Nothing intimidates me like doing a review of a poseable figure, so instead we have here another dakimakura cover review. And it’s not explicit! Sort of. The Agarest War games have a saucy reputation though I am told that the level of suggestiveness veers more towards fanservice than full-blown hentai. This one has a little bit of both, I guess.
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Kyou Fujibayashi is one of the best-known alpha females of anime: she is confident, athletic, violent, and also domestically talented. She is similar in many ways to Tamaki Kousaka but for some reason, she doesn’t get nearly the same level of merchandising love. And what love she receives doesn’t feature anything close to the variety that Tamaki gets. Tamaki’s figures depict her in her underpants, swimwear, as a samurai in her underpants, blue jeans, and a maid uniform, among other costumes. Kyou, in contrast, generally gets stuck in a gym suit. Not that I have a problem with that, since I have this thing for girls in tight athletic wear. Similarly, I have this thing for figures of anime girls with vulnerable expressions. It really simplifies photographing them.
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Comiket 79 took place last December and I bought some of the doujinshi that premiered there through Toranoana. There were also a lot of dakimakura covers sold there and I didn’t buy any of them, since the releases were strictly limited edition and I didn’t feel like going through the hassle or expense of using my favorite proxy services. One of the pillowcases I wanted was this one, and after reconsideration I briefly contemplated picking it up off of Yahoo Japan Auctions. A couple weeks after C79, I loaded up Amiami’s webpage and was surprised to see this dakimakura cover listed on their site. I put my preorder in with the quickness, happy that I wasn’t going to have to pay a proxy markup. They’ve since added a couple more dakimakura covers that I thought were Comiket exclusives, which is gratifying indeed.
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Phat Company’s Lily is the newest Vocaloid figure to the market. Unlike the most famous Vocaloid girl, it’s pretty easy to tell what she does for a living. If you looked at Miku, you’d think she was a student at a high-tech school or a high-flying armored superheroine or a troublemaking, rabble-rousing revolutionary. Lily, however, is quite obviously a singer. Perhaps she just hasn’t been in the music industry long enough to sell out yet. It happens to so many who stick around and make it big, though, so time will tell.
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Here is a riddle: gather together a major figure manufacturer, a world-famous anime artist, and a graphics studio whose portfolio includes contributions to Metal Gear Solid 4, Tales of Vesperia, and Valkyria Chronicles, and what do you get? The answer is absolutely nothing other than a pair of boobie mousepads and a figure. Enka Oudou Dai Shogun was touted as a multimedia event, but I haven’t seen any of its media apart from a couple of illustrations in Shunya Yamashita’s One Voice artbook. It looks like nothing more will come of it and presumably it will thus be consigned to the dustbin of memory, just like Shuraki. Anyone remember Shuraki? There were some good figures from that series. Fortunately, Kiriko is a fine figure as well.
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Back in my review of Kotobukiya’s Dizzy, I lamented that fighting games aren’t a more popular source for figure makers. That hasn’t changed at all in the year since I received that figure. In fact, I can think of only a few figures of fighting game characters that have been released since then – A-Label’s Vanessa, and I suppose the Noel Vermillion nendoroid, if you count that as a figure. 2011 isn’t looking any more promising, with the major ones being another Dizzy, a peculiarly pachycephalic Kasumi, and this figure right here. With a bunch of fighting games – Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the two Tekken and Street Fighter crossovers, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, and the 3DS version of Dead Alive – scheduled for release, and with Super Street Fighter IV and BlazBlue still going strong, hopefully the situation will change and the girls of these games will grace us with more figures.
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If you collect anime stuff, it’s hard to avoid getting stuff from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. Unless you really dislike that franchise, that is; I know a couple of people who fall into that category and I can certainly understand why they feel that way, since I tried to watch the show and found it a bit difficult to get through. Nonetheless, I do like the character designs a lot, particularly Fate’s, and while my collection of Fate figures isn’t particularly large, I seem to have a lot of them given that I don’t have a strong affinity for the show. Curiously, for a long time I didn’t have anything featuring the lead character, apart from a couple of doujinshi. I’ve ordered her actsta figure but while I wait for that, let’s take a look at another thing that I’ve recently acquired that features her likeness, though perhaps not in a way familiar to fans of the show.
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I’m a big fan of Yamato’s vmf50 doll line. They’re fun to dress up and display and not too many people buy them or even know about them, and as I’ve got this odd tendency to dislike anything that becomes mainstream, that’s a big plus in my view. I bought Yumi a couple of months ago but she got ensnared by the printer ink cartridge bomb scare fiasco. Fortunately that blew over reasonably fast so we can take a closer look at her now.
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There’s been some supposition that every figure I buy winds up in the bargain bin. I guess that’s partly a function of me buying a lot of figures and is also indicative of a curious trend in the figure hobby. In recent times we’ve seen VN02 Miku Hatsune, the first and the latest Black Rock Shooter figures, Dead Master, Vivio, and tons more figures receive huge price cuts and I’m not sure why so many high-profile releases are getting their prices chopped so hard. I’m sure this situation pleases collectors worldwide but I’m still a moron who pays full price for everything so I seldom get to partake of this happy occasion. I wonder what it says about the health of the industry. Regardless, here we have a figure that I’m sure won’t end up in a discount pile any time soon.
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One of the more lamentable trends in entertainment media during the last couple of decades is the phasing out of the action girl in the battle bikini. They used to be commonplace, particularly in video games, where examples include Golden Axe’s Tyris Flare, SNK’s Athena, the valkyrie in Gauntlet, Sheena in Contra Hard Corps, and a bunch of characters from the early Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games. Nowadays, not only are they not nearly as common, you often see a peculiar aversion to sexiness on the part of female characters. World of Warcraft hasn’t had adequate bikini armor for two expansions now, much to the lament of my four paladins. I hear that the people running Tomb Raider want to place less emphasis on Lara Croft’s appearance, which explains why Square Enix can’t make good games anymore. Sonia Belmont got torched from Castlevania continuity altogether. This trend may be due to an attempt to be more inclusive and more appealing to larger audiences, or a desire to create more realistic characters, or a perceived lack of maturity associated with creating scantily-clad warrior girls. Whatever the cause, it sucks. Fortunately, Kotobukiya and Leaf agree, so here we have Tamaki Kousaka, the first of many Tamaki figures scheduled to drop this year.
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