I’ve always wondered about Wonderfest and kind of wanted to go, but normally I find out about too late, or something that’s really not a good excuse to go comes up and I don’t go. This year I decided to go and here’s the report.
It starts as it often does, with a choice of undies. Sadly, my selection of interesting undies is severely limited. Ever since I came to Japan, my undies have been boring, as have my socks. Back in Australia, I had an exciting selection of amusing socks, superman, TMNT, colours of all sorts and designs a plenty. In Japan, one would expect and even better selection, and indeed there is!
However, when one has larger than your average Japanese man’s feet, your choice becomes horribly limited. For me, buying shoes is a chore as my size is usually just out of regular selection. Anyhoo, if you made it through that, the undies for the trip are the same ones as in this trip.
Summer Wonderfest is known for Garage-kits, which appear to be kind of homemade models/customs and cosplay. I don’t really have much interest in either, but Takaratomy did advertise having the new War For Cybertron Unicron toy for display, so since I can’t really spare 800 dollerydoos for a toy, I figured this would be the only chance for me to see one. So Off I left for Makuhari Messe Hall, once again.
The day proved to be rather warm, but the train air conditioning was nice. When I got the place, there were a bunch of people wandering about and I went to buy my ticket. It cost 2500 yen at the door, there was a very short queue to line up in and I had my ticket in no time.
By the way, tickets looks like this.
Yup, it’s a book! Darn, I wish I’d brought more than just my man-bag…..
After walking in, I noticed a lot of…
Nothing….
Many tables set up and people everywhere. I guess this is the atmosphere of the little guy at work. So for a bit of perspective, I climbed to the side and up the steps.
Wonderfest used 3 halls of the Makuhare hall, which makes it smaller than Tokyo toy show (yay)! It looks like this.
Busy hey?
First place I stumbled upon was a little Evangelion stand advertising the Netflix show. They had some huge diorama/statues to look at. I have a friend who loved Eva, so I snapped a shot for him.
And their flier advertising it on Netflix
Then as I was wandering I came across the Bandai section. They had these little versions of chogokin bots they’ve done before. They looked very cool.
Still wandering and wondering where the TT section is. While just wandering, I made my way through the Max Factory section and had an idle look. I think I should’ve had more than just an idle look as I later found this on twitter.
Gonna have to get that when it comes out. I’ve been waiting for an Ameterasu figure for ages. I really like a less chibi version, but this will do for now!
Next up, I spotted a huge Monchichi. My better half loves Monchichi, so I went over for a look and wow! It seems they mainly focuses on making plush toys, but around the corner was something special!
The special part……
This poor person in a Monchichi costume was making some kind of model, at the time they were trying to attach the legs.
Since SDCC was only a week ago, I didn’t expect much, but I did want to see that Unicron. A pleasant surprise was that they had a prototype Pirahnacon on display. Cool!
On the other side was a section devoted to Diaclone (more on that later!)
First up the stuff on the outside. The big Bumblebee was a cardboard standee, as the Bumblebee movie bluray is/was out.
The had a case with Seacons, another with Golden Price and a S.T.A.R.S display base and another with The TTmall G1 and Bumblebee Prime, a Big Convoy and 7-11 Nemesis Prime.
First off, the Seacons.
They looks super good in beast mode and Pirahnacon mode. they seem to be based on the Terrorcons from POTP and some of the headmasters. Seawing looks like he will transform like Misfire. I like monster robots, so these guys did it for me. I do wonder what the robot modes will be like as they will have a LOT of fish-bits on them. There is no denying that that Pirahnacon looks absolutely frikking AMAZING!
In the case next to that was a kind of crowdfunding based Golden Optimus. I’m not too sure how I feel about this (yes I am, I don’t care). It was shiny.
Next to that case was a case with a Big Convoy, 2 Optimi and a Nemesis.
I really liked the look of the Big Convoy. He has extra parts so you can make his, um, Big Matrix Cannon ( ?) and it’s pretty cool. He even has slightly different mammoth leg parts on the side if you look close enough. A great toy that by the way. The Nemesis Prime at the back is a 711 exclusive. It looks nice, colours are good. The G1 and Bumblebee Prime are TTmall exclusives. BB Prime is coloured to match G1 Prime. nice bold plastics that all match well, it looks BLOODY GOOD. Kinda irritates me that I’ve already acquired a normal BB Prime as that guy looks better. Oh well.
Around the corner was the Siege section.
SIEGE
They Had Omega Supreme (sexy Light piping), Ratbat (yay), Rumble, barricade and Spinister in there for me to look at. Shame Spinister doesn’t have his Targetmaster buddies with him, but he does look nice. Omega looks great and Ratbat and rumble will probably disappoint (like Condor and Ravage did), but I’ll get them anyway. I love Ratbat too much.A quick walk through the middle where the UNICRON was on display leads you to the Masterpiece cabinet. They had Lio Convoy (nice) and Blackarachnia all coloured up and looking hell sexy.
Now for the big guy.
While walking through, I got a goodie bag from the staff, which it turns out has a little surprise in it. But my eyes could not be taken off of the impressive Unicron in the middle of the room. Haslab is wanting a minimum of 8000 orders to go through with this. The price is 75000 yens, or 700 bucks (iirc). Which when I first saw it, I thought:
“What a rip off, no toy is worth that much!”
Having seen it in person, I now think
“That’s not bad value really.”
- Its good. Bloody good.
- It’s big. Bloody, incredibly, mind blowingly big
- It’s wow, just wow.
It’s so huge, if I had one, I would need to build a whole new room just to house it. It will certainly have presence in your house, I guarantee that!
First, some shots.
Now for some perspective…… Check this out!
I am sure there are heaps of photos for this guy, so get out there and get one if ya want it.
Around the corner of all that was the Diaclone section.
On the left you can see some people lining up, they are lining up for a free Diaclone man, which is how I got Gary.
Hi Gary.
I dunno if these guys come with names, but Gary is my computer game hero name, so he gets to be Gary from now on. I really like him.
Back to Diaclone and TT stand. They seem to go all out with Diaclone. While Transformers is kind of stagnating with rehashed G1 for the past 5 I think years, Diaclone is looking fantastic and varied!
The Diaclone display did look mighty fine, so fine I spent more time looking with my eyes than taking pictures… So, um, sorry.
That pretty brings my Wonderfest adventure to an end. I walked around a bit more, discovered I could order this mascot chick statue:
But while leaving I stumbled on a little shop section. I spied some Transformer-esque looking boxes and took a peek. Lo and behold a Super-con size Micron Densetsu (Armada) Convoy was mint in sealed box for 2000 yens. Since I do like it a lot and my review of the Hasbro version reflects this, I thought that since I miss playing with it, I’m gonna get this one, so I did.
So all in all a good day really. Wonderfest isn’t nearly as exciting as I wanted it to be, so that means now I’ve finally been to one, I am not going to worry about going to another. Good to get it out of my system. And when I got outside, a look through my Black bag taken from Takaratomy man, I got a see through Optimus Prime toy which is apparently based on the Bumblebee movie! Woo! I’ve also taken the liberty of scanning the fliers from my goodie bag:
The Transformers side
The Diaclone side:
Some music festival one, one side has the art work, the other the information:
And finally the one advertising the gold Prime, also a crowdfunding activity (personally I don’t see the point with this one)
Bye bye
Gary getting to know his housemates
*the thing I changed my mind on was Unicron. At first I was completely “No, there is no way that is worth that much money,” but after seeing it, I think that what they are asking for it is a pretty fair price.*
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