OtaCute, the guys who brought you the AniSong Festival, held its two-day cosplay festival on the last two days of July. This is a joint venture between them and Exosia Project, a company that delivers entertainment to a niche audience such as the people who attend such events.
It seems that OtaCute decided to make this event bigger than their previous cosplay festivals because they now have two venues: their usual YouSuites place and this newly opened bar called Wall Street. We will get to the bar later because it will be an integral part of the event.
The YouSuites portion of the event is reserved for the usual cosplay convention events like mini-games and such.
Wall Street, on the other hand, is for the more unusual events (well, unusual for cosplay convention standards) such as a kimono fashion show, a comedy show, a real-life Tekken show (!), and a giant weeaboo rave party.
..and yes, this is also the event that marks one Myrtle Gail Sarrosa’s return to cosplay conventions.
This is not a comprehensive review of this event because I wasn’t able to attend some of those events like the Anikura rave party (Jay Agonoy has the video for that) but what I can say here is that kudos to the organizers for doing something different inside the Philippine anime scene.
This is the first time that I know of that someone here did a convention/event in two separate venues (technically it’s just one venue since the Wall Street Bar and YouSuites are part of a large building, Laperal) and this is also the first time that events outside of your usual cosplay convention (in the Philippine context and again, real-life Tekken performance) happened here.
Being the breeding ground for indie idol groups, this event also gave way for polar’s third single drop and there are performances from the Black Sabbath of idol groups (in terms of being a collaborative group) Nekonnect, and Urodia, formerly named Project Urodia.
Now onto Myrtle Gail herself. She felt overwhelmed with joy that this is her first cosplay event in years and that it was good to be back. Her stance on NFTs may not be something that I would agree with but as a person who followed the cosplay scene here in the Philippines for ten years now, it’s one thing to say that it feels good to welcome back a fellow “compatriot”.
You can watch the full interview here.
It’s not just Myrtle and Urodia who made a comeback. Yuki Horikoshi, 1/3 of the comedic troupe that I covered some time ago, came back as one of the hosts of the show together with his comedic partner Israel Buenaobra, another Funny One contestant. The chemistry between Yuki and Israel is fluid enough for the jokes to land smoothly and they play off each other really well.
All in all, this edition of Cosplay Festival brought out the big guns that OtaCute can get and it really helps that there is variety in an event such as this.
You can check the rest of the videos on my YouTube channel. As always, thanks for reading!
Rayas-WEB 
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