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LVL Up Expo 2019 Day 1 review

By Mark Rodriguez

It seems that LVL Up Expo has become the new Anime Vegas in the sense that it is the new con you can look forward to year after year while many other promising hopefuls vanished after that first year. While Johnny has been going to this con for the last two years, this is my first time going to one and here are my thoughts so far on day one.

We started the con by running into fellow Youtuber Jack Knives. He made appearances in VGM Episode 82 and our 2018 Holiday Special

First off this con kinda did the switcheroo in the sense that most cons have Friday and Saturday be full days while Sunday is a half day as things are wrapping up. This year however, it appears that due to it being a school day, day one started at 3PM and wrapped up at around 10, making it the short day while Saturday and Sunday will be the full days.

As for the con itself, the sheer size of the event surprised me. There are 2 floors and the entire second floor is the dealers hall, which also contains the artist alley, the autograph booths, the several video game tournaments going on and even a wrestling ring.



 It is HUGE when compared to previous cons and almost becomes a huge maze. Johnny and I both won things at a raffle held by two women showing off their demo game... and it took us quite a while to find their booth again. We didn't do too much shopping, other than a couple of 1 dollar comics (Batman Legends of the Dark Knight) and steel mugs of amazing Vintage Vanilla Soda with unlimited refills.

The panels were entertaining. We attended one that featured some of the guys behind horror icons like the Cryptkeeper and the Gremlins films. I had no idea the guy that did the voice of Ghostface (Roger Jackson) also did the voice of Mojo Jojo from the Powerpuff Girls. There was also a cool panel going down the history of horror games and how the genres changed from over the years. They discussed things like Resident Evil, Silent Hill and even Five Nights at Freddy's got a mention.

Overall a fun day and we got to meet up with some of our friends and familiar faces we see at several cons, even though I've been out of Vegas for a few years.This one person even remembered me from back in my Krillin days at Anime Vegas. the wrestling was pretty entertaining, it's always fun seeing people do power bombs and vertical suplexes in real life. Though I'm pretty sure our favorite thing of the day were those oh-so-delicious unlimited refills.

One thing this con had was a Side Quest, where you had go around and collect several items. This Chun Li Cosplayer came up to me for a pic of 'Two Rivals being friends' so we posed for a pic of Capcom and SNK shaking hands. Then we posed for this cool pic afterwards. I'm just happy people still recognize good ol' Terry Bogard.
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