Going to the Midland Expo for the second time, I was again overcome with excitement. This time I travelled by train; on my way from Birmingham to Telford, I saw the place full of energetic cosplayers and expo goers. When I got there, I thought the early ticket lines would still be huge, one hour after it started, but, there was no such thing, and thus I quickly entered Midland MCM Expo 2012.

Unlike last year, Tecmo Koei Europe were not present, so it was just Nintendo who was representing the gaming audience, showing their recent 3DS titles such as One Piece: Unlimited Cruise SP and Resident Evil: Revelations, however they were mainly promoting one of my most anticipated games for the Wii and that was The Last Story. It was the first item on my agenda to check out and to my surprise, the game had a multiplayer mode (I was told it was online as well), so I was involved with a local multiplayer deathmatch with six other people; it was a very fun addition and the controls worked well. Fortunately me winning the match got me a poster and a limited edition copy of the game.

After looking around the Expo for a while, I bumped into Peter Shillito, host of the Crewe radio show Nekodesu (a whole show that is dedicated to anime music), we sat down to rest at the food area to talk about the latest anime season, news, and his radio show in general. (If you want to listen to Nekodesu, it’s on every Saturday from 9pm to 11pm at http://thisisthecat.com/)

As for UK anime distributors, MangaUK had a large collection of DVD and Blu-ray sales on their booth, including the recent release of Samurai Girls which I picked up on Blu-ray along with the first season of Sengoku Basara. MVM had their usual DVD boxset selection (along with some Beez ones as well), I managed to finally get the Gurren Lagann Anime Legend boxset.

One of my favourite moments of the convention was meeting and shaking hand with, Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of some of my favourite games of all time including Chrono Trigger, Lost Odyssey and of course the Final Fantasy series; it was a really amazing moment that I can’t thank Nintendo Europe enough for setting this event up. There was also a half-hour panel on The Last Story and a Q&A session with Hironobu Sakaguchi, talking about the story and characters from the game, along with the multiplayer mode.

Apart from that the Robots Live show and DDR UK providing some arcade games, this Expo felt smaller than last year and while I really did enjoy my time at this convention, I kind of wished there was a bit more to offer.

Still I came home with another memorable experience at the Midland Expo and a good start to the convention year.

I will be at the new Birmingham MCM Expo in March and the first London MCM Expo in May, I look forward to seeing you there.