Tag Archives: Goodsmile Company

by | April 15, 2012

Nendoroid Sena Kashiwazaki

Usually I limit myself to buying figures from anime I’ve seen or video games I’ve played. I fear that I would buy a lot more figures otherwise. I had to make an exception for Sena though.

Sena has some pretty nifty accessories, which is the main reason I bought her. She has a couch, a television, and a PS3. Plus, I really like her sparkly expression. Did the rest of her fit my expectations? Let’s find out!

I enjoy the fact that Sena is a cute girl that plays video games. Well, I guess she does. She’s pretty basic otherwise. Hair, check. School uniform, check. Her sparkly face is pretty cute.

Her butterfly clip is pretty. The edges are rougher than I’d like or expected, and it’s already fallen out more often than I’d like. The transparency is pretty awesome.

It looks like the painter for my Sena didn’t really care to get it right. One of her socks is pretty sloppy. I definitely like her petticoat though! Nice little bit of detailing there.

The accessories are curiously devoid of detail. Perhaps the PS3 couldn’t be labeled as such for legal reasons. I still think it could be more detailed. In fact I know it could be more detailed. I have other nendos with tiny accessories that have better detailing.

Just look at the back of the television. Plenty of detailing without any brand stamp. It’s weird.

The bottom of the television cart is pretty rough. This is the kind of thing I expect to see from kits I put together from plastic frames since I’m generally too lazy to neaten up the pieces. I don’t expect this from a finished product.

I don’t mind the television being blank, but white was really the wrong color choice. It’s very glaring. The PS3 fits very snugly in the cabinet, though!

I felt the way Sena looks while playing Mega Man 2 the other night. That game is unforgiving! With this picture, I also realized that it is pretty well impossible to take a picture of Sena sitting on the couch where you can’t see her underwear. If you angled from above it’s possible, but it might look a little weird. She sits fairly securely. There wasn’t too much tipping her over for this shot.

Tsundere pose! (Her cheek was probably smudged by me. I didn’t notice any problems with her faces upon first opening her box.)

Final verdict? Sena is 50/50 for me. I love her faces. She’s the only nendoroid that I see myself regularly using all expressions. However, the messiness of her production and the lack of details with her accessories really bug me. The PSP really weighs in her favor. I can see captioning many pictures of Sena with the PSP (or other nendos!).

If you really want Sena, I’d say go for her, but if not she doesn’t seem all that necessary.

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by | March 3, 2012

FINALLY. Love is War DX

It has finally arrived. My Love is War DX Miku!

You should have seen my face when I went to pick this up from the post office. The box is huge! I brought in my Tony Taka Miku to help provide a sense of scale. This is definitely the largest figure I’ve ever bought. There were no windows in the box showing the figure – you’ll see below that it wouldn’t have made any sense. The box itself has an excellent design, really accentuated the style of this figure.

Opening the box, you see a fearsome array of parts! I haven’t seen the box for the regular edition of Love Is War Miku, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they used pretty much the same box, with just some text changes. There’s two layers of clamshell here, and some really diabolical use of tape, and wire to hold the clamshells together. Seriously, who puts a knot in those bits of wire?! I ended up just prying apart the clamshells enough to claim everything out of them.

Here’s Miku’s clamshell! You get a good look at her and part of the base.

Here’s the giant megaphones and railings that make up the rest of the base.

Instructions and the wire for the megaphone. The pictures provide all the illustration you need to put this all together. The wire is a pain. I may never buy another figure with any kind of wire again.

Looks like Miku’s twintails get extra support, which is good. Looks like they’ll need it!

Miku without the rest of her base. The pose ends up looking a little weird to me. Also her butt is sculpted very strangely. I wish I’d thought to take a picture at this stage but it didn’t occur to me until I had the rest of the base together. My camera stopped cooperating with me at that point, but maybe I will take a picture later. Her underwear is very strange as well. Her skirt is wonderful, looks very windblown, as well as her belt.

Her hair is just gorgeous. My only worry is that the smaller bits seem a little brittle. Hopefully nothing happens to them.

They’re a little difficult to see in this picture, but Miku’s boots have some really nice blue highlights! It’s not a trick of the reflection, it’s the painting. I am impressed.

More great detailing in her shirt, and the hand holding the megaphone: her trigger finger actually curls around the trigger! And look at all those nice wrinkles in her sleeve! Her face sculpt is beautiful, as well as her hair! On an intial examination, I saw absolutely no seam lines.

The base is complete. The quality is just great, everything looks like it’s actually metal. I’m always impressed when something manages to look heavier than it is.

Love is War Miku all put together, next to Tony Taka Miku for reference, again. These are the two most expensive figures I own, and I love them for different reasons. I also suspect that there’s a lot less wire than in the model pictured on the box. Trying to get it to do what it was doing in the diagram was super frustrating.

Now for some closeup shots of the details, specifically Miku’s shirt and arm warmer things!

Here is an example of my camera being uncooperative. It’s an automatic, I don’t have any control over the lens, which sucks often. I *thought* it would focus on Miku, but instead it focused on the megaphones behind her. This shot is still cool, but it’s a little frustrating. If you have any tips that don’t include “buy a new camera,” I’d love to hear from you.

 

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by | February 26, 2012

Goodsmile Woes

I couldn’t contain my excitement when Goodsmile Company announced a release date for their Love is War Miku. Love is War is my first and favorite Miku song, so I was really happy to be able to order this awesome looking (and wallet breaking) figure. In the past month, Goodsmile has gone from being one of my favorite companies to a possible candidate for boycott. (Yeah right. I’ll still buy plenty of nendos.)

I decided to put in an order for the DX version of the figure, which comes with an enormous speaker base, and a lot more cost.

I had a couple issues with my payment, and learned first hand that their customer service leaves something to be desired. I had a slight miscalculation of my personal funds, so I had to scrape together money real quick (my fault, not theirs). However, their instructions were nearly inscrutable, and in this case impossible to actually follow. I was directed to click buttons on a page that didn’t exist, which puzzled me to no end. However, they do answer e-mails pretty promptly, so after back-and-forth conversation in e-mail, I got my payment cleared up.

Now to wait for it to ship!

I received the e-mail that this shipped, along with e-mails from other companies for other figures I’d ordered. It’s always exciting to expect something in the mail.

I received my Taiga nendo just before Naka-kon. I received my Append Miku nendo in the week after Naka-kon. They used the same form of shipping, I thought, so Love is War DX Miku should arrive any time now….

ANY TIME.

This past week (February 19-25), I mapped out when I’d received the e-mail saying Miku had shipped and when I thought I could reasonably expect to receive her. For the cost, I had better receive something! Then I received an e-mail that suggested through some weird error that a number of figures had simply sat at a post office for the past couple weeks, traveling exactly nowhere. Supposedly they are shipping now. This e-mail also looked to have been run through a translator and just copied-and-pasted to recipients, so I had to read it twice for it to make sense.

This on top of many shipment delays for the Cheerful Japan nendoroids is definitely not making Goodsmile Company look good. I seriously doubt I will order from their webstore again after all this.

That figure had better arrive this week.

(Yes, I did forget to post a vocaloid video last week. My apologies.)

image courtesy of Mikatan’s blog

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by | October 27, 2011

Nendoroid Baka Ki el Dogra

When I ran across the announcement for this nendoroid, I was surprised! Granted, I still haven’t finished watching Level E, but what I’d seen of the series I really enjoyed, so I preordered this guy right away. Generally, I like to think I only order figures of characters I especially like, but sometimes there a little something extra that makes the deal better.

I’d had a weird blind spot with nendoroids I’d ordered before. I’ll order something based completely on its initial picture, and then be completely surprised at what else it’s packing.

Anyway let’s start with a box picture! It’s a pretty standard nendoroid box, but I do really like the exterior of this one.

 It really looks like the Prince is wondering just when you’re going to let him out of the box doesn’t it?

I’m pretty used to Nendoroids, I have a pretty decent little collection going right now. But for whatever reason, I am boggled by all the arms he comes with. Plus, they’re all handily marked with an “L” or an “R,” which I haven’t seen on any other Nendoroid that I own. He has the standard number of faces though: three.

The Prince’s faces are pretty terrific, you have the thoughtful face, the expressionless face, and what I think of as his manipulating face (the one with the blushing). He also comes with a chair to reenact his first appearance in the anime, plus various arms, a kitten, a book, and a cup of coffee. His outfit is really simple, so there’s hardly any messy paint there.

The messiness was all saved for the Prince’s hair. I was seriously disappointed with this quality. It’s easily one of the nicest hair sculpts I’ve seen for a Nendoroid, but the paint job on the one I have neutralizes it completely.

Fortunately, most of the mess seems to be just on this side, checking the other side shows it to be pretty fair quality.

Also, the Prince joins the ranks of sitting Nendoroids, such as Ciel Phantomhive, and…..others. Ciel’s the only other Nendoroid I own that has a chair. I had a little fun with the smiley face joints Goodsmile uses, and the chair.

Now, Prince Baka comes with the newer style of Nendoroid base, that has the peg that goes in the back, but his hair covers his back. Goodsmile solved this little problem by specializing his base a little, and once I figured it all out, it was no problem to set him up.

 

Actually, with these two pictures, I still didn’t quite have it right. The little peg ends up being angled down, not up. Either way, I still think of a car being fueled every time I look at this base, haha.

The chair! It’s a pretty nice looking little office chair. It doesn’t balance quite as well as I’d thought it would, usually I have to lean Prince Baka’s head forward quite a bit for it to stay flat. This definitely won’t work if your desk or table is not level, as I’ve found out at work.

Whenever I get a new figure of a pretty small size, I like to take it to work and display on my desk. Sometimes, if it’s a figma, I’ll mess around with posing it on my breaks (while hoping no one is watching me!), and with nendoroids, I’ll change their faces. The Prince here is a pretty androgynous fellow, so it wasn’t a surprise at all when my coworkers assumed he was a girl. He does look pretty girly, with that hair of his, and especially this expression.

This is my personal favorite of the expressions. The manipulative factor is what makes the Prince so fun.

I’m gonna have to take a picture of all my nendos that have cats now. I think this puts me up to three.

This is a great bit of detail: the seams of his shirt. I’m always really impressed to see things like this in smaller figures.

My final assessment: I’d say only buy this Nendoroid if you’re really a fan of Level E. I bought it for that reason, and I’m still really disappointed about the paint on the hair. This won’t be my favorite Nendoroid, but he’s pretty solid. All in all, his good points do outweigh the bad hair.

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