We took a look at Vertex’s Archeyle almost four years ago, and today we’ll be looking at Cecil, the latest in their series of Elf Village figures. I liked Archeyle’s design but I felt that the execution left something to be desired. From what I can tell, this is a common sentiment regarding Vertex’s figures and it’s one of the reasons I haven’t reviewed very many of them. Laziness, of course, is the main reason. At any rate, here’s Cecil.
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I’ve mentioned several times that Epic Seven is now my primary game. I’ve also said that one of the reasons I enjoy gacha games are the attractive character designs generally intrinsic to the genre, and that I am looking to collect more figures of gacha game heroes. Strangely, while there’s no lack of figures from games like Azur Lane, Girls’ Frontline, and Granblue Fantasy, there are virtually no figures of Epic Seven characters: this figure is the only one. It’s a strange state of affairs, and one that I hope is amended in the future, as I think it has excellent character designs, though in my opinion none are better than the dragon knight Luna.
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So this statue and this post both require a bit of explanation. I hadn’t intended to review it but it looks pretty good, even if it does take certain liberties with 2B’s design, and I thought it might make for an interesting review. The principal thing here is that this statue is in no way an officially licensed product and I’m generally a little reluctant to review such things unless they are doujin products whose production is largely motivated by a desire to display artistic creativity and to express an affinity for the originating material, and being that this statue is the product of some enterprising individuals in China, I’m inclined to think that its existence owes more to its potential commercial viability rather than aesthetic concerns. But like I said, it looks pretty good and hey, its producers may very well have an appreciation for both the character and for the female form, as we’ll see. Also, there actually is a licensed 1/4 scale statue of the Nier: Automata characters, produced by Prime 1 Studio. However, they’ve made the somewhat shady move of requiring consumers to buy the very expensive full set of all three characters if one wishes to display 2B without her skirt; the standalone statue doesn’t have that feature (though I imagine a brave collector could remedy that with some hand tools). Given that situation, and combined with my lingering resentment towards Square – undiminished even after a quarter of a century – for helping Sony destroy Sega in the game console business, my qualms regarding the unlicensed nature of this statue are largely mitigated.
So I’m going to put up some pictures of this statue – this is going to be a brief review, without as many pictures as usual and a great deal more explanatory text, since some people might be curious about this statue and others like it. This statue comes with a ton of optional parts, including her sword, another head, and different arms. The configuration I have her in here is the way I wanted to display her, so the other parts are back in the box.
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Today we’ll look at a Korean figure from a Korean gacha game: Eileene from Seven Knights. I vaguely remember downloading Seven Knights a long time ago but I didn’t spend more than a few minutes with the game. From my admittedly limited research, the game looks somewhat similar to games like Summoners War and Epic Seven, though the graphics seem very dated, somewhere on the level of the original PlayStation in quality, with the chibi styling of its characters particularly reminding me of Final Fantasy VII and Tactics. There’s apparently a sequel out, which looks far more modern and ditches the chibi artwork for a far slicker, modern, and more realistic aesthetic reminiscent of Korean MMOs such as the Lineage, TERA, and Black Desert series.
A couple of additional notes regarding Eileene: she also appeared in the mobile game The King of Fighters All Star a few months back, which is kind of an odd and nonintuitive pairing, but mobile game collaborations often are, seemingly. There’s currently a Seven Knights anime airing on television, but I do not know if Eileene shows up; my guess is that the principal cast are original characters, though I’m not sure about that. I haven’t followed any anime series in years and I’d be interested in hearing if this show is any good.
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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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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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The series Gantz is experiencing a somewhat unexpected revival, not with respect to its original manga or anime adaptation but rather at the hands of figure and statue companies. Union Creative released two figures of Reika Shimohira a couple of years ago – one dressed in a black bodysuit and the other wearing a much more abbreviated version of that outfit – and FREEing is due to release their 1/4 scale version of Reika in a bunnysuit soon. In addition, the Japanese statue company Prime 1 Studio will be producing two versions of Reika, one called the Black Version and the other called the White Version, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who glances at each statue. And then we have this figure here, which came out late last year, if I recall correctly. This figure is the counterpart to Union Creative’s Reika, as she and Anzu seem fated to be paired together forever.
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Occasionally we look at a statue meant for the American audience, and today we’ll do just that. Being that summer is just about over, we’ll examine a nice-looking girl in a bikini: Aspen Matthews from Top Cow and Aspen Comics.
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Archeyle isn’t the first, nor the second or third, Vertex figure I’ve purchased but somehow it’s the first one to be reviewed here. Oddly, it’s also one of two half-naked blonde elf girl figures to be released at the end of July. You really can’t go wrong with happy, thong-wearing blonde elf archer girls … can you?
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