Dollfie Dream 20th Anniversary Project

23 minutes ago, Heartplace said:

Does anyone at Dolpa know what Dollfie Dream item 20? I'm so curious but I'm worried it's going to be something very anticlimatic ._.

There hasn’t been an official tweet about it yet but from what I could gather from some twitter commentary and the worlds blurriest photo, it seems to be the announcement of a 20th anniversary book called Let’s Dollfie Dream, coming out next summer. So…kinda, I guess. (Although there hasn’t been a DD book in a while…) I had also been hoping for something a little more exciting, but at least we can still look forward to seeing what resulted from the polls this year.

Edit: managed to find a tweet with a photo that didn’t look like the photographer was sprinting past the stage at high speed in an earthquake when they took it, yeah it’s an anniversary mook.

https://x.com/usapo/status/1733750055843328511?s=46&t=4p5nRrsi9Bdrs_0lk7Ex6w

Edited December 10, 2023 by Monty

6 minutes ago, Monty said:

it seems to be the announcement of a 20th anniversary book called Let’s Dollfie Dream, coming out next summer. 

I can corroborate. Underwhelming announcement to round off an underwhelming Dollpa.

13 minutes ago, Tierparkzone said:

I can corroborate. Underwhelming announcement to round off an underwhelming Dollpa.

Yeeah I gotta admit a lot of these 20 ’projects’ were kinda…phoned in? Like stuff that happens every year anyway (still confused why Dolpa itself is counted as one), like they had to really try to list 20 things. 
 

Still sad there wasn’t a DDH30 head design contest (that was just my wishful thinking though), but I do still think the character request submission thing was a cool project at least, even if a lot of others were less interesting. I’m just dying to know what it resulted in, I was actually expecting that to be the announcement today.

It was bad. Really bad. They ran out of guidebooks shortly after it started, so most people couldn’t participate in bingo or get the mini Volks News they were offering. You also needed a guidebook to get the drinks they were offering at the end, so we couldn’t toast at the end either.

Then they announced the book (more accurately a mook), announced LA Dolpa for Fall 2024 (which, I mean, great for Americans, but most people at the event were Japanese and you could tell they didn’t care), and… I’m not kidding… had two people dressed up like Oath of Silver Coin SDs come on stage and pretend to fight before announcing a themed cruise… it was so campy and cringe and out of character for Volks, who normally tries to convey such a refined elegance…

26 minutes ago, Monty said:

Yeeah I gotta admit a lot of these 20 ’projects’ were kinda…phoned in? Like stuff that happens every year anyway (still confused why Dolpa itself is counted as one), like they had to really try to list 20 things. 
 

Still sad there wasn’t a DDH30 head design contest (that was just my wishful thinking though), but I do still think the character request submission thing was a cool project at least, even if a lot of others were less interesting. I’m just dying to know what it resulted in, I was actually expecting that to be the announcement today.

I have to admit that I'm half hoping that they will allow whatever Vocaloid that won to be re-released.  Sakura Miku!🤞🤞 🤞

Not that I have the money right now, but still, a man can dream, right?

 

Ryu

Edited December 10, 2023 by RyuichiSakuma13

55 minutes ago, ragnamuffin said:

and… I’m not kidding… had two people dressed up like Oath of Silver Coin SDs come on stage and pretend to fight before announcing a themed cruise… it was so campy and cringe and out of character for Volks, who normally tries to convey such a refined elegance…

On the contrary I think this is very in character lol. They’ve also had those kigus before - they’ve been around a long time and I was kinda happy to see them again! They’re so campy and cringe they circle back to being endearing (let’s not forget that every Dolpa starts with the entire staff, let by two people dressed as cats, doing radio taiso.) Plus - it’s the Oath of Silver Coin 20th anniversary, which those two characters are from - so I’d actually been wondering if they’d make an appearance. When I saw the pics of them I was hoping at first they were going to announce the next dolls in that line, but it has been a good while since there’s been a cruise too, so I personally thought that was the most exciting announcement. 
(Then again I love silly campy things and Oath is my favourite Volks thing, so..)

Edited December 10, 2023 by Monty

36 minutes ago, Monty said:

On the contrary I think this is very in character lol. They’ve also had those kigus before - they’ve been around a long time and I was kinda happy to see them again! They’re so campy and cringe they circle back to being endearing (let’s not forget that every Dolpa starts with the entire staff, let by two people dressed as cats, doing radio taiso.) Plus - it’s the Oath of Silver Coin 20th anniversary, which those two characters are from - so I’d actually been wondering if they’d make an appearance. When I saw the pics of them I was hoping at first they were going to announce the next dolls in that line, but it has been a good while since there’s been a cruise too, so I personally thought that was the most exciting announcement. 
(Then again I love silly campy things and Oath is my favourite Volks thing, so..)

It might’ve been endearing if the rest of the event hadn’t felt so disorganized and underwhelming, but it just seemed like it wasn’t planned well at all. I’m really angry they charged full admission when we couldn’t enjoy the best parts without the guidebook, and on top of that the final announcements were lame and we couldn’t even get into Tenshi no Sumika Shop because there were just too many people and they suck at crowd control argh!!!

5 hours ago, Monty said:

On the contrary I think this is very in character lol. They’ve also had those kigus before - they’ve been around a long time and I was kinda happy to see them again! They’re so campy and cringe they circle back to being endearing (let’s not forget that every Dolpa starts with the entire staff, let by two people dressed as cats, doing radio taiso.) Plus - it’s the Oath of Silver Coin 20th anniversary, which those two characters are from - so I’d actually been wondering if they’d make an appearance. When I saw the pics of them I was hoping at first they were going to announce the next dolls in that line, but it has been a good while since there’s been a cruise too, so I personally thought that was the most exciting announcement. 
(Then again I love silly campy things and Oath is my favourite Volks thing, so..)

I'm seconding this, lol I'd pay money to see Super Dollfie kigus fighting. I think it's hilarious, and it's unfortunate people are so entrenched in cringe culture that they won't let themselves see the fun in it. A bunch of grown adults collecting expensive dolls, but a silly sword fight and dress up is where you draw the line? All the videos I've seen of it seemed very fun, but I've seen quite a number complain about it. 

9 hours ago, Monty said:

There hasn’t been an official tweet about it yet but from what I could gather from some twitter commentary and the worlds blurriest photo, it seems to be the announcement of a 20th anniversary book called Let’s Dollfie Dream, coming out next summer. So…kinda, I guess. (Although there hasn’t been a DD book in a while…) I had also been hoping for something a little more exciting, but at least we can still look forward to seeing what resulted from the polls this year.

Edit: managed to find a tweet with a photo that didn’t look like the photographer was sprinting past the stage at high speed in an earthquake when they took it, yeah it’s an anniversary mook.

https://x.com/usapo/status/1733750055843328511?s=46&t=4p5nRrsi9Bdrs_0lk7Ex6w

Ah, I've got to admit that's pretty underwhelming for me. Not sure what I was expected it would be that wouldn't make sense to announce before the event, but given that it was a 'secret announcement', I was hoping for... not a book. 😅 But thank-you for finding out. I'm guessing then there were no doll announcements, SD or DD?

3 hours ago, Heartplace said:

Ah, I've got to admit that's pretty underwhelming for me. Not sure what I was expected it would be that wouldn't make sense to announce before the event, but given that it was a 'secret announcement', I was hoping for... not a book. 😅 But thank-you for finding out. I'm guessing then there were no doll announcements, SD or DD?

I do like the idea of an anniversary book personally (especially when you consider the last DD book was a loooong time ago and not exactly up to date), and think it should be one of the 20, it just maybe shouldn’t have been hyped up so much as the grand finale. But oh well.

There aren’t usually DD announcements at Dolpa anyway (sometimes there are like Rin/Len reboot last year, but they are much less common than SD ones, and those are typically just collab announcements) although I’m surprised there wasn’t a SD one as the Disney announcements have been pretty consistent every December for the last few years.

I do think LA Dolpa 2024 was a pretty exciting surprise reveal though. It’s multiple times cheaper for me to travel to Japan for Dolpa than it is for me to go to the US for anything at all so there’s no way I could go to one myself but I’m really glad for my friends who have been holding out hope for another since 2019.

2 hours ago, Monty said:

I do like the idea of an anniversary book personally (especially when you consider the last DD book was a loooong time ago and not exactly up to date), and think it should be one of the 20, it just maybe shouldn’t have been hyped up so much as the grand finale. But oh well.

There aren’t usually DD announcements at Dolpa anyway (sometimes there are like Rin/Len reboot last year, but they are much less common than SD ones, and those are typically just collab announcements) although I’m surprised there wasn’t a SD one as the Disney announcements have been pretty consistent every December for the last few years.

I do think LA Dolpa 2024 was a pretty exciting surprise reveal though. It’s multiple times cheaper for me to travel to Japan for Dolpa than it is for me to go to the US for anything at all so there’s no way I could go to one myself but I’m really glad for my friends who have been holding out hope for another since 2019.

Yes, agreed. Nothing wrong with the book, just not what I was personally hoping for as the big final announcement. 😅

That's true as well, but I was sort of hoping for another Vocaloid Reboot or a Disney announcement. As much as I love DDs, the Disney dolls are something I also have my eye on. 

And yes! Same, I'm excited for LA Dolpa 2024! However, I'm in the opposite situation as you where getting to LA would be easier for me. I think I'll start planning a trip around it. Maybe I should get that Volks doll suitcase after all! It's been a decade or more since I've been to a doll meet!

LA Dolpa 2024!!!

LET'S GOOOOO

13 hours ago, Emil said:

I'm seconding this, lol I'd pay money to see Super Dollfie kigus fighting. I think it's hilarious, and it's unfortunate people are so entrenched in cringe culture that they won't let themselves see the fun in it. A bunch of grown adults collecting expensive dolls, but a silly sword fight and dress up is where you draw the line? All the videos I've seen of it seemed very fun, but I've seen quite a number complain about it. 

I mean, if that’s your thing, you do you, but not sure why you’re being so judgmental about it. People didn’t find it amusing because the whole event was sloppily run this year—they literally ran out of the guidebooks you needed to participate in the main events ten minutes after opening and most people spent hours waiting in line to get into the shop. The sword fight felt tacked onto the end because they knew people were going to be underwhelmed by the announcements. Normally I enjoy campy humour if it’s done right, but this just wasn’t it fam 🤷‍♀️ 

9 minutes ago, ragnamuffin said:

they literally ran out of the guidebooks you needed to participate in the main events ten minutes after opening 

I meant to reply to this earlier, but I actually had no idea they sold guidebooks on the day to begin with, I thought you had to buy those in advance? (they did sell out in record time online, though, so I guess a lot of people couldnt and only had on the day sales to rely on…)

 From what others have said about the Sumika chaos (and the guidebook selling out), I think it’s probably because of Miku. My friend who was there wanted a dragon kigu but said it was too scary to even go in. They may have been able to avoid that congestion if there was a dedicated area for preordering her. It’s a shame this soured a lot of the event, given that it was meant to be such a fun milestone one.

The number of yahoo auction scalpers/resellers that went is also irritating, it always frustrates me knowing how many people who actually wanted stuff miss out thanks to them (I don’t doubt they were buying up the guidebooks to get good numbers, depriving even more people of tickets). Unfortunately the only way to stop resellers is to stop buying from them, and this hobby doesn’t seem to want to stop rewarding them unfortunately…but thats a separate, unrelated rant.

1 hour ago, DesertPhantom51 said:

LA Dolpa 2024!!!

LET'S GOOOOO

Yeah, I was a bit worried they weren't going to do another. I'm going for sure. I'll need to start deciding which dolls to bring. 

3 hours ago, Monty said:

I meant to reply to this earlier, but I actually had no idea they sold guidebooks on the day to begin with, I thought you had to buy those in advance? (they did sell out in record time online, though, so I guess a lot of people couldnt and only had on the day sales to rely on…)

Ever since I started attending Dolpa in late 2018, guidebooks were part of the same-day tickets. On some occasions they offered just a ticket without the guidebook for 500 yen - but a guidebook would have been available for full price instead for anyone who wanted one.

Running out of guidebooks didn't come as a surprise to Volks either, as they announced "we may not have enough" during the initial same-day ticket queuing process. I don't mind skipping the guidebook itself, but they didn't announce that lots of Dolpa activities were tied to the possession of said guidebook. And as they knew in advance, they could've easily tied these activities to the ticket instead. - It's not like they didn't have enough bingo cards, etc. ...

Also they could've just flat out announced "we don't have enough". - I was maybe the 100th-120th person in the same-day line, and the guidebooks ran out a couple people before me.

 

4 hours ago, Monty said:

From what others have said about the Sumika chaos (and the guidebook selling out), I think it’s probably because of Miku.

Quite likely. I guess they did that to get an all time high attendance for their 50th Dolpa. Although it didn't feel much more crowded than usual. - The extra people might all have been stuck in the Tenshi no Sumika queue...

 

4 hours ago, Monty said:

My friend who was there wanted a dragon kigu but said it was too scary to even go in.

Good news for your friend: At the end, we saw how the store was picked clean of almost everything, only thing that was left were the dragon kigus - in huge amounts. - Your friend should have no problem getting them online or at DollPoint once they're properly released.

 

Thankfully my main objective this time was the dealer market, and not any of the Volks events. Therefore, I'm just bummed out instead of pissed. But if Volks can't manage to get the events in order that set Dolpa apart from other conventions, I think I'll just stick to I-Doll and Tokyo Doll show in the future.

 

Tentatively, I do mean "tentatively", A few of us in the Ecchizona Group are planning on making the trip for the Sept. (no fixed date/location yet?) Dolpa in LA. 

I've also heard rumours of an East Coast Person thinking of doing the same. (No spoilers from me! I'll let them make the announcement if/when they decide to!) 

Would be awesome to put faces and Kiddos to the names in here! 

We'll see how things progress! 

 

 

Rick

20 hours ago, DesertPhantom51 said:

LA Dolpa 2024!!!

LET'S GOOOOO

 

3 hours ago, battrastard said:

Tentatively, I do mean "tentatively", A few of us in the Ecchizona Group are planning on making the trip for the Sept. (no fixed date/location yet?) Dolpa in LA. 

Added a topic under meets. 

 

I’m super hyped by the DD book, I hope it has all the DD sculpts so far as a DD bible, but if it’s just a silly mook book as the old ones it’s fine too, one more to the collection!

Edit. I just reread my january post, glad it made to the 20th announcement 

Posted January 21

I’m super hyped with the idea of a book compiling all the existent DDs, I’d instabuy. DDs 20th anniversary yaaay!

Edited December 14, 2023 by Singer Yuna

On 12/14/2023 at 9:47 AM, Singer Yuna said:

I’m super hyped by the DD book, I hope it has all the DD sculpts so far as a DD bible, but if it’s just a silly mook book as the old ones it’s fine too, one more to the collection!

Edit. I just reread my january post, glad it made to the 20th announcement 

 

Posted January 21

I’m super hyped with the idea of a book compiling all the existent DDs, I’d instabuy. DDs 20th anniversary yaaay!

I'm not familiar with DD books, other than listing sculpts, what else do they have in them?  Outfits?  Shoes?  Bodies?  Also, what is a "silly mook book?"

 

Ryu

6 minutes ago, RyuichiSakuma13 said:

Also, what is a "silly mook book?"

Idk about existing DD books or how this one will be different, but a mook is a cross between a magazine and a book. Content-wise, mooks are more like magazines, but they have ISBNs and are made of better materials to last longer.

On 12/19/2023 at 12:56 AM, ragnamuffin said:

Idk about existing DD books or how this one will be different, but a mook is a cross between a magazine and a book. Content-wise, mooks are more like magazines, but they have ISBNs and are made of better materials to last longer.

OIC, thank you for the explanation.  I'm not sure that I would buy one, tbh.  I'm still hoping for another Vocaloid reboot.

 

Ryu

Edited December 20, 2023 by RyuichiSakuma13

The cover of the Let’s Dollfie Dream book was revealed, and preorders are currently open for it. It ships in July.

https://x.com/volks_dd/status/1783694992671682758?s=61&t=Yu0eGVZRpH3eaiC2l3hzGA

It includes special features on the Piapro (ie Miku and her variants/Rin/Len/Luka/Meiko/Kaito) and Squeenix collabs (ie FFXIV and Nier). Both of those features apparently have new official photos - particularly of the upcoming FFXIV twins. 
Besides the general DD info it also has faceup, wig styling and posing tutorials. 
There’s also a summary of the 20 year history and a roundtable discussion (kinda an informal multi person interview) with staff, which could be pretty interesting.

People who buy it will also have access to buy a blank DDH12 (Ie a flat mouth DDH01) and twintail clips.

Might be interesting to have as a collectors piece, but I’d rather see sample pages first.

I bought the 20th anniversary Super Dollfie book when it came out.  I bought it specifically for the Junichi Nakahara collaboration pics (I have a Josephine March, which is one of the head molds used for the collab).  A lot of nice pics, not only of that collaboration, but also of the La Rose de Versailles dolls and the Boys Dormitory boys that had recently been released. It also had pictures of outfit mix and match ideas, and close ups of faceup styles.  There are also a couple of interviews/articles, but I haven't taken the time to find translations.  Note that nearly the entire book will be in Japanese. 

I'm probably going to go ahead and get the Dollfie Dream version as well. If the quality is the same, it should be a nice book. 

 

I have quite a few DD books now. The old ones are cute because they come with a scale book you can cut out/scan and make into a doll sized version of the book. They're also a good catalogue of rare and grail DD from times past.

My latest acquistion was the photobook where somebody takes their DD on a journey across Japan. I don't think this is a Volks book but it's really cute.