next time!
~Lui
