As it is way too hot in this part of the world, we’ll look this week at Illya and Chloe von Einzbern, two girls who are dressed to beat the heat. They’re a little young-looking but that shouldn’t be anything too unusual for fans of contemporary anime. As the tradition here is to feature only one figure per post, we’ll start with the white girl and then take a look at Chloe in a couple of days.
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We’ll take a short respite from reviewing hentai figures and instead look at this figure of Black Heart – not the demonic villain from the Marvel Comics universe, but the Sony-themed goddess from the Hyperdimension Neptune video game franchise. Compile Heart and parent company Idea Factory have made a number of anime-themed RPGs, most of which have languished in obscurity, but they hit it big with the Neptune series, which has since spawned numerous games, a mediocre television anime, but surprisingly few figures, meaning that any time we get to look at a figure from this series is a special moment.
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The conventional wisdom would have it that Japanese anime and tentacles go together like politics and corruption. As is often the case, the veracity of this stereotype is overstated; these days, even in adult-oriented media, there aren’t really that many tentacle-centric anime series and games. This is also true regarding figures; despite the name of this site, I don’t think I’ve actually ever reviewed a figure that incorporated tentacles as a central feature of its design, and that makes this post a watershed moment in the seven-year history of this site.
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Back in the day, getting a Native figure was a rare and exciting moment. The thrill has been lessened somewhat by the proliferation of excellent sexually explicit figures – particularly those from SkyTube – but nonetheless, Native is still amongst the best at what they do and opening up one of their figures is still a happy thing – and this site, of course, is all about happy things. This particular figure, of the mononymous Momoi, espouses a medical theme, a first for Native, I believe; that’s a bit odd to observe, as nurses are as much a part of the hentai repertoire as tentacles, maids, and catgirls, all of which have had representatives in the Native catalog for years.
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Right, it’s time to get back to work. The review queue is impressive: scads and scads of Tony figures, a couple of Asukas (but – strangely enough – no Reis), and a bunch of Seven Deadly Sins figures that I never seem to know how I want to photograph. We’ll start off looking at this girl, one Motoko Kusanagi of Public Security Section 9, who is dressed to kill in her own unique way. One can surmise that Scarlett Johansson won’t be wearing anything like what Major Kusanagi is wearing here.
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Arc Systems Works has been pushing the BlazBlue franchise hard in recent times. Notably, the fifth and most recent console iteration of the game – BlazBlue Chrono Phantasma Extend – is due for release in the North American market in just a few days. In addition, its ofttimes incomprehensible plot has been extended by a dizzying array of multimedia: spinoff games – including, rather incongruously for a fighting game series, some visual novels – manga, light novels, and a poorly-received anime series. Concomitant with this expansion is the sort of product push that the better-known Guilty Gear series never received, comprising a variety of wall scrolls, stickers, hugging pillowcase covers, and of course, figures such as this one. This isn’t even the first Mu-12 figure to hit the market – that distinction goes to FREEing’s version from well over a year back – but being that the last time Alter made a figure of an Arc System Works character turned out quite well, the redundancy is not at all unwelcome.
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The plan was to do a porno figure review but the gods of lighting and set design are fickle. Instead, with the To Love-Ru series getting quite a bit of love from figure makers this year, we’ll take a look at Alter’s Mikan Yuuki. This is the second figure of Mikan that they’ve released; I didn’t get the first, as I generally prefer figures that are standing upright, or at least kneeling. Considering its origins, it is perhaps not as lewd as one might expect, but there’s something to be said for a relatively innocuous figure of a cute anime girl.
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And we’re back to our irregularly-scheduled program of figure reviews. Today we’ll be looking at Chris Yukine, one of the lead characters from Senki Zesshou Symphogear. For some reason or another, the series hasn’t gotten a lot of figures, despite apparently having been popular enough to receive a two-season anime adaptation. In fact, a quick survey suggests this is the only one scaled-size PVC figure from the show. This is also the first figure I’ve bought that is made by Aquamarine, a company that seems to be under Good Smile Company’s corporate aegis, and it’s always interesting to see whether a figure from a new company can measure up. That is, unless the figure is terrible, but happily, this figure of Chris is anything but.
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Anyone who has been in this hobby for a while can’t be too surprised by the concepts embodied by certain figures. I mean, there’s a figure out there based on an anime-fied Adolf Hitler, every now and then a company shows off a tentacle rape figure, and there’s even a very nice necrophilia-oriented figure up for preorder at the usual stores right now. Still, it was a little strange to see three figures involving toilets going up for preorder at approximately the same time (this one, obviously, and the other two were Ringo Hanamaru and a Kaitendoh figure). To be a fan of anime culture often implies being a fan of certain themes and fetishes, but I freely admit that toilet usage is not amongst mine. Still, if anyone could make this look good, it would be Native, no? Perhaps – but only if they didn’t botch it for other reasons. Which they did, unfortunately.
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For the first review of the year we’ll be going back eleven months with this figure of Sumika Kagami, one of the central heroines of the popular eroge Muv-Luv Alternative. She’s the third figure from this series to be produced by Kotobukiya, following lead girl Meiya Mitsurugi and a peculiar figure of Kasumi Yashiro in a skimpy bunnysuit. It’s possible that Sumika will be the last figure that Kotobukiya produces from the core science-fiction series, as it looks like they’ve moved on to the Carnelian-illustrated spinoff Schwarzesmarken, though who knows; they’re still producing model kits of the mecha from the game, so perhaps they’ll revisit Alternative someday. If not, at least Sumika is quite a nice figure to end the mainline run with.
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