On the 5th of March, I cosplayed Reze from Chainsaw Man alongside my good friend Pie @piedivide as Denji! We spent the whole day out in the city of Adelaide, and I wanted to write a report about the fun time we had!
All under the cut!
Background
We decided that we wanted to cosplay Denji and Reze after watching the Reze Arc movie in cinemas together during January. Although, we weren't able to do the cosplay until March since I didn't buy the cosplay until the middle of February aha.
I was going to buy it much earlier, but I had other commitments to pay for (such as my university graduation fees). Pie already had his cosplay ready so he was waiting for me, so I felt bad that it took such a while to acquire everything on my end.
I ordered from Doki Doki Cosplays, as the only website that had the outfit and the wig available. The plan was to use Miccostumes, as they now have an Australian warehouse to ship from but the Reze costume was completely sold out.
Luckily, the cosplay came rather quickly despite me not paying for express shipping! I tried it on and it fit wonderfully, so we planned on cosplaying earlier. Unfortunately, it was extremely bad weather on the day we chose with storms, so we canceled our plan and decided to do it another time.
And that's how we got here!
Overall Plan
Arrive at Pie's house by 10:30am
Fill in petrol before heading to city
Arrive at 11:30am by car (my car in fact)
Walk around Rundle Mall, have something to eat
Explore the MOD exhibition
Have a drink at Frankie's on Franklin
Visit Amuse Game Center and play some games
Visit Chinatown and Adelaide Central Markets
Have dinner at the Pancake Kitchen from 5pm
Do Karaoke from 6pm
Visit Paradigm Zone at 8pm to kill some time.
Watch Nirvana: The Band - the Show - the Movie at 8:50pm
Leave at around 11:00pm
Morning
Pie and I planned out our cosplay day the night before (as we were busy before that point), so we went to sleep rather late. We bought the tickets for the movie and paid for our parking during this time to ensure that the next day would go smoothly!
I woke up at 7am despite staying up late as I wanted to make sure I had time to do my makeup. I was rather hungry upon waking, so I had two pieces of toast quickly before becoming Reze. I foolishly decided to wash my makeup brushes during this time and also used expired contour powder since that's all I had LOL.
For the wig, I had to use a shit ton of bobby pins and gel to keep the wig on my head and the front strands in their shape. I made a mess in the bathroom sink since I was doing some last minute wig cutting but it was worth all the trouble!
Ta da! I'm Reze!
I took some pictures and videos on my phone before heading out to Pie's house at around 10am to make it on time. I live about 30 odd minutes away, depending on how the traffic is. I always say I wished I lived any closer, but alas.
Before heading to the city, we went to fill in more petrol. I had about half a tank left, and I knew it would be best to fill it up now...especially with how bad the prices are here in Australia. $2 per liter is crazy work, I'm only lucky my car is pretty economic and doesn't have a huge fuel tank.
Lucky for me, Pie has a Costco membership so I could get cheaper petrol LOL (thanks again!!)
Then, we arrived at the city!
We bought this 24 hour ticket for the parking where we had to enter and exit on the same day for about $18. It was my first time actually driving through a parking lot like this, the gate opened automatically when it read my number plate. I parked on the second floor and we took the lift down to start our day!
Day
We actually got recognized from the get go. We were waiting to cross the road and this girl came up to us and asked if we were cosplaying Denji and Reze, and said we looked great! Pie and I felt so giddy, we weren't sure if anyone would at all.
It felt good.
First off, we went to get some food. Pie didn't eat anything while I only had two measly pieces of toast, and we needed energy for all the items we had planned on our agenda. Eating is very important, even when you're the Chainsaw and Bomb Devil.
I had an almond croissant (where I learnt I was saying almond wrong the whole time) and Pie had a ham sandwich! Reze's front hair part kept getting in my way so I had to move it to the side when I wanted to eat anything LOL
Then, we stopped to watch a magic show being done by this very funny Japanese guy. The Adelaide Fringe was currently running during this time, a period filled with fun show and performances from performers all around the world.
He blew fire guys. And sounded like Osaka-san in a good way. I love magic.
We entered into Shin Tokyo, the anime store of Adelaide! No one recognized us in there but we bought two Pochita charms since we were obviously Reze and Denji and needed them. I left my Pochita in my bag since I had nowhere to clip the poor guy.
So cool.
We walked around a little more, before deciding to head to the MOD building to explore their newest exhibition: Beginnings! It's a museum where you can see and interact with various exhibits, such as feeding this giant beast machine renewable and non-renewable energy, making your own little creature, go shopping for food, making stars appear and making music!
There was even an exhibit that reminded me a lot of Severance, since it was decorated like an office and had the same kind of computers and desks. Pie and I spent the time messing around there, trying to complete all the activities.
We even made a stop at the Adelaide Convention Center to take some cool photos before we went to the museum in fact. Look at our epic pictures.
Once we were done with MOD, we headed to Frankie's on Franklin! It's a cool cafe with a second floor that we sat at. I ordered a iced strawberry matcha, while Pie ordered iced chocolate that was deemed rather sweet according to him.
The main idea here was that we had to kill time until 5pm, when we would eat at the Pancake Kitchen. So, we scrolled on our phones for a little bit and then we headed to the Amuse Game Center. During our walk, I thought we could go see the Central Markets since we would probably have time.
This is when we heard "Are you Denji and Reze?" being yelled at us while we were walking across a park, and I turned right to see a bunch of school kids from afar. I yelled back "YES" to them and they all started screaming and clapping their hands. It was such a funny experience, I couldn't stop laughing. I said thank you and waved at them all, feeling famous all of a sudden.
A moment I still think about.
Unfortunately, the token machine wasn't working at the arcade when we got there, so we couldn't actually play anything. Or even play the gachapon since it also needed tokens. There was only like three people as well in there.
That sucked lol.
At that point, we left and headed to the Central Markets and walked through Chinatown!
There's this cute shop called Sakura (I think) that has loads of cute goods that is always fun to walk around in. They have tons of ichibankuji and a lot of overseas products from Japan and China that you can buy.
The Central Markets are filled with produce that are rather expensive in general but there's a cute little bookstore area. There wasn't much manga this time around but it's always nice to see books. It's also fun just walking around!
We decided to head back to Rundle Mall once we saw everything, but not before taking a stop at Victoria Square! It wasn't so busy, so we snapped some fun photos near the fountain area. The water stopped while it was my turn to be photographed and I was rather offended by this action LOL
Pie and I explored JB HI-FI and EB Games, and look what I saw. Is that my beloved Maruzensky from the hit game Uma Musume? Whoever drew that is an absolute GOAT and they deserve a pay raise. I was very happy.
Then, we headed to the Pancake Kitchen! It was my first time there actually after wanting to go for a while. It's in this little side street near Rundle Mall and inside is rather nice! We both ordered pancakes (if that wasn't obvious).
Look at how tasty they look!!!
Our drinks took forever to come and it was all Pie's fault (jk) for ordering a peanut butter shake. It was all very tasty and I would love to come again some time soon. There's another one in a location closer to both of us that we plan on visiting soon!
Night
It was finally time for Karaoke!!!
None of us really planned what we were singing this time, so we simply chose whatever for two hours. Pie did many English songs this time around, many that I knew and one that I did not. I ended up doing Hi-5 songs at one point because they had the instrumentals on YouTube and also did the Natsuki vs Nico Yazawa Rap Battle at the very end LOL
It was a lot of fun!
After that, we headed to Paradigm Zone! It's one of the coolest arcades we have here in Adelaide that's open late, having loads of rhythm games to play. The main point of coming here was that we didn't want to be standing around outside at 8pm, especially with the sun being gone.
We played two rounds of Taiko no Tatsujin, since none of the other machines were available. They had IRIS OUT on there, which was perfect considering who we were!
One of the main highlights of today was heading to the cinema to watch Nirvana: The Band - the Show - the Movie! I didn't know that these guys made a movie, I only knew them from their Update Day video.
But when Pie saw that they were showing it, we decided that we had to go! It was such a funny movie, I was laughing the whole entire time. It's so well made too, the 2008 segments felt so real. God dang it, why can't we actually go back to 2008 lol
Someone actually complimented Pie when the movie ended, but the person came back to say that they were sorry for not saying anything about me since they forgot Reze's name while I was taking a bathroom break.
And I thought that was very nice of them.
It was now time to head back home after a long day. There were loads of people out on the streets around 11pm, which included a lineup at the lifts to the parking lot we were in. You really wouldn't think the city would be this busy on a Thursday.
A group of people actually followed us for 100 meters just to say that we looked awesome while we were lining up, and I was impressed. I didn't think we'd get any compliments this late, but it felt good. I really appreciated every single person who came up to us throughout the day, and I know Pie feels the same way.
Now, getting out of the city was IMPOSSIBLE.
It was all Ed Sheeran's fault. He was having a concert and it shut down half of the road we were meant to take, so I had to do a crazy u turn AND go into the bus lane so I could turn left into one of the streets we needed to go down.
That's a sentence I thought I'd never say. Stupid Ed Sheeran and his dumb concert.
But we got out of there!
End
I headed home once I dropped off Pie and took off the entirety of my cosplay. It was such a fun day that I'm a little sad it had to end, I wish we could do this every single day.
The two of us talked online for a little bit until we went to sleep, riding the high that was this day! I woke up the next day tired as shit since my eyes opened at 8:30am and my hip was making a lowkey clicking sound every time I walked.
It was worth it.
Thank you once again for cosplaying with me, Pie!! You looked amazing as Denji and I really hope you know that I enjoyed every single thing we did together :D
Mythbusters is great because Adam Savage will be like “Could Sir Arthur have built a surface to air missile with Middle Ages technology? Probably not. Anyway here’s how to make a bomb.” And Jamie will be like “If all goes well this will not blow up instantly and kill us.” And the three other guys are trying to see if you could kill a person by throwing an egg really fast.
Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.
op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.
for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.
so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.