It was Xenosaga that did it. I’ve played Japanese RPGs for most of my life; like many people, the first one I played was Dragon Warrior, and games like Phantasy Star II, Panzer Dragoon Saga, and Final Fantasy VIII (!) are among my favorite games. But Xenosaga was the one that made me forswear Japanese RPGs. I couldn’t take the awful story, the clumsy presentation, the terrible voice acting and the insipidly generic characters. Except for KOS-MOS; KOS-MOS was very cool. I guess Ziggy wasn’t too bad either. But the rest of it was, and it wasn’t until I played another game with a female combat android that my faith in Japanese RPG makers was restored.
I was mostly a stranger to the long-running Shin Megami Tensei franchise when I first played Persona 3, having played SMT Nocturne very briefly. The game’s impact on me was all the more amplified by my lack of expectation, and it rapidly secured a place on my list of favorite video games. It had realistic characters with believable issues, worries, weaknesses, and dreams along with a story that married the ordinary ongoing life of a high school boy with his incongruous parallel travails to save the world. All of this was wrapped up in a slick, stylish, modern presentation that convinced me that a Japanese RPG need not be soullessly derivative.
Aegis is a robotic combatant who joins the team to fight off the great evil threatening humanity. She is curiously named Aigis in the American localization; normally I roll with the U.S. names on this blog, being an American myself, but Aegis is such a fitting name that I’ve dispensed with my convention. It is the name of the shield of Zeus, symbolizing her role as a protector, as well as a sophisticated military radar and fire control system used by a number of navies, underscoring her artificial construction.
As one of my favorite characters in Persona 3, I wanted to get a figure of her, but there aren’t many options. Kotobukiya made one, as did Alter, but both are long sold out. I stumbled across this figure while browsing through Hobbyfan’s listing of prepainted resin kits and decided to pick her up. She is built in 1/6 scale from a resin kit originally designed by Osiris and Heavy Gauge.
I had some misgivings about buying a prepainted figure from Hobbyfan due to their error on the Meiya Mitsurugi that I bought, but happily no such problems are evident on Aegis. The paintwork on her body is particularly nice; I like the combination of her metallic parts and the darkened shading on her light-colored exterior. The paint on her hair is a bit flat, but I’ll give that a pass. I also like the exaggerated proportions of this figure; it lends it a sense of uniqueness amongst all the other figures I own. Aegis was definitely a worthwhile pickup and I’m very happy to have her.
Aigis is actually a more correct transliteration of the term from Greek. Aegis is more common of course, but Aigis is not wrong per se.