Cosplay Mania, the Philippines’ largest Japanese media-themed event of the year, finally made its long-awaited in-person comeback yesterday at function halls 1-5 of the SMX Convention Center in Pasay City.
..and they went out with a bang with guests ranging from Nozomu Sasaki, the voice actor for Eugene Urameshi the Ghost Fighter, to five vtubers from Cover Corp.’s Hololive Indonesia wing. This means that they really planned to make this one extra special after two-plus years of online conventions.
With that said, the long line situation remains but it’s not as bad as it was during Cosplay Carnival. At least Cosplay.PH and SM Supermalls were able to mitigate the overcrowding situation.
The ticketing situation, on the other hand, is something that the organizers really needed to work on because the recent phenomenon of ticket scalping for Cosplay Mania is something that’s quite unheard of during the pre-pandemic era. I am not saying that they should give out more tickets but they need to make sure that there’s an ample number of tickets for people who wanted to see it live. I also appreciate the fact that they streamed the event on Bilibili and I can understand why they chose that platform: copyright issues.
The toy sellers are also back in town for this event and not only that, there are some new and innovative players in the merch stands. One great example of this is Tankobonbon, a manga store in Dasmarinas, Cavite.
What made them stand out from other manga stores present at the convention is that they offered people to read their manga selection for free. If that’s not a great way to promote your business, I don’t know what is.
Not pictured here are the stalls from the idolsphere such as DNE and Muji Kiss’.
What would a cosplay event be without cosplayers? Without further ado, let me dump some cosplayer pics here:
I’ll go ahead and leave this one as it is for now. The event itself is a 10/10 banger and it truly presents itself being the “WrestleMania of Philippine cosplay events in my opinion.” I hope this brings an even more resurgent cosplay scene and another avenue for our indie idols like LoveSo and Seishun Kakumei to bring their talents on stage.
See you at Ozine’s 1990s anime-themed convention.
Rayas-WEB 
Neat. I can’t wait to attend one soon.
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