I hadn’t planned on picking up any of Alter’s other Ikki Tousen figures, but Amiami had Ryomou and Kanu in stock the other week and with their shipping discount promotion still ongoing, I couldn’t really think of any reason not to buy them, so I did.
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Ikki Tousen is a staple source for anime figure manufacturers, and with the manga still ongoing and its fourth television series currently being aired, it can be expected that they will continue chucking them out. For years, fans of busty kung fu girls with exploding clothes have been fed a steady diet of Kanu Unchou, Hakufu Sonsaku, and Ryomou Shimei, with Orchid Seed being the latest to exhibit a figure of the latter. Now I’ve got no problem with that, being that I lived off of chicken nuggets and hot dogs back in school, day in and day out. However, even one with a diet as poor as I hungers for something different every now and then. Sometimes, a man wants steak tartare. And with that admittedly discursive and not entirely relevant introduction out of the way, we have here a figure of Kakouen Myousai, the humorless, dress-wearing enforcer of Kyosho High.
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Being someone who dislikes world PVP combat in MMO games, I didn’t have much interest in playing Lineage II when it first came out. However, I loved the character designs, particularly the female dark elves, and eventually I gave it a shot. I liked my dark elf fighter’s starting costume very much, but even that wasn’t enough to overcome the monotony of the gameplay and I called it quits after my free one-month trial period.
I still like the character designs though, and I’m glad to see several figure manufacturers bringing sculpts bearing their likenesses to market. Orchid Seed is the latest to do so, and here we have the elf. No name, no character class, just Elf – although one can infer from her staff that she is some sort of finger-waggling, babble-chanting spell-flinger, as these sorts of conventions are eternal in this genre.
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Last year, when figure sites posted up pictures of Velvet, the figure-buying collective gushed over Bubba’s latest creation. Would it make into mass-market form? If so, who would do the honors? Max Factory, maybe? They and Bubba had collaborated before, and Max Factory has certainly always had the full confidence of the fanbase.
Then Yamato announced that they would be doing the job. Exuberance evaporated into anxiety and exhilaration flash-boiled into exasperation.
I wasn’t too distressed since I like Yamato, but I wondered how she’d turn out; Yamato’s done a nice job with REFLECT’s sculpts, but I was curious as to whether they could do justice to Bubba’s masterpiece. How did she turn out?
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Sometimes I buy things for the most gossamer of reasons. Example: one day, I loaded up Tsuki-board and the random header generator rolled up this picture. I thought to myself, “Fate has a nice ass.” Then I looked again and thought to myself, “Fate has a nice rack.” And really, do I need any more reasons to buy a figure? So I hit up eBay, type in the magic words, get one listing back from a seller in Japan with a buyout price. I log in, click the buyout button, bam, package gets mailed the next day, bam, mailman drops her off a couple days later, bam, done. Isn’t the internet awesome?
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Way back when I was in college, I was interested in making electronic music, and being that I did not and still don’t have any musical talent to speak of, I figured the easiest way to do it would be via computer. I had a copy of ReBirth for drums and a MIDI controller that I could use for basslines, my roommate played the guitar so I could ask him for samples, but one thing I didn’t have was vocals. While I might have been able to fake some sort of musical ability with instrumentals, there was no way I was going to embarrass myself by trying to sing. One day, while reading the news from that year’s NAMM on Harmony Central, I learned that Yamaha had developed voice synthesis software intended to provide musical vocals. They had a couple of voices, and I listened to the samples; one of them was of a voice called “Miriam” singing old traditional songs like Auld Lang Syne and Scarborough Fair. They were interesting and innovative in an academic sense, but they were still rather rough and being a broke student, I couldn’t buy the software anyway, so I quickly forgot about them and the whole enterprise and went back to doing my homework.
Fast forward years later; I’m out of college, I’m buying figures, I see a ton of people talking about some young green-eyed girl in dire need of a haircut. Wondering what anime she was from, I Google her name and find out that she’s from “Vocaloid.” How curious, I think, that an anime was named after voice synthesis software. Then I find out that she’s not from an anime at all; Yamaha made a mascot character to ostensibly represent one of their voice packs and it succeeded beyond their wildest expectation. I’m not certain if this whole phenomenon is an ingenius example of marketing or a demonstration of how simple it is to get money from anime fans.
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So a few days ago, Blowfish posted a writeup on the Queen’s Blade Leina Battle Book. It’s a great-looking book and the best part about it is that it features Nyx, the peasant girl-turned-sorceress-turned-tentaclebait. However, that means that his site has more tentacles than mine. I’ve been running this site for over a year, I’m a big fan of tentacles, my site is even named after tentacles, but now Blowfish has more tentacles on his site than I do on mine. That’s unacceptable, it’s completely unacceptable, and I need to do something about it. So to restore balance to the universe, here we have a quick review of the artbook Mahou Shoujo Ai Illustration Collection.
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With the exception of a brief moment of weakness during the recent Star Trek Online beta test, I’ve been MMO free since kicking the Warcraft habit a year and a half ago. I don’t miss the games at all, but I still like looking at the character designs that populate the various games in the genre. Apparently E2046 does as well, as they’ve turned time and again to MMOs for inspiration, and so here we have Zabrina, their latest figure.
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I own a lot of perverted figures and I’ve staked out a niche in the figure reviewing community as someone who likes perverted figures, but this figure might be the most perverted one I own. I wasn’t sure if I was depraved enough to buy this figure, and judging by the dearth of reviews, I suppose not too many other people were, either. With time running out in Amiami’s half-price shipping promotion, I finally caved in and tossed her in the shopping basket. Of course, Amiami extended the discount for an entire month the next day. That’s the way life goes, I guess.
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Having become intrigued by Keumaya’s figure lineup, I put in a bid for Violet on Yahoo! Japan Auctions only to lose out in the last hour. Undaunted, I run a search on eBay and Violet shows up the next day. After a very brief moment of hesitation, I punch in a bid value and put the mouse cursor over “Place Bid†and then …
COMMON SENSE: Hey man.
ME: Oh for the love of basketball, not you again. Don’t you got anything better to do?
CS: This is my job man, I’m here to stop you from doing stupid things. And I had this feeling that … wait, what’s that up on the monitor?
ME: This? This is Zanjibaru.
CS: No, not your porn game. Wait, that’s eBay! You’re buying another perverted girly figure again, aren’t you?!
ME: … Mebbe.
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