I Attended ComicVket2 and MusicVket3!

The year is 2021, and among the many things plaguing modern society is a literal plague. The coronavirus continues to hinder me from either visiting Japan or attending any anime conventions, and as a result my "otaku power level" has dropped to an all-time low. I've fallen seven weeks behind on a few of the seasonal shows I've been watching, and my anime backlog stretches out for an eternity. Fortunately, there's at least one company out there dedicated to creating a convention-like space for nerds like me who are waiting for covid-19 to pass. This year marked the third year that HIKKY hosted ComicVket and MusicVket on VRChat. ComicVket is a doujinshi convention set up in the style of the real life Comiket, while MusicVket is the doujin music version of the event. This was my second year attending the events, and I'd like to share a bit of my experience with you.

Like last year's ComicVket1, ComicVket2 took place in a world modeled after real life Akihabara, the otaku city. However, this year's version of the world was massively expanded on. In the original world, you would spawn in in the middle of Akiba's main street. This year, you spawned in inside a recreation of the Akihabara Station! It's not completely to scale, but its still quite a fun attraction. You can actually get Suica IC Cards from the ticket machines along the wall. In real life, IC Cards are rechargeable cards that you can use to pay for trains, buses, meals, vending machines, and anywhere else that accepts them. In ComicVket2, you could use the the Suica card on a vending machine and purchase a Red Bull!

Like every HIKKY event, Red Bull could be spotted everywhere. The presence of the brand wasn't as overwhelming as it was at GameVket earlier this year, but you still were never far from a can of the stuff in virtual Akihabara. 

Also returning from last year was the maid café! This year's version was a bit smaller and less explicitly café-like, but it featured more digital cardboard cutouts to pose in front of than before. The maid café usually serves as the ComicVket official goods display area, and this time there was a little stand in front with mugs, hats, and shirts to look at and play around with. Trying to get a picture posing in the shirt was pretty difficult if your avatar was bigger like mine was!

The new attraction featured at this year's ComicVket was the art board! Anytime you'd wander near the middle of the event, you'd be bound either see someone's past doodles or someone doodling right at that time. Unfortunately the experience was a bit gimped if you were a desktop user, since VRChat strips a lot of features for non-VR users. HIKKY was able to engineer in one VR-only feature, the selfie camera, for all users, but somehow I would guess that it would be a lot more work to work in movable hands for all users. Still, I had a good amount of fun with it, making poorly made smiley faces and very unclear images that are supposed to be Kamen Riders. It was also fun seeing everyone else's art on display. Some people really went all out with it!

I didn't get many pictures of them, but of course the main attraction were the many many booths selling comics, art, and other random things! Like the real life Comiket, you could buy things that didn't have anything to do with comics. There were quite a few stands that had documentation on things like Unity, making 3D avatars, and one both was even selling a book on building bikes from scratch! These goods were mostly being sold through Booth, a merchandising arm of the art website Pixiv. Overall, there was a good selection of goods to browse and buy. The one thing about this event is that, compared to regular Comiket, there weren't that many derivative works for series you'd expect like Touhou, Kancolle, or UmaMusume. There was a booth selling Madoka works, at least two booths had Nasuverse related works, and I remember seeing a couple of booths selling fan books of popular VTubers from Hololive, but overall most of the art was original works. That was fine by me though, there was some amazing stuff being displayed!

The dedication to the recreation of Akihabara was absolutely incredible. You can tell the world venue was worked on for a while, since the old Sega arcade outside the station was still covered in Sega branding. Or maybe they kept it that way on purpose. Either way it was delightful to see. The one thing I regret forgetting to grab a photo of more than anything else was the recreation of the Akihabara Railway Bridge, complete with a knock-off Onoden on it's left and a Sega arcade on its right. All of the most important and classic of the main street Akihabara iconography was represented, from maids accosting you at seemingly every corner to the excessive amount of giant ads plastered on every building. A great reconstruction all around. 

  

Of course, one of the most important parts of any event is the crowd. Being held publicly on VRChat, there were all manner of interesting characters that showed up during the week. Since I wanted to interact with some of the artists and couldn't participate in the event on the weekend, I mostly hung out in digital Akiba weekdays during the morning hours US time, while most people were either in school or at work. But in spite of that, plenty of English speaking users were on in addition to the Japanese users. As one might expect from the denizens of VRChat, things could get loud, crazy, and broken, like when one user with a Warhammer 40K skin called in an aerial strike and sent all of Akiba to a fiery hell. But overall, in spite of all the trolls, oddballs, and degenerates, the crowd for the event was great. Good people and good times all around. 

I spent almost all of my week on the ComicVket side of the convention, but I did spend a good few hours on the MusicVket side. While ComicVket took place in a digital recreation of real life Akihabara, MusicVket's stage was a custom neon city themed like a dance club. 

  

The entrance to MusicVket was reached by exiting left from the starting Akihabara station (going right would take you into the ComicVket side). One you passed through a portal, you'd find yourself in MusicVket's cyberpunk dance club city, with a 1/1 scale RX-78-2 Gundam there to greet you. I really don't know why the Gundam was there outside of them already having the model for it from HIKKY's 2020 event Virtual Market 4, but it was a fun sight, especially considering I just recently finished watching the original anime. Aside from the Gundam, the MusicVket starting area featured a performance stage, complete with a large screen that featured various camera movements focused on anyone who wandered on up. It was a fun little gimmick, and I feel that if I had gotten to hang out on the weekend I would've seen some musically gifted (and ungifted) individuals take advantage of it. 

Like in ComicVket, you were never too far from a table of Red Bull. One of MusicVket's other gimmicks were its "secret club rooms." While most of the event was a futuristic city, you could also find these random rooms covered in graffiti. The one I found had a couch, pool table, and of course a table of Red Bull. It was an odd little addition, possibly brought in to fill out the slummy underbelly feel for a fleshed out cyberpunk experience. Or maybe I'm just talking out of my ass. Since there weren't a lot of people in the world when I was checking out MusicVket, I didn't see anyone hanging out in there, but I imagine it was a cool hangout spot over the weekend.

While there were many gimmicks and secrets hidden throughout MusicVket, I was only in there too check out one thing: the music! Unlike for ComicVket, I took plenty of pictures of the music booths. You could listen to a demo of the music of each artist, and some of them even included a music video that you could watch. When you walked up to the booth, a little art pop-up would spring out on the side, and it was interesting to see what each artist did with their little piece. A lot of the musicians just plugged an album cover or an alternative album cover, and the overwhelming majority simply used a render of their virtual avatar. Several booths had messages and doddles for their space, a couple of booths used real life photos, and a couple featured banners that you could take a photo with (that unfortunately needed a friend to work properly). One of my favorite booths, which featured Baroque music, had a talking tuba as its art pop-up. 

I ended up buying a lot of music and art from the two events, and since the main storefront used by the artists, Booth, has a partnership with the proxy service Buyee, I was even able to get some physical goods! I'll be showing off those in a future post, so look forward to that. Overall I had a great time with HIKKY's events this year. I loved seeing what they improved and expanded on from last year, and seeing many new and returning artists made it feel like the events are slowly but surely getting bigger every year. There was an Easter egg in the Akihabara Station that said that HIKKY is working on a permanent Akihabara VRChat world that is scheduled to release in 2022. you can guarantee that I will be checking that out when it comes, as well as next year's ComicVket and MusicVket. Until then, take care!