By: Katherine Cañeba | @kcserinlee

TL/DR

This was a very enjoyable and well-attended mid-tier convention (around 15,000 attendees) with a lot of official vendors, art vendors, and English VAs hosting panels/meet-and-greets. Spend one day if you’re mainly planning to shop; spend two days if you also want to attend panels. Plan to arrive as soon as possible in the morning because once parking at the convention center fills up, additional parking structures in the surrounding area will require a good amount of walking to get to and from the convention.

Location: Pasadena Convention Center, 300 E Green St, Pasadena, CA 91101

Date: 4-5 November 2023

https://www.animepasadena.com/

Size and Scale + Food Alley

I attended for Day 1 and spent it mainly on shopping and slightly on exploring. The venue was an appropriate size given the scale of the event. It felt spacious enough to house all the vendors, main stage, gaming area, photo op zone, and still had open floor space in the hallways to sit, rest, or eat. I also appreciate that there was an information table at the entrance to each building in the venue.

Food options abounded, starting with a couple of food trucks that had incredibly long lines in the outdoor plaza on Green Street and a conveniently-located Starbucks that was part of the convention center itself. The location in downtown Pasadena also afforded attendees a wide variety of surrounding restaurants. My friend and I ended up getting lunch at the soft opening of a new restaurant a couple of blocks away called “Tokyo Chick.” They had a banner up across the street from the convention center to attract hungry con-goers who didn’t want to wait for up to an hour for food from the food trucks. Considering how busy it was at Tokyo Chick, we liked that the wait from the back of the line to receiving one’s food was around half an hour. Everyone was required to take their order to-go, and the to-go boxes were placed in a Tokyo Chick-branded reusable polyurethane bag that could be brought back to the restaurant for a discount on your next order. If you find yourself at Tokyo Chick in the near future, I recommend trying the karaage!

https://www.tokyochick.com/

Health and Safety Policy

https://www.visitpasadena.com/convention-center/attendees/accessibility/

The Pasadena Convention Center states on their website that they are in ADA compliance with everything from designated parking, to restrooms, to service animals. As is somewhat standard now across California conventions, there was no strong encouragement to wear masks, and masking was entirely up to individual preference. While I did I see several attendees wearing masks, the majority of people were not and I did not observe any pressure or harassment of masked individuals by unmasked ones, or vice versa.

Vendor Hall & Artist Alley

Official vendors and fan artist booths were grouped together in one hall, with a Celebrity Signing area congregated to one end of the hall. There was a sufficient quantity and diversity of vendors to lose oneself for hours (and drain one’s wallet!). Be sure to pace your spending in a con this size or larger!

Given Pasadena’s proximity to Hollywood, the celebrity guests were mainly locally-based English VAs for a variety of titles, from American animated productions like Avatar: The Last Airbender to English dubs of Japanese anime and video games. Notably, the English VA for Princess Peach from Nintendo fame was there too!

Cosplay Areas

Cosplayers freely roamed the venue and were concentrated most heavily in the outdoor plaza on Green Street. This area is where people could best admire the cosplayers from afar, or interact with them and ask for photos.

Entertainment – Attendee Experience

Once we made it to the front of the registration and badge pick-up line, there were no more long lines to contend with (not counting the lunch lines)—just convention fun! Between the Entertainment Hall, Cast Panels, and Artist Alley, I spent the majority of my time in the Artist Alley and enjoyed every moment.

Of course, every mid-size and larger anime convention worth one’s salt has a Main Stage, and true to form, the one here was playing a lineup of anime soundtrack cover singers, emcee jokes, and trivia contests with the audience. The photo booth area on the same floor as the Main Stage had many banners of popular anime, but the views were always obscured by people sitting on the floor or at round tables in front of them, so they were not very accessible for photo takers without having to ask for people to move. There were also giveaways to celebrate the 5th Anniversary of Anime Pasadena, but we arrived too late and decided not to participate since they had run out of everything we would have been interested in. However, other than these small letdowns, we had a great time and experienced a lot without feeling overwhelmed.

One lingering question I had about the convention management was that there was a dedicated convention center staff member in the Entertainment Hall (Dragon Hall Z) catching everyone at the door and verbally directing them to go straight downstairs towards the Main Stage area. The whole ground floor was off-limits to convention attendees for undisclosed reasons. It would have made more sense to have physical cordons, like retractable-belt barriers, and a sign put up to communicate this in addition to having a staff member present to ensure compliance.

In closing, Anime Pasadena was time and money well spent, and I encourage any anime fan who will be in the LA area in early November to plan for next year’s convention!

Final Judgments

Venue: 5/5

Staff: 5/5

Organization, Layout & Management: 4.5/5

Organization, Media Use: 5/5

Attendance: 5/5

Affordability: 4/5

Overall: 4.75/5

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Copyedited by: Peggy Sue Wood | @pswediting