Hi, today I will show you a new “oldie” figure about the Suzumiya Haruhi – Gekisou Version.

I recently bought this figure from Ami Ami’s Pre owned items branch for around 8000 Yen.
It already became a regular habit for me to check for new offers and figure prices there, except the figure is really rare the prices are more than fair, you can get items you always wanted.

To be honest I mainly ordered this Haruhi figure, because she was quite popular in the past and had a significant price drop recently, which might be a bad reason for a figure purchase.

The Haruhi Suzumiya – Gekisou Version was manufactured by Max Factory in April 2009.
This version is scaled 1/8 and has a a height of 210 mm. The origin of this figure is this certain illustration where the SOS Brigade is playing rockband. The figure was part of a figure lineup, next to Haruhi there have been  Gekisou Versions of Yuki Nagato and Mikuru Asahina.

It is kinda scary to see rare, high price figures getting cheaper, especially when considering the worth of ones own collection. It nearly seams as if figures have a certain price life span, first they are available for the retail price, then they are sold out which leads to rising prices for several years and in the end the prices get quite low, Im wondering if prices will rise again in the future.

Considering for how much money private sellers sell their figures compared to places like Mandarake is hilarious. Lets take this Haruhi as example, I got my Haruhi for 106 € with shipping and customs included and there are private sellers that are selling this figure for 170$ and more.

On the one hand Im quite happy that I can get rare figures for affordable prices, but from another point of view I dislike how these shops kill the aftermarket prices, it somehow changes the figure from a piece of art to disposable plastic merchandise, what I as collector don’t like.

What’s your opinion about falling prices of great formerly popular figures?

Let’s put this little side topic aside for now and start with the actual review part

Hair & Face

Haruhi’s hair is sculpted closely to the illustration, it has many strands and a spiky design, the long Ahoge and the rest of the hair is made of relative flexible material. The hair has a soft look and looks nice with the natural brown color and the subtle applied darker shading .

On her simple but well sculpted face, Haruhi shows an extreme cheerful and energetic face expression. Her eyes are very detailed and capture Haruhi’s radiating energy in a very good way. There are figures with open mouths that look convincing and there are figures that look silly with it, I have say it this Haruhi tends more towards the latter. Not from all angles, though.

Body & Outfit

This Suzumiya Haruhi figure  has a more cartoon look compared to her anime counterpart, everything about her has soft edges. Overall she has a slightly petite body, she seems to be of normal height and has a good balance of upper body and legs. Haruhi shows some skin in this figure adaption, her top is short and exposes her shoulders, collarbones and the belly, she also is a little busty :D. This figure also has thin arms and tiny fingers, a little too short in my opinion.

Her nice legs are covered by olive green stockings with an accurately painted fishnet pattern.
On her left leg she is wearing a shorter version of this stocking model and some more skin is revealed. The gloss and bulky brown shoes are another little yet very nice design element.

The extravagant outfit of  this figure  has many Visual Key elements, on top of her head she is wearing a broad yellow band. The dots around her neck actually are no dirt (haha I was quite shocked as I noticed these spots, that looked like dirt), it is a painted on necklace. Haruhi is wearing a second necklace around her neck which is made of wire and shows a cross  pendant.

Her short top is very cute, the black and white colors is a nice color combination, at her arms the figure has cool decorations in form of arm and wrist warmers. Around her waist is a big belt, I think this is a quite sexy design element. Further below Haruhi has a three layered skirt with a longer rear, the upper layer has a semi transparent smoky color, the two other layers are black.

Haruhi comes with a fancy and very detailed E-guitar, it looks really nice and has single chords.

Im a big fan of The Melancholy of the Suzumiya Haruhi franchise and I loved every animated piece of it so far, a goal of me would be to read all the light novels in the next year, since I doubt that  more anime adaptions from this franchise will be made in the future.

I always love the adventures of Kyon, Haruhi, Yuki, Mikuru and Koizomi, while it mainly appeared as everyone  in the SOS Brigade was dragged along Haruhi’s self centered crazy ideas, I think that all of them enjoys their youth to the fullest, thx to Haruhi’s awkwardness.

Im quite fascinated by the unique character of Suzumiy Haruhi, some see her as self centered, annoying girl with a slightly rotten personality, but I like these ruthlessness of her a lot. Her spontaneous, upbeat, and hyperactive  style is also something I like about Haruhi.

Final Words

I always had problems with figures that are adapted from characters of my favorite anime. I am a lot more picky with figures from shows Im more attached to. If the figures aren’t close to what I imagined I don’t buy them. Having a figure from a favorite anime is a nice thing, but you won’t find that in my collection. With shows that I just consider as good I m easier to convince.

This Haruhi is actually a nice figure with a very fancy outfit and an action orientated pose, but personally I’m not as satisfied with her as I would like to be, she’s unfortunately not  my Haruhi.

Of course it’s question of personal taste, but the open mouth bothers me a lot to be honest, from certain angles she appears a bit like a psycho. I had preferred a more serious, less cheerful face expression of Haruhi. That would be the only thing  that I really dislike about this figure.

Aside from that she is a nearly flawless figure with very convincing sculpting and painting., the Visual Key outfit is also a very appealing part of this Suzumiya Haruhi – Gekisou Version.

This figure of Haruhi also has really good photogenic qualities thanks to her dynamic and cool appearance, I had a lot of fun with taking pictures of her.

thats all for today, see you next time…

They have a height of 80 mm which makes them bigger as petite Nendoroids, but smaller than real Nendoroids. Their sculpting and painting quality can be considered as very good, the parts are painted very well and the faces also have lovely rosy cheeks *blush*. There are some minor flaws I will mention later in this review. Everyone of these small piglets have a few little features.

The Guitar version comes in a casual dress with a mini skirt, brown boots and a t-shirt, extra parts are a guitar and a towel. She seems a bit exhausted from her concert but she’s still happy. In direct comparison with the other two versions, she appears a little boring in that outfit.

The Demonbane version is one of my favorites, Sonico cosplays as Al Azif from Demonbane.
This Sonico looks very cute in her frilly white outfit with the red ribbons. Her happy face has a nice upper front teeth line, its also nice how her belly is exposed. Her feature are the rotateable arms.

The Valentine version is my second favorite Sonico from this set, she is inspired by this 1/7 scaled Soniko figure that Orchid Seed produced in 2009 showing the naked apron outfit in a sexy way. Im no big fan of the naked apron attire, but a sexualised chibi Soniko is quite amusing.

You can see some sideboobs and the white thong between her buttocks. This small darling is very photogenic I have to say. Her pose and the shy face expression are a very good combination. As feature she has a cute cake and is showing some curves, one cute detail are her house slippers.

With my copy of the set I had not much luck, as I was unpacking them I already snapped the neck of the Guitar version *damn* I actually wanted to swap the heads of the figures, but after the bad experience I planned not to do more damage to these figures. Another flaw is that the Demonbane version doesn’t stand straight on her base unfortunately she is leaned slightly backwards. In terms of durability the Apron version is the most steady one.

My fellow blogger Sevie apparently received a better copy and had more trust into durability of these 3 figures, in her review she swapped heads and tried more interesting things than I did.

Overall these three figures of Sonico have a nice quality in terms of sculpting and painting, far better than the petite Nendoroids. From my biased impressions they are no figures for heavy duty, not something for playing around, just place them on a good spot and let them be would my advise. Nevertheless the quality is good, but for future figures of the Choco*Ochi line Orchid Seed should improve the connection between figure and base, I don’t trust these flimsy pegs.

My next Sonico related post should be a review about the Bath Time version figure from Native.
Im totally looking forward to this one ♡´◡`♡  Thx for reading, see you next time!

Hi a new figure has finally arrived, after a lot of anime related posts I can present you a new figure review. Today it will be about Hirasawa Yui, she’s a premiun prize figure manufactured by SEGA.

Her origin is the popular anime adaption K-on!!, the slightly airheaded Yui was the unofficial main character in the first season. In this figure adaption she is shown in her official HTT (Happy Tea Time) band t-shirt which she sported at the last performance on the school festival with Mio, Ritsu, Mugi and Azusa in episode 20. Ah that scene afterwards was such a big tearjerker, parting with your schoolmates and previous schoollife can be so sad hard. “stop crying damn wimp” XD
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pOoLvamGvM&feature=related

I never thought about buying a Sega figure before, last year, I began to notice, that their quality seemed to be better than I actually thought. I couldn’t find this Yui figure at japanese shops and ordered this figure at an US-shop, later she appeared on Mandarake for around 1600 Yen, I paid a little bit more, 35 $ + shipping (rage!), for prize figures you should give Mandarake a try.

First Impressions

Despite beeing a prize figure Yui comes with a nice looking box, she is a fully assembled figure, already fixed on her flip-flop colored base and with her beloved guitar “gitah” in her hands.
This “Windmill” Yui figure is quite big, she measures 21 cm which lets her look like 1/7 +

As I first unpacked her I felt a bit dissapointed with her, Yui was so unexpectedly big, I expected something more close to 1/8. Because of the huge size the lack of details on this prize figure is very prominent. I guess I became a bit spoiled with the level of detail from my high price figures.
Well, while doing the shooting with Yui, I slowly got the feeling that Yui actually is a very nice looking figure and that I was too harsh with her at the beginning even though there is still a difference in comparison with figures from other manufacturers that have a higher reputation.

Pose and random Infos

As you see this is a quite dynamic pose SEGA had chosen for her, I think they wanted to recreate the trademark windmill move of Pete Townshend, a member of The Who, he also owned the same Gibson Les Paul guitar like Yui, in fact he had 9 different Les Paul guitars for the concerts.

Yui raises her plektrum in the air like she wants to ROCK!, her movement with the spread and slightly crooked legs is captured very nicely, well her back is more leaned forward, but thats mainly because of the weight of her guitar, I suppose it’s a quite heavy instrument for a girl of her size. Yui’s guitar is the Les Paul Standard Sunburst made by Gibson, they did a very good job in recreating the details of this popular guitar model, the plastic has a nice polished wooden look, the turning knobs are on the right placed and also the belt around Yui’s shoulder looks cool.

Yui has a wild waving hairstyle with several detailed strands and her 2 yellow clasps. There are also some shading effects which have been rarely used on the rest of this figure. They gave her face a nice open mouth and some cute  blushmarks and nice eyes, overall she resembles Yui very well, maybe her eyes appear a bit too big in comparison with her face, what do you think?

The reason why I have ordered this figure adaption and not one of the other Yui’s is mainly based on this cool looking pose and partly based on my aversion to western styled private school uniforms, they are so plain and bourgeois. With the white HTT t-shirt her outfit has more credibility, now she really looks like a member of a band. Thats the spirit of Rock n’ Roll!
Well, Im ok with the skirt and her black pantyhose, since they accentuate her nice legs.

Also the sculpting of her dress with the detailed wrinkles on skirt and shirt is very well done. There are nearly no visible seamlines, also the simple paintjob looks clean and smooth.

Final Words

Yui is a premium prize figure and in terms of quality she’s actually a very good figure. At first I was a bit dissapointed because of her big size, but after the shooting and some days on my desk, she grow on me a bit more.

Well, you can clearly see where Sega cut the budget for prize figure Yui, aside from the hair this figure has no shading and the good sculpted guitar has no strings, nevertheless it’s remarkable, that a prize figure comes with such a good quality. Well for the price I’ve paid I would had expected a decent figure, but when you’ve just paid 1500 Yen this is more than a very good deal.

This is Arisa from “The Art of Shunya Yamashita“, she is scaled 1/7, has a nice sculpted face and a cool guitar at her hand. She was produced by Yamato and her release Date was in 2007.

I own that figure for some years now I like her but unfortunately she started to lean a bit. Her stand on the base was also very shaky until I felt the urge to use some glue. Last week I decided to do a little reshoot of this figure , I tried to make a stage like setting. That didn’t really turn out like I imagined, but some pics turned out pretty nice I think,

Arisa is standing on her tiptoes with one hand she is holding her detailed guitar in a chilled fashion and the other hand is placed behind her neck. In this shooting I used my Sony Alpha 550 with the Sigma EX 50mm, an 6500K lamp Softbox an external  Flash and a  small slave Flash.  For the backround I used black tissue and glitter stripes.

Arisa is avery pretty looking figure, her face is very well done, this figure doesn’t have the typical anime face. I like her purple twintailed styled hair and the strong green eyes, I really like the optional glasses that were included ^^.  She also has a nice smooth looking mouth. Her appearance is tall and mature, Arisa has long legs and wide hips. The sculpting of her body also looks great, this figure shows nice collarbones, nicely shaped boobs and a detailed belly.

Normally this figure wears a white plastic school uniform which fits to the overall look of her outfit, but I exchanged it with the red white shirt which you can see on the photos. The Figure is also castoffable but for this shooting I thought  it wasn’t necessary to do so, maybe next time =D

So that was my first Blog entry, I hope it wasn’t too bad I’ll will try to improve my writing and my rusty english in the future. Helpful critique is always welcome

see ya