[AGF 2017] Animate Girls Festival: Idol hell and ikemen heaven

For people who are addicted to handsome anime boys and voice actors, there is no better place than Japan’s Animate Girls Festival (AGF) 2017. From 3rd November to 4th November – just two days, it would attract more than 77000 visitors. Well, basically 99% of them are girls.

Why is AGF so damn inviting like flowers to bees? Here are the reasons why.

▍Show Off Your Love

9:30 am. A cool winter day in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, but it didn’t stop thousands and thousands of girls with suitcases from gathering outside Sunshine City, the venue where the four-hall large event was held. According the size of their suitcases, it was obvious they would sweep away all merchandise sold there in a second – but this wasn’t what was eye-catching.

The most prominent thing was their bags.

From the look of one’s bag, you know how much dedication she had.

These ladies were accompanied by their princes from Uta no Prince-sama.

Looking fashionable with these B-Project idols.

Kicking ass with Bungo Stray Dogs.

They took their students from I-chu out on a field trip.

These girls forced the NEETs from Osomatsu-san to go out and be social.

She had a nice date with many cute Atsushi from Cute High School Earth Defense Club Love!.

Apart from showing off their love, AGF was also a good place for exchanging goods, especially when they had a missing item in the collection!

▍Merch

AGF was basically a hellhole for pouring money. Every booth was there to sell event-exclusive and future merchandise. Here are some examples.

These Gintama and Yuri!!! on ICE products won’t be available until December, but they were already available for preorder at the venue.

These Touken Ranbu badges were AGF and Nitroplus Online Store exclusive.

These Ensemble Stars buns were truly AGF exclusive, so they were all gone in just a few hours.

Want to get these rare A3!xTaiko no Tatsujin stuffed toys? You could pre-order them and get them earlier before most people.

But this also meant the queues were so damn long.

At some booths, especially idol franchises’ booths, everyone was given a ticket with an assigned time slot, which was usually a few hours later than the time that person got the ticket. Yet, it didn’t mean you were free to buy anything you want as long as you arrived on time.

You had to queue again.

Yes, the ticket only guaranteed a place in the queue. There was no guarantee on how many or which products you could purchase, because one person could only get a limited number of items, and some items could be sold out.

QooApp received an A3! ticket at 11:00. It said we should head back there at 15:30 and we did. In the end, we reached the purchase counter at 16:30. When we finally got the beautiful Mankai Company Flyer Collection as well as Masumi and Tsumugi plastic stands, we all agreed that an hour didn’t matter at all.

▍Get Pampered

While most booths were there to show their best collections, some were there to pamper the ladies.

This place was where people could rest in a Kotatsu with the lovely brothers. If you want to get pretty for this grand AGF party, go to the manicure corner here to get Osomatsu-san on your nails.

At The Thousand Noble Musketeers’s corner, You could practise in this mini shooting range and get presents. Don’t forget to take pictures with Brown Bess after that!

If showing off your love was not enough, you could show off your amazing skills by playing Uta no Prince-sama Shining Live.

For a Doki Doki experience, Ikemen School offered AGF-exclusive audio stories. Ray Blackwell from Ikemen Revolution, Date Masumune from Ikemen Sengoku, Leonardo da Vinci from Ikemen Vampire, and Vincent van Gogh from Ikemen Vampire would speak in your ears as your school mate, of course, as a boyfriend too.