Japan Trip 2014 – Art of Gundam

See this post for the introduction.

In case you didn’t know/notice from my previous blog posts, I am a huge Gundam fanboy (to be fair though, I actually don’t blog all that much about Gundam, mainly cause I never find the time to build all those gunpla kits gathering dust). I grew up watching Gundam Wing as an elementary school kid (somehow convinced my parents to ignore all the “Rated T for Teen” warnings) and went on to watch (and enjoy) all the older series from long before I was born. So when I heard about The Art of Gundam exhibit, I was pretty happy to discover that it happened to overlap with my Japan trip and penciled it in to the 2 week plan.

Shinj– I mean Amuro, get in the f**ken robot

The tour opened with a cool exclusive 3D short featuring Amuro in the RX-78 fighting Char’s Zaku Custom and an un-named regular Zaku in space, seen from the perspective of White Base’s command bridge, complete with special effect lighting and all (stand up theatre).

The exhibit itself consisted mainly of copies of early character/mecha design sketches and animation frames/storyboards from Universal Century series (Mobile Suit Gundam, Zeta, Double Zeta, Char’s Counterattack, etc.), accompanied by some videos of the final produced footage. Near the end were also some really cool dioramas of highly detailed and painted gunpla kits (a mix of MGs and HGs) in some interesting glass container that gave them a super 3D effect.

The exhibit concluded with a beautiful AMV featuring footage from every single Mobile Suit Gundam series ever animated (Universal Century series, G Gundam, Gundam Wing, After War Gundam X, Turn A, SEED/Destiny, Gundam 00, Unicorn AGE, and even MS IGLOO and Stargazer), ending with footage from the upcoming Reconguista in G (G-Recon). In the same room were also some production/reference material for G-Recon (all of it looked like Eureka Seven: Ao to me). There were also cool minature models of Regild Century’s orbital elevator that showed in the PVs (looks very different from Gundam 00’s space orbitals) and the new space colonies (somewhat reminded me of SEED’s PLANT colonies).

Wish I could find an upload of the AMV, cause it was amazing and literally brought tears to my eyes… (my friends were just sitting there bored and looking at me funny). Unfortunately photos weren’t allowed inside so I didn’t end up taking many pics except outside the exhibit (like above). Gundam Guy actually has a pretty nice blog post on the exhibit if you want to find out more.

Getting off the train station where the Art of Gundam exhibit was being held

The outside of the building

Giant welcome sign

Lining up for tickets

A few gunpla on display

At the end of the exhibit was a small photo area where you could sit at the helm of White Base and pretend to be Captain Bright (unfortunately there was no one slapping action to be had)


It’s Gendou

Outside was a Gundam Cafe

Taking a look inside, it pretty much just looked like a regular cafe with some wall posters put up. Much less impressive than Akihabara’s Gundam Cafe, so we ended up skipping this (unfortunately, we never ended up getting the chance to go to either Akihabara’s nor Gundam Front’s later).

While deciding what to do next, we wandered outside for a bit and I took some photos of the sea port next to the exhibit.

Ships! Actually, there would be plenty more of that later in the trip in the form of KanColle ship girls at Comiket. Oh yesh, so many ships to come @_@

Some random sculpture, maybe a memorial of sort?

Osaka’s giant Tempozan Ferris wheel in the distance

We ended up doing a brief visit to Nipponbashi but the time spent there was so short I just combined the photos with the rest of the Nipponbashi photos in the next upcoming post. Either way, we ended up meeting back up only a few hours later for dinner. Most of the group wanted to go eat some eel, but sorrowmoon and I weren’t fans so we decided to try out KFC in Japan for the lulz

Unlike Japanese McDonald (which tastes different and 100x better), Japan’s KFC tasted just like North American KFC, except maybe a bit lighter on the oil. At least there was Fanta melon soda ^_^

They also have vastly superior restaurant interiors. Such as these fancy, super-clean washrooms.

My friend Sam and I decided to hit the arcades a bit before sleep time (forgot which arcade we went to). Spent a bunch of time playing jubeats (my absolute favourite rhythm game, which I plan on writing a simulator for in Beats2), followed by the awesome Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax.

Gogo Kirito, cut that bitc– I mean kawaii imouto!

It was both our first times playing, but I eventually settled with Shana while my friend Sam played Misaka (but later switched to Asuna). I also took two videos of Sam playing against some locals. He lost against a Taiga (currently bottom-tier but we were newbies) but won against a Yukina (currently mid-tier but the player was also a newbie).

I played a few times myself and pretty much got dominated but found the game really fun and ended up pre-ordering it from AmiAmi. Time to finally dust off that PS3 and get myself a stick!

Short post but a fun day. Next up (for real this time), Nipponbashi and Dotonbori – the land of otakus and the land of food/giant enemy crabs~

~Keripo

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/keripo/sets/72157646641414708
MyFigureCollection: http://myfigurecollection.net/blog/16585
Figure.fm: http://www.figure.fm/en/post/54196/Japan+Trip+2014+Art+of+Gundam.html