Irma from Queen’s Blade (NSFW)

Irma from Queen's Blade

The Queen’s Blade series has come a long way from its humble, game book-based origins. Over the last few years, it’s gotten several anime shows, a number of artbooks, numerous fan-made doujinshi, a few large-scale dolls from both Azone and Volks, and of course, a ton of figures. MegaHouse has been the most prolific producer of these, and their releases have progressed in roughly chronological order, starting with the original Queen’s Blade girls, moving on to the characters of Queen’s Blade Rebellion, and continuing with Alicia from the ongoing series Queen’s Blade Grimoire. Notably, they skipped over Irma, much to my chagrin, being that she is my favorite character in the Queen’s Blade series, and for a while, I thought that they would never make a figure of her. Happily, and much to my surprise, they reversed course earlier this year and finally released her and now I can stop whining about how figure makers don’t love Irma. (Figure collectors who happen to be Melpha fans, I know your pain and feel for you.)

Irma figure by MegaHouse

By day, Irma appears to be a quiet cleaning lady in a downtrodden section of the city of Gainos. In reality, she is a cold-blooded assassin in the service of Aldra, the reigning loli-queen. She is generally taciturn, purposeful, and inscrutable, a bit like a malevolent Rei Ayanami, whom she superficially resembles. However, she shows more emotion when in the company of cats – she loves cats – and when she is around Echidna, who was a mentor (and perhaps more) to her in her youth. Further, her true intentions are hazy and her loyalties are suspect at best.

Irma makes only a brief appearance in Queen’s Blade first season, accosting Tomoe and Shizuka during their journeys. She appears again in the second season, fighting in the Queen’s Blade tournament herself. It’s probably not a big surprise that she doesn’t win; indeed, she suffers some deliciously brutal injuries in defeat. Unfortunately, that’s the last time we see her in the main Queen’s Blade storyline; she does not seem to appear in Queen’s Blade Rebellion, though I vaguely remember reading that she is supposed to be off someplace with Echidna while the events of that series take place.

Irma figure by MegaHouse

Many of the Queen’s Blade characters were designed by popular artists, and Irma is no exception; she was created by Hirotaka Akaga, who is also known for doing the character designs for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 fighting game Arcana Heart 3 as well as the design for the Queen’s Blade Rebellion character Layla. He made a nice wallpaper image to celebrate this figure’s release, but some of his other artwork shows Irma being imprisoned, defeated, molested (by tentacles, no less), and dominated. Irma doesn’t seem to be a very popular character – particularly compared to fan-favorites like Airi, Alleyne, and Cattleya – and she seems to get kicked around a lot, which I think makes her even cuter. (Admittedly, some of her artwork comes from the Vanquished Queens artbooks, which are entirely about the Queen’s Blade girls getting, well, vanquished. It is a bit curious, though, how Irma never seems to be on the winning side of a fight.)

Irma figure by MegaHouse

As mentioned, this figure comes from MegaHouse. Like all of their previous Queen’s Blade figures, Irma is sculpted in 1/8 scale, standing about 20 centimeters tall at the top of her head and 22.5 centimeters in overall height. Also like their previous figures, she comes with a bunch of accessories and can also be displayed partially nude, which we’ll talk more about in a bit.

Irma figure by MegaHouse

Irma’s demeanor is generally cool and detached, but here we can see her showing a little more passion in the exercise of her craft, with fire and determination evident in her expression. She looks great, with her pink eyes noticeably standing out. The lighter color of her lips is also attractive, particularly in the way that it contrasts with her dark skin.

Irma figure by MegaHouse

She’s depicted in a fighting pose, blades at the ready, though it’s hard to tell if she’s landing or leaping backwards. It’s also interesting that she seems to be getting ready to slash with her left-handed dagger, but it’s not like Queen’s Blade is noted for its realism or anything. Again, her pose looks great, showing her combat ability even as it accentuates the litheness of her body.

Irma figure by MegaHouse

Her body is, of course, also emphasized by the clothes that she wears. It is traditional for Queen’s Blade characters to not wear much clothing and Irma isn’t an exception, wearing basically an underboob-baring crop top and panties. Her outfit looks wonderful as well, showing off almost everything but hiding just what it needs to. She also wears a variety of belts, one of which seems to supporting her buttocks. Her scabbards are separate pieces which attach to sockets in her body; this should reduce the risk of breakage, since they’d likely just detach rather than snap off if something struck them.

Irma figure by MegaHouse

However, if one feels that her abbreviated outfit is still too much, she can be displayed without much of her uniform. MegaHouse’s Queen’s Blade figures have always had elaborate castoff systems – sometimes too elaborate, particularly considering that they never come with instruction sheets. I’ve got their Aldra figure somewhere here, in pieces; it was so annoying to disassemble her that I didn’t feel like putting her back together, and now her parts are scattered all over the place. They’ve obviated this frustration by sensibly providing a second, unclothed torso piece; one can simply detach Irma’s limbs and head and re-attach them to the nude torso.

Irma figure by MegaHouse

Unfortunately, her semi-nude appearance doesn’t look quite as nice. Irma has a very slender body build (or at least, this figure does; most of her artwork doesn’t depict her as being this slim) and while she looks fine with her clothes on, she looks rather emaciated without them. Her neck also looks peculiarly long and narrow; the high collar of her top deflects attention away from its stylized proportions, but bereft of that benefit, it stands out in an undesirable way. It would have been nice if they’d re-designed her neck to better fit this appearance, but that certainly would’ve driven up her cost.

Irma figure by MegaHouse

But at any rate, she looks great even while clothed.

Irma figure by MegaHouse

Her neck still does look rather skinny, particularly from the rear, where it doesn’t look substantial enough to support her head. It almost looks like her head ought to roll off her shoulders.

Irma figure by MegaHouse

Despite her slim proportions, Irma has a great-looking rear. One of the best aspects of the Queen’s Blade franchise is how so many of its female cast prefer wearing thong panties, even including the, uhh, bulkier characters like Cattleya.

Irma figure by MegaHouse

I also like Irma’s high-heeled boots. Irma attaches to her base via a metal peg, which hopefully will provide enough stiffness to keep her from leaning over.

Irma figure by MegaHouse

Finally, she comes with a pair of extra sword hilts, for those who wish to display her with her weapons sheathed. I think her pose would look a little odd without her weapons in hand, but you could also display her with both her blades and with her extra swords in their scabbards. (If anyone remembers the movie The Replacement Killers, there’s this scene where Chow Yun-Fat’s character shoots his pistols empty and instead of reloading, he just throws them away and pulls out another pair of guns; this option kinda reminded me of that. Yeah, I know that’s a strange memory for a half-naked girly figure to evoke.)

Irma figure by MegaHouse

It has been a long, long wait, but MegaHouse’s rendition of Irma was worth the anticipation. She is a fantastic figure, looking both sexy and dangerous. She’s got a beautiful body and a lovely outfit, and her facial expression is just as attractive. The only thing I might complain about is that she’s sort of smaller than I would like, but then, I would say that about every figure that I own. I suppose her unclothed appearance could be substantially improved but I like her uniform so much that I would never display her that way, anyway. I’m very pleased with this figure of my favorite Queen’s Blade girl. However, its existence does raise one question: what am I going to whine about now?

Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse

Another review of Irma is up at Wieselhead.

Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
Irma figure by MegaHouse
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26 Responses to Irma from Queen’s Blade (NSFW)

  1. Asa says:

    I really need to finish QB some time. I got through S1, and started S2 though it’s been so long I should probably just go back to the beginning to rewatch it and binge through the lot.

    I don’t remember this character at all, not having seen much of S2. It is a nice enough figure, though her torso looks about as big as her thighs, which is always disconcerting. Still, skimpy dressed underboob characters are fine by me.

    • Tier says:

      Me too; I’ll be honest, I skipped a lot of the episodes and just watched the ones that Irma showed up in. It doesn’t help that I’m not a big huge fan of many of the most highly featured characters in the anime (Nanael, Airi, Tomoe, Shizuka … I like Leina, though I understand a lot of people don’t). I’ve been on a Blu-ray buying binge recently so I’ll have to remember to keep an eye out for them when I do my Christmas shopping.

  2. Akita Saito says:

    I really didn’t like her long and awkward neck. Though her shirt’s collar somewhat hides it. She was worth it though, her fit body which was most of the reason I bought her along with the rest of her clothes and posture. It was sad that she got “cut” from the anime though.

    • Tier says:

      Yeah, I don’t like it either; I have a few figures that have this problem (Compact Hog and gangsta lean Saber, for instance) and I really wish they did not, particularly the Saber figure, since the original garage kit had a shorter neck. I was disappointed with her showing in the anime, too, though I’m glad she got out okay; I was kinda surprised that they did kill off one major character during the show.

  3. Steve Chen says:

    Church backdrop? Yup there is a God alright lol! Now if only MH does a decent Melpha(similar to the art used in Vanquish de Queen’s artbook, the one where she is strung up with Siggy) and Claudette.

    Agree withe the long neck. With clothes on, the collar cancels the optical illusion, but bare it kinda looks like a Candice from Phineas and Ferb. As for the body swapping, would have preferred the old school cast off (but color bleeding to the skin and the d@mn lack of instructions is sure to be a pain) but given how intricate (and potential fragility) the design used on her Assassin of the Fang uniform, it was probably MH mos pragmmatic choice.

    Over all a 4.8 out of 5.0 (

    • Tier says:

      I share full sympathies with Melpha fans but I have to admit I am not overly fond of the character’s design and am not too interested in a figure of her. If and when MegaHouse does a figure of Zara, though, I will certainly be very interested.

      I like this method better for a couple of reasons, the first being that I had no plans to display her naked. The second is that MegaHouse often makes it a complete pain in the ass to disassemble a figure; I was glancing over the comments for their Alicia figure, since I have it sitting here, and I saw a lot of complaints about how difficult it is to get her reassembled, and I’m really not looking forward to taking her out of her box now.

      • Steve Chen says:

        Alicia is not that hard to strip, the reports are exaggerated (the lack of instruction, now that’s the pain in the @ss). It’s where to attach that sword of hers that’s the problem. and the magnetic bra sometimes isn’t properly aligned.

        • Tier says:

          Ah, well, that is promising, at least. I suppose I should at least remove her from the box and try it out for myself; a magnetic bra does sound cool indeed.

  4. Adam says:

    Cattleya is a fan favorite? I wouldn’t have guessed, as I find her proportions rather gross. :-\

    While I agree that this Irma looks better with her clothes on, I definitely appreciate that they implemented the cast-off as separate piece that can be swapped in and out rather than trying to make the clothes removable. Removable clothes rarely work well, but it is nevertheless the standard way of implementing cast-offs. I had previously assumed this was because alternate pieces must cost more to produce, but Irma was quite reasonably priced, so maybe not. Anyhow, I would like to think this the start of a new trend, but more likely it’s just that Irma’s outfit would have been too difficult to implement in the usual way.

    • Tier says:

      Me too, though I can’t criticize anyone who does like her; I’m sure a number of my own personal likes are puzzling – or repugnant – to many other people. I’ve seen a number of doujinshi featuring her or characters with similar body physiques, so I guess there’s an audience for that sort of character design.

      Yeah, I’m hoping to see more of this as well, since it’s much simpler and convenient for the owner, and I wonder if it’s also more straightforward and cost-effective to manufacture, since you don’t have to worry about fabricating separate parts. I do recall Fabienne mentioning that Orchid Seed included a separate, nude torso piece for one of their recent figures (Ikkitousen’s Chouhi, I think it was), so at least two manufacturers have used this method. Hopefully they’ll both consider doing more of that in the future; I sometimes see that a figure can be cast-off and decide not to buy it because of that, either because the implemented method looks terrible or because I think it’s going to be too much of a pain in the ass to deal with.

  5. Wieselhead says:

    Jeez! gaming and blogging is hardly something to combine 🙁

    I found it somewhat hilarious, that a few months after your little complaint, Irma was announced by Megahouse. Compared to other Queens Blade figures she’s rather athletic in a skinny manner even some of the younger characters are curvier than Irma. Still Irma is what I see as hot with her feline like body, the perky boobs and her yeah bigger butt.

    Her outfit appears more practical, not as playful as the one of other characters, I like it because it looks really badass in terms of design and colors and has good details.

    Irma’s face turned out great Megahouse put some effort into it, it’s very detailed and expressive, these eyes are sparkling like gems. I think less tilt to her head would have been a bit better, but that would have decreased the dynamic appeal of her pose a bit.

    I assume that you’ve dedicated an own flash to her face, the pose makes photography less easier when pllanning to capture her face properly.

    Have you cutted out all these window squares? it looks really elaborate.

    • Tier says:

      Indeed! I’ve been playing too much World of Warcraft over the past months, though now that it’s sort of in a downtime period with an impending expansion, I’ve been dialing back my playtime and trying to get more figure reviews done (where the heck is everyone, anyway? Most of my blogroll’s been dead for a while, but now a lot of those sites are really, really dead.).

      I’ve been whining for years! It’s still a little surreal to see her figure here, in person; I’d pretty much given up any hope that she’d get made. Somehow, I thought I’d be happier to see her, but I think I feel something more like relief.

      Her outfit is indeed great; it’s skimpy and sexy but not as outrageous or impractical as that worn by a lot of the other Queen’s Blade characters. I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of characters like Echidna or Luna Luna for that reason.

      Yeah, she’s got a flash on her face; it’s gridded so that the beam stays tight. I actually ran out of lights during this shoot, which was kinda appalling since I’ve got a bunch of lights here. The pose and her hair definitely did complicate the shoot, as I usually like to light from the left. The stuff in the windows is printed on some regular printer paper, so it didn’t take too much work; I just taped them to one of the big acrylic sheets that I have.

      • Wieselhead says:

        I don’t know how you feel about it, but Im sad that most figure collectors vanished into thin air, but not everybody can run a blog for long, be it motivation or having too much work.

        I was searching for other active figure blogs, but well not a very successful task. There are a few, but most don’t care about getting in touch, some didn’t even answer my comments *how rude*
        I more or less gave up on searching for new figure blogs, for once.

        Oh just printer paper, the illusion was perfect ^^

        • Tier says:

          Yeah, it seemed to me that many people stop updating their websites at around the two year mark. I had thought that community sites like figure.fm and Tsuki-board might have something to do with that, but then I read something there that some people didn’t think there was an active community there. Or something like that. I dunno. Maybe people just don’t feel like talking to each other. I don’t really use Twitter very much anymore, either.

          Haha, yeah, I try to answer all the comments here, since if anyone takes the time to write something, I feel like I owe them a response. Sometimes I forgot and I’ll come across a comment that’s gone unanswered for months, and that always makes me feel pretty bad. (Kinda like how I forgot to answer this comment for a week.)

  6. bear says:

    My biggest complaint from when I first saw this figure was that the colors looked ashen and dull. Your stained glass backdrop and strong light/shadows really helped to breathe new life into it. Did you have to play with the levels/colors in post or was it all physical effects?

    • Tier says:

      Yeah, though I usually have to do that, since I have a tendency to underexpose photographs. I increased the color saturation a bit and brightened up the images, but I didn’t have to do much more than that, which was a nice surprise, since I really did not want to spend all evening processing the pictures. I spent more time working on her hair than on the backgrounds; her hair came out pretty bright, probably too bright, in retrospect.

  7. Snappy says:

    Fantastic lighting work as always! Loved how your reflected the faux stained glass on/off the base so that it’s somewhat obscured. Genius!

  8. nuo2x2 says:

    after quite a long while, well, finally huh..?
    um, aside from her not-so-tan skin color and that turtle-ish neck, I’m not really a big fan of her pose. what do you think Tier?

    I just worry she might prone to bend easily. Mine is still fine, but I just displayed her for couple of months now…

    • Tier says:

      Yep, a very, very long wait. I do like the pose, though I wish her body were a little more built up; she’s never really looked like a waif or anything and she looks a little strange when she’s this skinny.

      I hope she’ll be okay; she doesn’t seem to be too heavy so I think she’ll be alright. I don’t think any of my MegaHouse figures have ever had leaning issues, so that’s one thing that gives me confidence in them.

      • nuo2x2 says:

        well, gotta second your thought here, I also ‘must’ keep her in full clothed due to her skinny-ness ^^’

        ah, great to hear that!! well, to be honest, I also have the same confident, but not until my recent experience with POP WhiteBeard (sorry to bring this manly figure here) from OnePiece. But again, he is quite an outlier I guess…

        anyhoo, let us enjoy our long glorious wait for this figure for now, cheers!

        • Tier says:

          Ah, if that figure is leaning, that would be unfortunate. I have no idea what the figure looks like or who the character is, but it would shake my confidence in the maker a little bit.

          Indeed! Maybe she could be more perfect, but I think it’s great that she’s here. Now, it’d be even nicer if some more companies made figures of her, or if she showed up in the newer Queen’s Blade series.

          • nuo2x2 says:

            naaah, you shouldn’t. This MegaHouse POP 1/8 scale WhiteBeard is actually one 31cm tall PVC monstrosity. So, no wonder it has problem supporting it’s own weight.

            hear hear!! hoping there will be another company(ies) captured her beauty in another pose!! ^0^ me, I’m still hoping for her revoltech version.

          • Tier says:

            Ah, okay; yeah, that sounds different than the little girly anime figures I am more familiar with, then.

            Indeed! That would be pretty nice. Heck, while I’m dreaming, it’d be pretty neat if Azone did a 50cm version of her; I mean, they did one of Sigui, so I guess they must have the license.

  9. nuo2x2 says:

    @Tier
    Sorry I opened a new reply.
    woah, that would be ultra sweeet!! yeah, Azone’s Irma would be great!!

    or maybe, one of those pre painted, cast off able resin from Griffon, the R-Line. like Airi and Alleyne ^^

    • Tier says:

      That’s fine, it’s actually better this way since threads get all squished-up once they go five-deep (which is as deep as I’ve set them to go in the WordPress settings). An Irma big-ass doll would be very cool indeed, though I’m certainly not holding my breath. I’m not really expecting any more Irma figures, I suppose, since it took this long for the most prolific Queen’s Blade figure maker to produce it (I had thought that maybe there was some problem with getting a character license from Hobby Japan or the artist, but Hobby Japan has rolled out a ton of figures in the last year or so, and Hirotaka Akaga drew a special wallpaper to celebrate Irma’s figure release, so there couldn’t have been a problem there). I’m just glad she’s here. I kinda thought I would be really happy when she finally got made, but I think I just feel more relieved and content than anything else. (Now if she were 1/4 scale or something, then I think I’d be thrilled.)

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