Thank You For Attending London Anime & Gaming Con - Photos, Stories & Reactions

[Ferefire]

We'd like to thank all of you for attending London Anime & Gaming Con!

We look forward to seeing you all at the next London Anime & Gaming Con which will be on the 21-23 February! You can get tickets for it now HERE. You can also download the phone app at https://www.animeleague.app to view our full calendar.

Got any stories, photos or feedback? Put them in this topic Thank you all.

[Smurf21AGB]

Ok! So I love travelling and coming to Anime and Gaming Con but I wasn't very impressed with the London event this year. We left after 3 hours, it just wasn't as great as the last few we'd been to. Newcastle was epic! You had a retro gaming room where you could go in and play the different consoles which my friends were looking forward to seeing here and were vastly disappointed. Also, we overheard people were just walking in without having purchased tickets. I spent £140 on ours plus we spent a lot of money on merch and at stalls but people got to walk in for free? You should really be scanning people's tickets and allowing those who pre ordered and bought to actually enter and not just let anyone come in. As much as I love sharing our love for games and anime, it just isn't safe especially in London! People could call anyone to come in and at the Novotel no less. I just thought it was all rushed and we didn't feel there was a lot to participate in for the younger kids we had (age 13) she was incredibly bored quickly. Bring back the anime bingo and have the raffle earlier too!

[codek]

They did check tickets, although that got lax towards the *end* of the day.

Anime bingo was there too, 11am in the main stage.

The retro gaming room was 2 large rooms, LOADS of different consoles and things. Very good! This tells me the navigation of the whole place left a lot to be desired.

[Smurf21AGB]

We got in at 10am-10:15am and they didn't check anyone's tickets, they were just waving bands around and just handing them out. Definitely was because the schedule didn't say anime bingo (we went Saturday btw) and the retro gaming rooms were nowhere to be found. We asked and were told it was only table tops and some consoled but we're reserved for all the tournaments happening that day.

[bernard_645]

I went on Sunday -
The good points were:

Check-in was quick and easy to show someone my ticket and get a wristband.

The atmosphere was good/fun !

The water from dispensers dotted around made life easier on a warm day !

The issues (mostly minor) were:

Directions from Hammersmith station were poor, there's more than one Hammersmith underground station, and even the nearer one, you seem to need to go through a shopping centre and across a bus station, maybe walk the routes and make notes ?

Would have been nice to know what the food options were in advance to know if you were going to need to make alternative plans.

Maps of all the floors, would have been better instead of the single map of one floor, I don't see how you could have found the board game section without asking (up one floor, no signs by the lifts, so just look around)

The board game selection wasn't "hundreds", a few dozen would have been closer (and less if you excluded monopoly and chess!), and there was no one organizing them (as there was with the role playing games), even a small "wait here if you'd like to play a board game" area would have helped the people who wanted to play find each other!

Perhaps a little more space around the stalls as they got quite crowded, maybe arrange in little islands, rather than rows ?

The main registration/help desk near the entrance was unstaffed ~90% of the time, so had to wander around to find someone to ask simple questions (like where the board games were).

[lockbake]

I attended on Saturday. Was great to see everyone dressed up and the atmosphere was good.

However, I have serious concerns over event safety and overcrowding. One example was the escalators, people were coming up / down and because of the crowds had nowhere to go, how there was an accident I don’t know. There should have been Marshalls inside to make sure people could move around safely.

I fear profits were put ahead of safety which is disappointing for a family event. Maybe the rooms could accommodate the numbers, but not the movement of that volume of people between rooms.

I hope there is a review of the event, so that improvements can be made for the future.

[Saranne123]

Was our first visit to an anime con. I don’t think we will be going again. It cost us £75 for 3 of us, my partner and I just went for my son. It wasn’t very well signposted, when we eventually got in, there was no organisation at all. We asked some of the “staff” where to go for things and they had no clue, just said wait round here and see! We eventually found where the magic playing was and after one short game, we ended up going to the merch area, which my son loved. After walking through the gaming area, only to find it was so busy we didn’t really get a chance to play anything, we pretty much left shortly after that. So £75 to visit some merch! It didn’t really live upto expectations, it was crazy busy and no one to guide us with what to do etc as it was our first time, we felt lost in a big crowd.

[Gabs.]

Heya, we were very disappointed about the video game side, with 2 rooms without any dealers, we were expecting to buy retro video games ! And there were 2 floors just for Animes ! If we knew it was only a small amount about video games we wouldn't have payed £75 ! If it's only playing game I will go to Power up and save money ! You should have call Anime con !

[MummaJuJu]

This was our second visit to AnimeCon at The Novotel and we went again this year because last year was great fun & it was easy to park at the venue so we didn’t have to worry about using public transport. However, this year was just awful!

There were far too many people, no organisation, no control and it was far too noisy. A lot of people who attend these events are neurodivergent (my daughter & her friend included) so why on earth would you think it’s a good idea to have different types of loud music playing everywhere you went!?

It also took us forever to get a parking space at the hotel (the people in front of us even had pre-booked parking but they had as much chance as us in finding a parking space). When we finally made it into the hotel there was really loud music playing and the place was heaving with people.

My daughter & her friend couldn’t even get close to the merch stalls and after 2 hours they were completely overwhelmed and we left. 4 x full price tickets for 2 hours in a stress & anxiety inducing environment - we certainly will NOT be attending again.