Today we’re looking at yet another leotard-clad girl from a fighting game – in this case, Marie Rose from Tecmo Koei’s Dead or Alive series. She’s a character I’m conflicted on; I like her design, in a general sense, but I have not been enthusiastic about what her – and Honoka’s – introduction to the series has meant for the Dead or Alive franchise. Nonetheless, in figure form, we can simply admire her for what she looks like, and that’s good enough for me.
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Today we’ll take a look at another leotard-wearing girl with an appearance in a fighting game – Cammy, quite possibly the reigning queen of them all. This figure is not new, having been released in March of 2018, but it’s a relatively recent pickup for me; I bought it during Kotobukiyua’s Memorial Day sale last year, partly due to a a moment of lockdown-induced ennui, but also because I’m a big fan of Cammy. I own a bunch of her figures, including her previous Bishoujo figure. I also have PCS’s Shadaloo Cammy and I’m expecting to receive PCS’s super-sized 1/3 scale Cammy soon. I don’t expect to review either statue, since they’re way too big for me to comfortably photograph and I don’t think there’s much interest here for statues meant for Western audiences; therefore, we’ll have to be content with looking at this figure.
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I’ve had this figure of Nier: Automata’s YoRHa No. 2 Type B – hereafter called 2B – for some time; since I’m not getting many figures in the mail these days due to the current moratorium on EMS shipments from Japan to the United States, and since this figure recently went up for preorder again, I figure it’s a good time to take a look at her. It’s something of a wonderment that this figure was released at all; I don’t recall that Square allows many of their properties to be adapted into figures, at least not by third-party manufacturers. That they allowed Yoshizawa Mitsumasa to do the design is even more odd, but we’ll get into that in a bit.
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Happy Christmas everybody. We’ve seen a few figures from massively-multiplayer online RPGs, primarily from the Lineage series, but today we’ll be looking at a figure from the Mu series. Mu Online was originally released in 2001, making it one of the first MMOs to be released after EverQuest, the defining game of the genre. Some years later, Webzen released the mobile games Mu Origin and Mu Origin 2. I’m not actually certain which game this character comes from; Japanese stores say Mu Online, American stores say Mu Origin, and the box simply says Mu. I’m inclined to think that she comes from Mu Origin 2 as her design matches some of the concept art, but being that I know virtually nothing of this series apart from having bought a few Mu comic books about fifteen years ago, it’s hard to tell for certain.
Speaking of MMOs, I’ve been playing World of Warcraft as my primary game for the last eight years but I think I’m close to throwing in the towel; Shadowlands isn’t really appealing to me and I’m not enthused by Blizzard’s current game design philosophies. These days, I’m mostly playing Epic Seven and I’m enjoying it quite a bit more than Warcraft.
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First, a couple of random thoughts: I recently logged in to my Hobby Search account and saw this, which has caused me to consider whether I want to continue receiving figures while Japan Post is not dispatching parcels to the United States. Second, I recently turned forty, which ought to give me pause and compel me to think about the direction my life is going, including whether I am wasting too much time and money on pervy plastic anime figures and gacha games. I’ve actually found that getting older has made me more comfortable with who I am, though; I’ve found myself being less unsure of the path I’ve taken and more content with where I am. The lack of updates here has less to do with me falling out of love with this hobby and more to do with me being lazy and having photographed some uninspiring figures that I don’t feel that compelled to write about.
And that leads me to talk about this figure: this is Narika Shihoudou, one of the three main heroines of the eroge Beat Blades Haruka. I’m always happy to see a figure from an Alice Soft property, even if it’s not executed particularly well, which is unfortunately the case here. And while I enjoyed Beat Blades Haruka quite a bit, I’d probably say that Narika was my least favorite of the ninja trio, and I don’t think I actually ever went through her route. Nonetheless, let’s go over her very quickly.
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We’ll pick back up with another Native figure, this one considerably smaller than the last one we looked at. This haggard-looking young girl is Magic the Gandhi, an unlikely-named character from Alicesoft’s famous Rance series. In normal times she’s a magician, a princess, and a romantic interest of the series’ titular anti-hero. As can be surmised, the circumstances she is depicted in here are not indicative of normal times.
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Despite being an avid consumer of all manners of news concerning the coronavirus epidemic, somehow it escaped my notice that Japan Post has suspended the delivery of parcels via EMS to the United States and that means I will not be getting any new figures until perhaps next month. As such, the only thing left to do – aside from abandoning this site, which I already feel pretty badly about and do not wish to perpetuate – is to review some older figures. Let’s begin with one of the biggest and most in-your-face in terms of callipygian excess, Erika Kuramoto from the doujin series Zettai Junpaku Mahou Shoujo.
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Unsurprisingly, virtually all of my preorders from the last two months have been delayed, and so I’ve only received one figure order in that time (a virtual cookie goes to whoever guesses which figure that might be). Therefore, we’ll take a look at Kotobukiya’s Scarlett, which came out last summer. I actually took these pictures shortly after receiving it, as this was a figure that I had been excited about since I saw Shunya Yamashita’s concept art the year prior. Growing up, G.I. Joe was one of my favorite cartoons – no surprise, as I spent much of my childhood on an Army base – and Scarlett was my favorite character. To say that I was eagerly anticipating this figure would be an understatement.
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We looked at a FREEing bunnygirl last time, and we’ll continue the trend today by reviewing Lucifer. Somehow this figure is the first from the Seven Mortal Sins that I have reviewed, which is a bit shameful, as I own quite a few figures from the series, but as today is Christmas and thus commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, taking a look at Lucifer seems only apropos.
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It’s been well over a year since we looked at a FREEing bunnygirl, but I’ve purchased a bunch of them in that time – three Muv-Luv girls, two To-Love Ru girls, Lucifer, and Reika Shimohira, whom we are looking at here. Truth be told, they all tend to look more or less the same, so for the sake of minimizing unnecessarily repetitive redundancy, we’ll just quickly highlight the main points of this figure.
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