Time evaporates. Her hair streams, the cloth of her sleeves dance, and her encased sword waits on edge for the sweetness of release. Alter’s Momohime qualifies as a masterwork, a Michelangelo of Japanese cute girl figures, both in grace, and nudge/wink, the size of her large hands.

When Momohime was announced there was a pretty strong buzz, a couple of notches below Saber Lily and Black Rock Shooter buzz, but definitely at must get levels. So what makes this delicate and murderous princess more divine than the others released lately?

A little truth first, as the retail version is not the flawless gem I wish it could be called. There is a phenomena where one on the verge of “perfection” sabotages oneself before carrying the ball over the line to become the greatest forever. Something went wrong and to make matters worse, the wound was self-inflicted. Alter’s decision to include swappable parts creates a gap in the figure where none should be that visible. It’s almost hard to imagine the green light for this considering Alter tends to avoid swappable parts as a matter of habit and here we have swappable parts executed to something less than Alter’s well earned reputation for awesome. This is truly a dude, why? decision. Fortunately, this flaw is mitigated by the armor placement blocking most of the seam.

Close-ups also reveal her pupils are misaligned and are not the same shape. The misalignment causes fewer problems since her eyes are shifted to the side, where eyes tend to misalign anyway, but the incongruent shapes of the pupils is harder to waive. It is almost as if whatever painting template that was used during production was accidentally flipped for one of her pupils.

The English language side of the Japanese figure fandom, or at least those who I read, appears to be in love with her. The rush to lavish adoration on Noritaka Fukumoto’s sculpture is full-on, to which I add my name to the list (Tentacle Armada, Exelica Meteor, Tomopop, Autaku). True, I don’t get around much and have a limited, thus skewed, perspective on other bloggers, but it’s rare that 4 of the blogs I read review the same figure within days of each other. Something this pretty increases the desire to do something special with the pictorial or review, maybe try something different with photography or post-processing — or get all douche y with the text. I think the quality of the photos in the reviews above in a roundabout way testifies to the beauty of Noritaka Fukumoto’s rendition of Momohime. Noritaka Fukumoto also sculpted Alter’s Gwendolyn, which is also a top flight figurine.

As you can probably guess from her name and the game title, Momohime is a princess of some sort, possessed by a demon. It’s a lovely character design that has something interesting to see at every angle, which is always a plus for something like a figure where every angle should look complete. It also manages to do this without a lot of clutter either. Noritaka Fukumoto took full advantage of the character and costume design for this sculpt. The flow of the elements feed or link to each other is such a way as to pull you back to her. Her exposed thighs almost act as the “whitespace” of the figure, rather than as a focal point as it is for many bishojo figures, at least from the front. On the reverse angle the exposed thighs then draw focus, which I think is a function of her left sleeve. Kind of interesting how it works to draw you to her face when it can in the front, but enough minutia.

There are so few figures which have as many appealing angles of view. Be cool to put Momohime on a turning table to appreciate all of the candy on display. Check the rivets in her armbands, the flowers in her hair, her scabbard, her leg-wraps, the bottom of her footwear, or the distress on the armor. It’s all sweet.

Even if you’re remotely inclined, buy this.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Sanya V. Litvyak flies the night skies, often alone, for the 501st aerial division. She soars between a ceiling of stars and a carpet of moonlit clouds, while tuning in the radio transmissions of the world.

I’ve done a bit of a 180 on Strike Witches. Just a few months ago I would have told you that I found them gross. Cat-girls or any of the animal eared girl things are not my thing at all. Outside of the Strike Witches, I still feel the same way about cat-girls or any other type of animal eared girl. I avoid things like Spice and Wolf. The dog-fights in Strike Witches turned me around as when they do it, the witches look pretty cool, so I can overlook the animal ears.

Photographing this figure of Sanya has led to a greater appreciation of her character. She spends a lot of time alone, so she’s often not with the other girls so she is kind of a hidden character and can be forgotten. I think she represents solitude in a way that some can relate to pretty well. How many of us are still awake long after the rest of the world has fallen asleep?

It’s a beautiful sculpt. Otsuyama Houjin captures Sanya through her facial expression and body language. Very sweet from the front and blatantly ecchi in the rear view. I’m of two minds on that, but it is Strike Witches after all.

Not being much of a mechamasume fan was another thing that kept me away from Strike Witches, but seeing the witches in action did a lot to make leg obscuring striker units visually acceptable. However, her striker unit looks slick. You can also swap out the propellers between the default spinning mode or have it so you see the individual propeller blades. The texture on the striker units looks very good in normal room light, not just in the photos.

The one I bought is very clean. It takes a macro lens to find the two paint boogers on the figure.

I was all done taking shots, but then thought to myself, even though Sanya is nocturnal, Strike Witches fly through these blue skies. Slipped a sheet of pink paper underneath to color the highlights pink for some sense of early morning light or something, which is more noticeable on the first two blue sky shots.

Went with a wider aperture than I normally do for the blue sky shots. The super shallow depth of field gets over used, but then I probably don’t use a shallow depth of field often enough as a consequence of holding that opinion. Every now and then it’s a good idea to tell yourself you’re wrong.

Foo-bar-baz has a comprehensive 360 view of Sanya.

I’m a little surprised that we haven’t seen more Strike Witches figures, after all from what I gather this show is a big hit amongst the types of people who buy figures. Of course, there’s likely a number of other factors involved keeping a flood at bay, or they’re not as popular as I assume. If Alter released one of each witch, I’d likely buy most, if not all of them. I still haven’t bought Yoshika Miyafuji, but that was due to her being released at a time where I wasn’t a fan of Strike Witches.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

When the character sketches for the first four Hyakka Ryoran figures were shown, Senhime was the one I was most looking forward to. For more than I year, I’ve been into the way of the spear. My barbarian in D&D used a greatspear, Moribito had some wicked fight scenes featuring spears, and martial arts movies often feature spears. I think the blind spear fighter in Samurai Champloo kicked off my whole spears are cool thing, though I do remember the spear chicks in The Wheel of Time books had some serious mystique going on, but lost interest in the series halfway through the fourth book and the spear chicks were more talked about as awesome than shown as awesome at that point in the series.

As far as the figure, it’s beautiful except for the face. Senhime, like Jubei before her, rock the curvy thighs style, maybe not as far as the Yamashita based figures rocked the thigh, but those spilled a little over into too much, I think. Regardless, stepping away from the slender and tiny body frame is appealing and seems like we’re getting more of it outside of “office lady” figures, which is a good thing for variety.

The render of her clothing and hair flows very well and has a pleasant amount of detail. In particular the volume of her sleeves seems perfect in how much and how deep the folds would be for that kind of material. It’s not overdone and it’s not vague. Flow carries over to the major body masses and how they line in the s-curve.

For all that I think is so right with the figure, her face is a bit of a spoiler. I’m not sure the expression here works and I keep thinking frumpy when I look at the face, as opposed to serious, or intense, or even grumpy. This doesn’t compute with the rest of the figure. Still, I think overall that the Hyakka Ryoran figure series was a good one and I do like the four that I got.

Tier seems to like her face a lot more than I do, which is my only complaint the frumpy face. I think we both changed our respective opinions on the figure from when we ordered to when we took her out of the box, though we moved in different directions. Senhime is a sweet looking figure, in spite of any of my poo-pooing.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

I really don’t know how on-or-off model the figure is and don’t care too much. Probably seen more fanart images than official ones by now. Like any popular character that’s been rendered by many people over the years, her appearance has probably morphed. Still feels like Tamaki though. Her breasts have probably grown. They’re kind of pushing against the border of too far here.

The figure itself is a bit on the ecchi side, but I don’t think it’s too tacky for an anime girl figure. Not that I’ve been online that much this year (so there’s probably a new set of figure blogs I don’t know about), but it seems like this Tamaki didn’t set the figure world on fire, but those who got her liked her just fine: foobarbaz, Exelica-Meteor, and Mukyaa.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

The figure collection now has 20% more pants, thanks to Iori Minase who has kept watch over my cluttered desk over the last month or so. It was an ebay purchase since she was out of stock wherever I looked, so she may or may not be legit. The box had a hologram sticker and the seller was in Japan, so I’m leaning toward the side that Iori here is fine, but when buying outside of a reputable store, you never really know. Still, I wanted Iori with her sparkly gold outfit and she’s out of production, so I bit.

Ryutaro Kaminaga was on sculpting duty for this MegaHouse figure of Iori Minase of IdolMaster fame. The remarkable thing about it is Iori is wearing full length pants, which really is the main reason I bought the figure, since so few anime girl figures are dressed in full length pants. I guess I wanted to get something that stood out from the pvc army in some way.

Actually, the gold pants are pretty interesting. There are sparkles embedded into her pants and vest, so there’s extra texture and shine when the light hits it just right. Topping off the hip huggers is a bitchin’ belt. It’s like she’s ready to dance for the Tokyo Cowboys.

Other than the wardrobe and the rendering of the shiny material, it’s a pretty average figure that steps up a notch due to these uncommon details. But, those are why I got it.

Another uncommon detail she’s got are rendered teeth, which are always tricky to do without it looking weird in a simplified style such as this. There were a couple of otherwise good shots I didn’t use because the light hit her teeth. I didn’t notice her teeth until I took a couple of tight shots around her face, but man my eye just kept going to her teeth. It would have been okay if her teeth were just a single mass, but the sculptor sort of rendered each of her front teeth.

And Now For Some Metablogging

Looking forward on the pants front, it seems like GSC’s Canaan shipped yesterday, so expect a review in like three months. ^^; I’ve lost the need to post stuff quickly. I still totally enjoy taking the shots once I get around to it, but mainly I’ve just relaxed a lot as far as blogging itself goes.

I have 1/5th the daily traffic today as I did from 2007-2009 and I’m not bothered by it. What brought about this change in attitude was selling advertising and sponsorship slots. Having someone pay me so they could put ads in front of the eyeballs visiting this site meant HappySoda was providing a service. Getting paid for this is fair and a great thing, but it made me understand that providing a service wasn’t what I wanted to do. All I really wanted from figure blogging was a glorified show and tell. Here’s what I got! So, I turned down new sponsor requests, didn’t renew campaigns, and then once those were done stopped worrying about generating traffic. While I miss the money, it feels great to not care about traffic. Really, amazingly great.

There are hundreds of figure bloggers now and each one has a space in which they personalize their massed produced item by making photo pictorials, figure comics, composite images, etc. And doing it better and better. This is fantastic.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

It’s raining today, nasty and crooked. Normally, Saturday is a real busy day, but I don’t actually have anything to do, except toss some clothes in the laundry and watch some college hoops, seeing a couple of teams trying to make their case to the selection committee. Cleaning up this place is a possibility, but why not waste some time instead? The camera still had a charge so it was a good time to take some shots of a figure I’ve had for a long while, Kotone Ousaka from Native, sculpted by Chieri, based off a Tony Taka illustration.

(This is an ecchi/NSFW figure review).

Obviously this is meant to be an ero figure. She’s leaning back on a desk with her shirt pulled up and holding a banana near her mouth. Food with sex is gross, but I seem to be alone in that department. I guess I’m weird when it comes to food and where it goes. Anyway, on a fake plastic anime girl, an erotically held banana isn’t that bad, but not that high on the erotic scale. Of the figures that Native has released, Kotone is probably the most tame on the “looks like she’s waiting to be raped” scale (thanks, Colette).

Native’s Kotone figure looks a little like Kotona Elegance from Max Factory, which was also sculpted by Chieri. Naked + Creative figures are basically Max Factory, at least so far. Not entirely sure if Native is just another MF product line or a seperate company that issues production to Max Factory. Anyway, knowing this assured me that the figure would be of good quality. A lot of ero figures look unintentionally awful, so I usually pass. Plus I don’t know if I’d ever display them since my apartment is too small for a manime cave where I can just dump all sorts of things I wouldn’t want in my living room or bedroom. I’m not above collecting these things at all, just don’t have a place I want to put them. Just as well, since I’m running out space in general.

Anyway, Kotone is awesome. I look forward to more Native releases. Good paint and sculpt, though she has good and bad angles like many figures (bangs cover her eyes when turned even slightly away). Any time a figure can have something other than a plastic disc as a base, it is great. The desk rocks. Now I wish I had something to hang on the hooks on the side of her desk, like a bag, or her skirt or something. That would have been a great finishing detail.

Her bikini top and bottom are both removable. I didn’t bother taking any pictures of Kotone sans bikini bottom, because it took a bit of effort to get the strap piece in place and there was no way I’d do that again. Plus, it doesn’t really look all that great. Her bikini bottom actually has more shape information than when she’s bare, so no point in it really. The top is far easier to remove, but her boobs look bigger with the bikini top on, so that’s the view for me. Either way, the boobs side of The Chest Wars should be fine with either clothing configuration.

It was a lot of fun taking these shots. Ero figure, yeah. Not just that though. There were a couple of interesting lighting puzzles to work out. Kind of surprised at how little light I wound up using.

Further Inspection

Foo-bar-baz (has box shots…also the packaging that the figure came in)
Tentacle Armada

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

She is the second of the Hyakka Ryoran figures and my favorite of the initial designs. Unfortunately, Yukimura Sanada was only available through Hobby Japan, the dreaded mail-order exclusive. Fortunately, Tokyo Hunter was able to get this for me. I’ve had Tokyo Hunter get a couple of things for me and have always been happy with the service. If I really want that mail-order exclusive that’s the first place I check.

Back in junior high, after school, my friends and I would pump all of our paper-route money one quarter at a time into Karate Champ and Yie Ar Kung-Fu. It took us a lot of quarters to figure out how to get past Chain, but after that it didn’t take us long to beat the rest of the characters. I always thought Fan was a cool enemy flinging her fans all over the arena. Too bad we weren’t stuck on Fan like we were with Chain. We beat Fan the first time we tried. Her fan attack was pretty to watch, so it was disappointing that we beat her so quick. I was a weird kid. Since then, I’ve always liked the image of fan-bladed warrior girls. So, I felt this dual fan wielding demon girl had a place in my collection.

These next three photos have an odd tint on purpose. I kind of liked how it looked, but if you want to see the ones without the color filter on it, you can check out the extra shots at the end.

There’s a lot of touches all over the place as far as rendering anatomy. Even better than that is an attention to weight and gravity in the overall flow of the figure, which see in a lot of Tanaka Senu’s figure work. You can easily draw an action line through many of Senu’s figures and see the weight follows action. Sanada has a great swooping curve. The solid line through her removes a lot of questions from the pose, making it easy to view without a lot of turbulence.

Even though I make a little fun about having a little Captain in her, I do dig the digs. Details from the “embroidery” on her coat and hat to the braids on the ropes are sharp.

There are two things I would criticize. One, even though you can’t see them, the area above her ankles seem to be a bit long. This opinion is based mostly on where her calf muscles end. However, the chunky shoes hide it very well (or maybe it is throwing me off). The other would be her bangs. They lack the confidence that the rest of the sculpt has in spades.

Extra Shots

I figured I’d leave the crotch shot small for those who don’t want to be assaulted by a 666 pixel high image of it. The shot shows some of the fantastic detailing of the sculpt, that tendon along the inner thigh. Also, the subtle shapes of the muscle area just below the swimsuit line.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Sora Kasugano has a pensive air around her. She would be just another character from an eroge, except for the softly contrasted monochromatic colors of her skin, clothing, and hair caught my eye. I find all of the Yosuganosora characters illustrated by Hashimoto Takashi attractive, mainly for how well the line work and color palette match so well.

Houjun Otoyama sculpted Sora based on this illustration. The adaptation of that illustration to the figure, particularly in her body language is well done. Otoyama caught the pensive body language as well as the physical shape and tone. Her hips and subtle torso twist look far more solid in the figure. I’m a fan of tummies, so I enjoy the extra tone that Otoyama included on Sora. All that’s missing is some water glistens, but I don’t imagine there’s currently a way to include that detail without it looking eww-chunky. Last thing you want to do with an already questionable desk ornament is to have to explain that stuff on her is supposed to be water.

Her towel is rendered surprisingly well for being made of plastic. As far as the base goes it does the job and is unobtrusive. The black rabbit doll acts as a counterweight to Sora’s lightness. Keeping it on the base grounds the figure well. Check out one of the thumbnails at the end that show the figure without the rabbit doll and towel to see how the composition of the figure is a bit unsettled without these accessories.

MegaHouse’s Sora Kasugano isn’t completely chocolate and unicorns. Sora’s head tilt looks better in the illustration, conveying a bit more personality than the more straight ahead positioning on the figure sculpt. Her figure face is a little more generic than resembling the illustration. As far as the detailing, shading in places is a bit over dark. In particular around her knees and ankles, it looks more like dirt than the natural darkening of these areas on an idealized body.

The over-shading isn’t enough to detract from her legs, which are a bit more realistically proportioned than in a good number of figures, where the tendency is to really elongate the leg area. Sora’s head and body are about the same combined length as her legs. Often times this proportion can make a drawing or figure appear stubby, rather than long and elegant. Sora appears to be anything but stubby.

I hope to see a Brilliant Stage treatment of some of the other Yosuganosora characters. Sora turned out better than I expected and a little bit more interesting than I thought she would be. Foo-bar-baz gave the figure 5-stars and I think its a good figure as well. I guess, if I had to score points against the sculpt itself, it would be her butt. The shape around her lower back, the tailbone on up seems off.

Extra Shots

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Perhaps a three-dimensional representation of the Black Rock Shooter cannot scoop up all of the style of the two dimensional art, but Akeji pretty much rocked this out anyway. The best part of the figure are her blue eyes, giving off a melancholy vibe. They’re really mysterious looking. However, facial expression really only matters up close, like when the figure is on your desk. On the shelf, the rest of the figure is what should speak and keep it interesting for several months or more.

Even though it is a background element, the massive cannon makes this figure shine. That and the massive base. Both elements have more visual mass than the shooter herself and work to contrast with her long twiggy body. It’s almost like the shooter herself is a placeholder for the gun and the flowing coat, which kind of fits her sad expression. That coat is fantastic, a perfect amount of shine, and the folds superb.

I love how the hair came out. It sort of looks like there’s streaks of different shades in her hair, rather than just one color. Have the figure people been seeing some hair color commercials?

Here’s some other opinions of BRS: foobarbaz and Persocom’s.

In the end, an excellent rendition of the Black Rock Shooter character. Anyway, does she actually have a name?

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Hello again. Time for plastic and jpegs. This go around it’s Yagyu Jubei from Alter and Hobby Japan, the first in the Hyakka Ryoran series, featuring a quartet of legendary warriors turned girly by Nitro+. Jubei is a standard release figure, but some of the others in the series are Hobby Japan exclusives. Nitro+ designs usually translate very well into figure form, so I’ve been looking forward to these figures.

The individual design elements are appealing. Her swords mounted on rope belts around her thighs are ridiculous, but they look great. A skirt would just get in the way, so Jubei’s smart not to wear one. Function should win over modesty in these situations, after all.

The sculpt, by Mirano, emphasizes triangles to keep the eye looking over the figure. The wide hips are a triangle pointing up and the neckline of her shirt a triangle pointing down, where the two points meet in between her breasts. There’s a couple other natural triangle patterns that have been emphasized and put to good use, which helps give the figure a good visual flow overall.

While I love the decent sized hips, full size boobs, and the face/eye design, Jubei looks slightly off in her proportions. It could be the chunky shoes elongating her legs that’s throwing me off, but her torso feels a touch compact. Also, from some angles the placement of her neck/head gets thrown off by the drum on her back.

I had a good impression of the figure when I took it out of the box. Although, there are a couple of things that dampened the sweetness, I still have a favorable view of the figure after a longer look. It looks like Foobarbaz, gave Jubei 3 out of 5 stars, which I could see, but I think I like it a little better than that. Could just be that I like the designs and it’s tilting me a little.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh