According to Wikipedia, Overload is considered to be the biggest anime convention in New Zealand. Armageddon may be bigger, but that's general pop culture. Didn't stop pop culture from leaking its way into this anime convention, though. I ended up seeing some what I believe to be Call of Duty cosplays.

That's right: I was in Overload for the first time. I wanted to see what it was all about: what goes on inside this massive anime convention, which, according to Wikipedia, brought in 8000 people last year. I'm curious to see the numbers for this year!

So, I spent $40 for a two-day ticket and waited for the day of reckoning, that being:

SATURDAY

I arrived just as it started at 10 am, and started walking around the stalls, all located in The Cloud. I knew I wanted to focus on the main stage events; the ones with exclusive guests, like Castle Swimmer creator, Wendy Martin, and voice actor for Tohru from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, Yuuki Kuwahara. But the first event would start at 11, so that was plenty of time for me.

There were too many stalls for me to count, but if I'm not mistaken, there are more than 200 stalls in this event alone. And those were just the artist stalls. I ended up not getting anything from there, and my fate may be to only return from Overload with the free booklet they give out to people there. It was hard not to just go spend money everywhere; I even had a backpack for this!

As a side note, there was a concerning lack of Sailor Moon art in The Cloud: I think I counted less than five stalls which offered some Sailor Moon merch. We gotta up those numbers, those are rookie numbers! There was a surprising amount of Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail merchandise though, and even more original art showcased, and the latter is a win for me. They all genuinely looked so good, but unfortunately, money management comes first.

There was also a maid cafe at the end of The Cloud, but I'm not going to cover that because I didn't go in there. I'm already broke as is. But here it is, as proof that it exists:

So once I was done looking around, I went to Shed 10, where all the exclusive events are. You had art showcases for the special artists coming to this year's Overload: Acky Bright, Wendy Martin, Kaoru Mori, Aki Irie, and Ilya Kuuchino. Yosuke, a Singaporean cosplayer, had her stall near the stage, where you could buy her merch and get autographs. This was where I stayed for most of my time in Overload.

Shed 10 was also where we saw two stalls from two clubs from the University of Auckland: one by the Anime and Manga Club, and one from the Game Developers Guild. The GDG had a game where you ran over babies with a speeding car and beer multipliers. It was hilarious, even if I only scored around 300 points before running out of time. I stopped by the Anime and Manga Club and did a short interview with them regarding random matters: you can read that here.

Right next to the GDG was a Miku wall, where you could draw your Hatsune Miku on the wall (so that's where they get the name) or leave a message. This was my overall contribution:

Anyways, another thing I want to highlight is Open Stages, where some cosplayers would come on stage and perform bits for the audience, mostly dance routines. Some came in groups resembling idol groups and performed a couple of songs. Others sang them, either in English or Japanese. It was nice seeing everyone so enthusiastic about this. Now, I won't document them here; I was mostly walking around, looking for anything else I might have missed in the event.

And more things I did find. For example, a truck from the Auckland Libraries, filled with manga. Yes, the Waitemata Local Board is one of the sponsors of this event, and they brought some manga from their libraries for us to read. I was pleasantly surprised to find they had some volumes of Cardcaptor Sakura and Sailor Moon; I almost thought those had become lost media with how rarely I see them in pop culture. Don't shoot the messenger.

The front had Overload merch, which I didn't buy. But there was also a place where you could try on yukatas and try some calligraphy. That's also where the autograph booth was for the special guests, which by the way, ran right in front of the only toilets in Shed 10. I ended up going to The Cloud to go pee whenever I needed to.

Back at The Cloud, there was also a zone with anime-based cars: cars with anime characters and related imagery plastered all over them. I don't know if they're just for showcasing, or if you could actually buy them.

But that was enough walking around, and I got back to Shed 10 just in time to catch the first event of Overload 2025:

Tamashii Taiko Drummers

We start things off with extremely powerful and impactful taiko drum performances from Tamashii Taiko Drummers. Watching them, you can see the synchronization and coordination between every member, so that every impactful hit arrives at the same time to maximize said impact. There's almost a melody of sorts that can be heard in the drums. Even with some hiccups in their performances, they were able to quickly get back on their feet and continue as if nothing had happened.

I would say the lady on the bottom of the stage had the hardest job of them: alternating between two different drums, and also acting as a metronome for the rest of the performers on stage. And unlike them, where they can swap out performers for others for different performances, she was pretty much stuck there, with no one to replace her. It was the most impressive part for me: she's part of the reason the others can deliver the big impacts in sync.

It did drag on a bit as we got to four performances, but the power and precision didn't waver during that. It's a very strong and impressive opening to Overload 2025.

9/10.

Acky Bright Q&A

This Q&A was surprisingly good. Going into the Q&As in general, I was expecting them to be standard back-and-forth between the interviewer and special guest. But instead, Acky opened with a short "guess the character I'm drawing" game. I answered Tomie for Gandalf, and I don't know why I did that.

I had brought a notebook to jot down any interesting things I learned from these sessions; I ended up filling a lot more than I expected. It was interesting seeing how he comes up with characters, and a lot of technical details were revealed, like the differences between drawing in black and white and color, regarding time taken and overall quality. I had learned quite a lot from this session, and it was engaging enough that I didn't feel bored during it. Just when I thought it was starting to drag out, the event was over. Perfect length for me.

9/10.

Wendy Martin Q&A

The one time I read Castle Swimmer, it was just the first chapter, then I got bored and moved on to sci-fi. It wasn't my thing. But a lot of people seemed to be really into that webtoon: half the audience questions started with some variation of "Oh my gosh, I just want to say I'm a huge fan of Castle Swimmer!" So she seemed like a big deal, and I loved the enthusiasm involved. I feel like this Q&A attracted more people than Acky Bright's did.

I missed the first 20 minutes of this Q&A for reasons. But I did manage to arrive in time for the audience Q&A, and it was fairly basic, although the topics were far from that. It's a fairly interesting mind to get into: making comics for LINE Webtoon, with an endless canvas space. I, too, ended up learning quite a bit from this event. Chief among which she identifies as a crab.

7/10.

Yuuki Kuwahara Q&A

This was unique in that no photos or videos were allowed during this Q&A session. But what I will say is that Yuuki Kuwahara was surprisingly short. Like, shorter than I expected. I think it's okay to describe that: her face is already on MyAnimeList, because privacy is a relic of a time gone by (Sean Parker, The Social Network, 2010).

She was a joy to watch, with her infectious smile and voice. And a lot of people turned up to see her; it's Tohru from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, the epitome of chaotic wholesomeness! And she gave us some insight as to what it's like working in this industry.

And she reminded everyone that she knows her job when she voiced Overload's mascot, Nindoro, with some prewritten voice lines. The change in her normal voice to her Nindoro voice was shocking, and I think it served as a good reminder that she is great at her job. It felt like it was an anime character talking to us in the flesh!

Overall, very fun and interesting, although most of the time was spent on the regular Q&A rather than the audience Q&A. To be fair, the questions the presenter asked were still interesting.

8/10.

Anime Trivia

Coming from our own Anime and Manga Club, or the AMC, this was easily the best part of Saturday. I was expecting a Kahoot-type situation and was pleasantly surprised to see that it wasn't. To be fair, the site might crash due to the sheer load.

There were three stages, the first being true or false. It covered popular anime, like SPY x FAMILY and The Apothecary Diaries, alongside lesser-known anime like Dr. Stone. For legal reasons, that's a joke.

I got eliminated after question 7.

The second stage involved opinions of audiences: the remaining people would choose between two options on opinion-based questions, like "Who would win: Goku or Saitama?" (So that was what the blackboard was for at their stall.). People would come up on stage, write their choice, and then the club would take the audience's opinions on the answer. (Goku won, obviously.) Whoever picked the popular opinion (that's the name of the game!) would step forward, and whoever didn't would stay. The game went on for a while, until there were only four people left.

Then those four people went to the third stage, "Categories", where the players were given a category to put down an anime title. The hosts would then go around and ask random audience members for their anime titles. The players need to have different titles from each other and from the ones the audience throws out. So it was exciting on the audience's end, because you get to decide if one player stays alive to the final three, or not, just with one answer.

This is a level of audience participation I haven't seen in a long time, and it became fun on all fronts, whether you were eliminated or still in the game.

Overall, this was easily the best part of Saturday. The games were novel and fun, and kept people active. And the audience participation aspect as the game went on was very genius: I haven't seen anything like that before. Or maybe I just don't watch enough game shows.

10/10.

Cosplay Parade

And so begins the fashion show. The cosplay parade went by very quickly; if I'm not mistaken, it took around 15 minutes. Just a quick flyby of some people showcasing their cosplays for Overload. But that felt like a preview for the last big thing on Saturday, the-

Overload Cosplay Competition Presentation 

Now, I missed pretty much all of the names of the cosplayers in this competition, so I won't announce who won which prize. The competitors would enter the stage, and SparkyCosplays (the host) would tell us which character they were, and the process of making that cosplay. Some of them were mind-boggling - we're talking over 20 hours of work done for just one aspect of the cosplay, for some of these people.

It's very impressive seeing all this effort being put into the cosplays, and the fruits of their labor definitely shine. But the number of people enrolled in this competition meant that it started to drag a bit. Not that there's much we can do about that if we really want to highlight the hard work these people put in to become their favorite characters. If the Cosplay Parade was a fashion show, the Cosplay Competition is an analysis of each costume showed.

Speaking of favorite characters, there were three Sailor Moon cosplays: Queen Serenity, Black Lady (full name is potentially a spoiler), and Sailor Moon herself, who wowed the audience with a skit where she became the other Inner Senshi through a suitcase on stage. Those were my favorites, and I was hoping one of them would win in some capacity.

Oh yeah, skits. Some of these cosplayers had skits to go along with their cosplay, where they would perform bits. And every time Sparky announced the cosplayer would be doing a skit, the audience erupted in cheers. My favorites were Kachina from Genshin Impact and Victor from Yuri On Ice; the former was a hilarious spoof of Philomena Cunk complete with rickroll, and the latter was extremely entertaining, with great sound mixing and banter between Yuri and Victor through a video call format. Now, reading the FAQ, all audio needs to be prerecorded: no live audio. But it was impressive that I genuinely thought Victor was speaking on stage, and that it wasn't a prerecorded conversation.

But anyway, the winners, which I will not announce out of fear of getting their names wrong. At that point, I had already forgotten which character was which besides the Sailor Moon ones because I watched that show (okay, just the reboot, which was something), and it didn't even matter because none of them won. There were three judges' choices, and a third, second, and first place. I was able to find on Instagram two of the judges winners: @silenceinteal as Victor from Yuri On Ice, and @cosmic_batt as Coco from Witch Hat Atelier. There was an overall winner as well: best costume AND skit. I remember the trainer from Pokémon X&Y won, I think her partner's name was Sylvia.

Regardless, congratulations to all the winners of the cosplay competition!

Also, Sparky reminded me a lot of Effie from The Hunger Games.

And with that, Saturday came to a close. By then, the sky was dark, and people were closing up shop and ready to head home and relax. I was, too; this was so much more fun and interesting than I expected. The Q&As were genuinely interesting, and the fact that they got so many people from around the world, Japan included, because this is an anime convention, was impressive. The Anime Trivia game was fun, and it's amazing seeing the skill and time cosplayers are willing to go through to become their favorite characters, all highlighted on stage. This event was so much more than I expected it to be.

Oh, what's that? There's still the next day?

SUNDAY

So Overload runs until Sunday, so I decided to cover Sunday as well. It was raining quite hard when I woke up, and the rain was still going on throughout the day as the first people walked in.

There were notably fewer cosplayers today than yesterday; I'm guessing it's because the cosplay competition was yesterday. But there was still the parade tonight, just like yesterday.

After some more looking around The Cloud, I ended up caving in and bought a Sailor Moon poster from sainteve, Row A. It caught my attention from when I walked into The Cloud for the first time, and continued to keep my attention whenever I passed by them. It costs 12 dollars, but the quality is very nice, and it reminds me of an old pulp fiction magazine. Maybe someone should make a review of that movie.

But we still have more events to go through. We start things off with:

UoA Anime and Manga Club DJ

Like Saturday, we kick things off with a musical performance, brought to us by the University of Auckland's Anime and Manga Club, with DJ sleepy~j. Now, truth be told, DJ isn't really my thing, and the opening felt quite weak. However, as the performance went on, it became more cohesive, with four people waving lightsticks to the beat. I feel like the weak opening shows how hard DJ can be: you need to mix multiple songs into one and make it sound not just cohesive, but great, for 30 minutes. That's right, the DJ went for 30 minutes straight. That's impressive in my books.

I don't have a lot to say about this event. I'll give it a 7/10, mostly because of the weak opening to the DJ session, but also because it picked up its pace at the end, and the fact that the DJ could hold it for 30 minutes.

Kaoru Mori & Aki Irie Q&A

No photos or videos were allowed in this event, which was surprising. But considering there doesn't seem to be any photos of them on Wikipedia, I'll assume it's for anonymity.

What was also surprising was that this Q&A went on for an hour and a half, and I was expecting to be bored at the end of it. But the fact that there were two different mangakas on the stage meant there was lots of variety, especially with their works being published now: Kaoru Mori with A Bride's Story, and Aki Irie with Go With The Clouds, North-by-Northwest. Both are very different: one is set in Central Asia, with many Mongolian references, and the other is a detective story set in Iceland.

These are also long-running manga, and I was glad I was able to ask how they both planned out their stories over such a long time.

Overall, the variety between the two manga made the hour and a half duration fly by in a breeze. You were constantly learning something new, and whenever you got bored, you could simply focus on the other mangaka at the table.

8/10.

Yosuke Q&A

Fortunately, photos and videos were allowed here. Unfortunately, there were no audience questions. I was constantly checking the time, thinking, "Surely, we've got to be starting the audience questions now, right?" Or, at least, that's what I thought I would be thinking. But while you're there, Yosuke's story is very interesting as she navigates through the world of cosplaying in Southeast Asia. We also see her dedication on hand, with her story of travelling to Indonesia just for an Alhaitham photoshoot. (It's Bali, it's always Bali, because it's not like there are 17,000 more islands in Indonesia; why don't you try visiting Bandung or Surabaya for a change? We're pretty big too. You want islands? Try Maluku, then stop by Palu.)

But short Indonesia rant aside, she also shared her YouTube channel/podcast, COSSIP, or "cosplay gossip". But even more interesting was an event called COSSET. The way I take it, you sell your old cosplays there, and other people can buy them for cheap. The aim is to make cosplaying cheaper and more accessible, which, now that I think about it, wasn't really a thing back in Southeast Asia. I don't know, I've been living in Indonesia almost my whole life, and I didn't see that. COSSET might actually be the first of its kind, but I could be wrong.

Now, the other explanation is that I've been living under a rock regarding anime for a long time, and you would be right.

While her stories are interesting and cover a lot of ground, I would have loved to see some audience participation involved in this. And truth be told, I'm not that into cosplaying; it's just a personal taste. But her stories are interesting enough and cover so much about cosplaying, that at a certain point, I didn't mind we weren't going to have any audience questions.

8/10.

Ilya Kuvshinov Q&A

No photos or videos allowed in this event, and considering that I couldn't find his face on Wikipedia, I'll also assume it's for anonymity.

Anyways, this is where it started to get boring. I found myself scrolling through my phone more than I expected to. Maybe it's because I'm not familiar with his work. To be fair, I didn't know who Acky Bright was back then, but I recognized some of his artwork when I saw it. I did watch Cyberpunk Edgerunners, though, so I felt like I should have been more interested in that end. In fact, he directed the music video "Let You Down", the ending theme of Cyberpunk Edgerunners.

And his situation was very interesting: an international person working in the heart of the Japanese animation industry. That's a very interesting side to explore, which they did. But after that, the specialty started to wear off. Because we had already covered the fact that he's a Russian working deep in the Japanese anime industry, everything else felt fairly normal. We had already covered artists before with Acky Bright, and to an extent, Wendy Martin and the Kaoru Mori and Aki Irie combo. So what else could there be to explore, besides his international status in the anime industry?

At least with Kaoru Mori and Aki Irie, they are making long-running manga, so it's interesting to see how they plan out their stories to make sure it doesn't go off the rails. Wendy Martin did come after the artist Acky Bright, but there was still more to learn based on the format she works in, as well as the story told in Castle Swimmer. Maybe I'm just more interested in the process of writing rather than drawing or illustrating.

5/10.

Overload Art Competition Award Ceremony

There were two more competitions in this year's Overload, the first being an Art Competition, where you make a hero to ward off bug-monsters. That's the general gist I got. We got a load of different artists drawing different characters. Lena and Grin reminded me of a friend's art style, but my favorite was Wanzhao. But who actually won?

Being judged by Aki Irie, here are the winners:

Third place went to Tanvir Khakh with the character of Damien Essos.

Second place went to Sarah Yang with the character of Qian.

First place went to Oscar Fang with the character of Ari.

I didn't take any photos of the competition, but Overload did showcase the artworks in Shed 10, and I have a photo of some of them:

Congratulations to all the winners!

Captain Patch - It's Wheel of Chaos

This was easily the best part of Sunday. I had no idea what to expect going into this event, but it turned out to be a game show. A highly chaotic game show. Captain Patch repairs cosplay items free of charge, and this game show is all about repairing broken cosplay items, with a twist: each team can get two items, and various cards to either boost them or sabotage the other team.

I'm guessing they saw the political landscape of 2025 and decided two can play the same game, because this year introduced Australia vs New Zealand. Two cosplayers for each nation, although Australia had three players, with two of them being from Illustris, a sponsor of the event. As a compromise, only one member of the Illustris duo could be on stage at any given moment, but they could swap out freely.

After some research on Instagram, I found out the contestant names that I didn't write down the first time around: Team New Zealand had @sparkycosplays and @perridottle, and Team Australia had @owldamone and @illustrismodels.

I remember the ball of duct tape Australia got, because it proved to be a huge help with them. So New Zealand then brought out the "gloves" card: one member had to wear gloves for 20 minutes, according to the egg timer. So then Australia brought out the sabotage card: they can sabotage New Zealand for 15 seconds. Naturally, the gloved member went to the timer, twisted the egg to zero, and trashed the table (no flipping over, sadly). And from there, it only got even more insane. I remember one instance where Australia played this card, where the other team could go out and buy items, but they had to run outside. While it was raining. And also, it means there will only be one person on the New Zealand table until that person comes back. That person was SparkyCosplays, by the way.

It was just 40 minutes of pure chaos, and I couldn't look away. And turns out, they weren't even keeping score, because at the end, they asked the audience (one audience member) who should win. By threatening a small doll of Nindoro, New Zealand won. Looks like Australia's "help I have a wife and kids and lost twice in a row and we'll give you a small wacky wavy man" was no match for "keep [Nindoro] in mind as you vote" (with a mental knife pointed at his nonexistent throat). I was able to find that video here. (I was sitting in front of that guy.)

Once again, this was the best part of Sunday for me.

10/10.

Cosplay Photo Competition Award Ceremony

Chloe Constable's photo was my favorite, and I don't really know why. Maybe it was the cosplay itself? It had an old, rugged look to it.

The judge's recommendation went to David Fu, who I remember was a photo of Beidou from Genshin Impact, taken over a rocky beach with crashing waves in the background.

Third place went to Eleen Tseng.

Second place went to Yumi L.

If I'm not mistaken, first place went to Sutiporn K., with a photo of a gun girl lying on the grass.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Cosplay Parade

This one was just a quick flyby of more cosplayers, just like the one yesterday. But there was no competition to follow it.

And with that, Sunday, and thus, Overload 2025, came to a close. Now we could go home and relax before we went back to university the very next day. While Sunday was fun, it wasn't as fun as Saturday. Maybe it's because the magic happened on Saturday, when you have just walked in and you don't know what is going to happen. Especially so because this is my first time in Overload, and I haven't been to a single anime convention beforehand. I know, I've been living under a rock with this.

Conclusion

Overload was surprisingly fun. I thought most of the fun would come from walking around the artist stalls in The Cloud, but the special guest interviews in Shed 10 were so interesting that that's where I stayed for most of the time. You really get a great overlook into the world of anime and manga through many people working in the industry.

That's not to say The Cloud was disappointing; far from it. You can see so many artists who love what they do and are now able to make money out of their work, and not just in the stalls. You have cosplayers all around who have given so much time and energy to become their favorite characters, which I can't imagine myself doing. But these people did it regardless, and I commend them for it.

I thought I had essentially thrown away $40 and was pleasantly surprised to come out with so much more knowledge of the anime and manga industry, and a further $12 taken out of my pocket. But at least I got a pretty cool poster to put up on my wall! Once I take out a further $4 to buy the bluetack needed.

Will I come back for next year? If I can. It depends on how much I get screwed over by the university and my bank balance. But if I can, I look forward to hearing more from industry experts and buying a bit more artist merchandise.