Anime Fest+ 2025 has concluded, but it might not be remembered much in the months to come.
Anime Fest+ 2025 concluded last weekend, running from 19–20 April, 2025 at IOI Mall Damansara in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The event was organised by Comic Fiesta, which runs a much larger annual event also called Comic Fiesta, and will likely do so again later this year. Anime Fest+ 2025 thus comes across as a smaller offshoot of the main event, serving to satisfy local cravings for an anime-centric convention before Comic Fiesta, and other larger events like it, return later in the year.
Don’t be fooled by its title, however. This year’s Anime Fest+ 2025 wasn’t only about anime. It also featured plenty of gaming-related events, booths, and content, leaving its identity and purpose a little vague. Sure, the title is Anime Fest+, but when PC gaming booths are included in the main hall and the cosplay competition is mostly attended by gaming enthusiasts, it seems just a tad misleading.
Admittedly, we’re splitting hairs here, as it didn’t seem to hurt the success of this convention much in the end. Here’s how Anime Fest+ 2025 went down.
Anime Fest+ 2025 event layout weirdness
Anime Fest+ 2025’s venue IOI Mall Damansara, which might be better known to Malaysians by its former name Tropicana Gardens Mall, isn’t known to be a popular mall to begin with. As an event venue for a convention like this, it’s awkward at best. The mall’s convention centre simply isn’t big enough to play host to an event of this size on one floor. Thus, its layout spans three floors in the mall–a fact that might be impressive out of context, but in its execution ended up being underwhelming at best, and annoying at worst.
On the mall’s CC floor, visitors can find the Info Counter and Art Market in the mall’s main atrium. The Art Market might be mistaken as a gated-off artisan market for everyday mall-goers, seeing as it’s a segregated zone populated by dozens of booths on the mall floor. It’s separate from the rest of the entire event, save for an info counter, and inaccessible to everyone who doesn’t have a ticket.
To get a ticket, you’d have to go up to Level 1, and queue up at the Ticketing Counter before going back down a level to enter the Art Market. The rest of the event is three more floors above Level 1 on Level 3A, where the Exhibition Hall, Main Stage, Cosplay Market, Coffytiam (an event merchandise store), and more reside. Hence, you’ll be doing a lot of walking up and down the mall just to see the event in its entirety; even more, if you want to revisit zones on different floors.
When I asked the event staff why the Art Market was so far-flung from the main event floor, I was met with a predictable answer: lack of space. The Cosplay Market is already on the event floor, and there just isn’t enough room to accommodate the Art Market booths downstairs. It’s still weird that the Art Market exists so separately from the main event as a gated-off entity of its own, but it is what it is.
So how was Anime Fest+ 2025?
Organisational oddities aside, Anime Fest+ proved to be a fun, if somewhat forgettable, fan convention. Cosplayers showed up in droves for anime like One Piece, Haikyu!! and Jujutsu Kaisen, but there were–to my eye, at least–more in numbers for video games like Honkai: Star Rail, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, and Genshin Impact. This much was at least true of the Pose-off cosplay competition on day one, which saw far more video game cosplayers in attendance than otherwise.
The main events weren’t especially enticing–save a chat with artist halca (known for performing music in Kaguya-Sama: Love is War, Wotakoi: Love is Hard for an Otaku, and more), and her later live concert, which only meant that visitors have ample time to visit the more interesting zones of the convention. Seeing as the main event was so disjointed from the rest of the event, and not to mention warmer in this Malaysian heat, cosplayers were scattered across all of the mall’s floors.
This means that there was plenty to see even while travelling back and forth from the Art Market to the Exhibition Hall. Tons of inventive cosplayers wearing detailed outfits modelled after fan-favourite anime characters stood around in groups on every floor of the mall. Further up, the Cosplay Market also teemed with visitors looking to meet their favourite cosplay artists. Ultimately, it’s the cosplayers who made this event exciting–them, and the artists huddled in the market below.
This is my entirely subjective opinion, but the Art Market–or Artists’ Alley, Creators Alley, and any such variant that essentially refers to a bunch of art booths sharing the same space–is my personal highlight of major fan conventions like these. Fantastic creativity was on display here in the Art Market, and it felt more personal and curated than the collectibles found in toymaker booths upstairs.
I didn’t have as much time to explore the Art Market this year, but that only kept me from spending inadvisable amounts of money on the many attractive stickers, prints, trinkets, and more that I saw themed after my favourite fandoms. If nothing else, the Art Market made this event worth my while.
See you at the next one
Anime Fest+ 2025 made one thing quite clear: these events would be a whole lot less attractive without the cosplayers and artists who frequent them. The sheer passion on display from fans, be it in the form of an intricately-made outfit or a batch of flashy stickers, is worth seeing for yourself. The event itself was nothing to shout about, and might be best described as an in-between convention for fans looking to bigger ones down the line.
We received media passes to attend this event.
