Here we have a figure from Amagami SS, a school romance show featuring a male lead who sleeps in a closet. Ordinarily, I’d rather have nothing to do with a harem-based school romance show, given how bad Princess Lover! was and how bad Mayo Chiki! is looking to be, but one guess should suffice to divine what aspect of this figure enticed me enough to buy it.
Haruka Morishima comes from the dating game Amagami, recently adapted into an anime titled Amagami SS. The anime is a typical school romance in which a young male weakling uses his simple honesty and earnestness to woo and win himself a harem. This lucky but not particularly memorable loser gets to mack on no fewer than six of his classmates. First up is Haruka Morishima, the girl that all the boys desire and that all the girls desire to be. Flighty, flirty, and playful, her regal countenance is both intimidating and enigmatic. And since I didn’t watch more than the first episode, I’m going to stop pretending like I know how the series goes. Personally though, I thought homeroom teacher Ms. Takahashi was the cutest girl in that first episode.
Haruka is manufactured by Max Factory and was released back in April. She’s sculpted in 1/7 scale and stands around 19 centimeters tall. She comes with no accessories or fiddly parts – just stick her on her base and she is good to go.
Haruka is posed somewhat suggestively, as if she desires to be sodomized. There’s no ambiguity as to where the center of attention is placed; it’s square up Haruka’s sizeable backside. Haruka herself emphasizes this point with the position of her hand.
Despite the provocative nature of Haruka’s pose and her shy backwards glance, she’s wearing a fairly conservative swimsuit. Unlike most swimsuit anime figures, Haruka is wearing a one-piece suit, only the second figure that I own that is clad in a one-piece swimsuit. The legs are cut relatively low, which is not unusual for a school swimsuit, but personally, I think a more risque suit would’ve been more pleasing to view.
Haruka’s suit isn’t particularly detailed; there aren’t any wrinkles or creases or anything that would give it more of a lifelike look. It would’ve been nice to see some creases across the seat of her suit or something, since that’s the obvious highlight of the figure, but sadly, the crack of her ass is lamentably undetailed. Max Factory did a better job with the Shining Wind girls in that respect.
On the plus side, Haruka’s body is sculpted quite nicely. Her pose is quite unique, imparting an element of distinction that distinguishes her among the myriad of swimsuit anime figures out there. The curls of her hair are particularly well rendered, as are her hands and feet. And though this is clearly a figure meant to appeal to ass-men, proponents of the female bust will be pleased as well, as Haruka’s breasts are quite shapely.
I also really like her facial expression, which contrasts quite a bit with her maneater reputation. She looks quite nervous and scared which, given the placement of her hand, heightens the eroticism of the figure. There are a whole bunch of anime swimsuit figures which don’t do much more than depict a character in a sexy bikini, but this figure conveys a sense of personality.
Overall, I like this figure, though it’s surely not a highlight of my collection and I don’t have any great affinity for Haruka as a character or the show she comes from. However, it’s hard to turn down a reasonably nicely-done figure of a cute girl spreading her ass with a smile on her face. Some of the finer points could have been executed with more consideration and detail, but generally speaking, the figure looks pretty good.
In real life, Haruka looks rather pallid, like a white girl who’s spent too much time in an ice bath. Her promo pictures show her with a healthy, ruddy complexion and a noticeable blush that appears to not have made it to the production figure. Curious. And regrettable.
Anyone else think the water here looks kinda like a hand making the universally-accepted gesture for male masturbation?
Also, for another review, more pictures, and a more comprehensive bio of Haruka, check out Wieselhead.
Love the water effect, great addition for sure. Morishima is probably the only girl out of the Amagami SS cast that fit my bishoujo criteria; however I personally feel her facial expression in this figure seems a a little disproportionate to me…., I think the spacing between the eyes seems a bit too wide for my taste, the off angle shots look just fine though.
Yeah, the space between her eyes bothered me at first. I’ve gotten used to it now, but her eyes are definitely more widely-spaced than usual for an anime character.
Hmmm, dunno about this one. I consider myself more of an ass person rather than a breast person; but for me, I really don’t see the appeal in this figure. First of all, it’s a swimsuit figure, and they’re usually boring. And she’s just standing there sticking her ass up, but not in any provocotive way. She’s just bending over to me. If she was real and I saw her in this pose, I’d probably go, “Oh, hey…” and then walk away. Maybe it’s in part her facial expression, I find it needs a little more aggression and seduction. She looks a little flirty, like she’s teasing you but at the same time is a little unsure of herself.
The swimsuit is also rather bland, all brown one piece swimsuit that’s the same colour of her hair – it just doesn’t say much. And for a girl that’s trying to show off her ass – she doesn’t really have much to show. I hate girls like that. XD Not sure if it’s because of the original character illustration or that the sculptor didn’t define the ass better…
I don’t know why I’m being so critical of this figure – maybe because it’s late and I’m feeling grumpy. LOL
I do like the paint splatter background you used – it definitely livens the figure up and is much more pleasing to the eyes. Also the shots with the water are well done, you’ve become quite proficient with these water shots. =)
Yeah, there’s not much that’s exciting here. I like it anyway, though. I think the thing I dislike the most is that almost any manufacturer could’ve made this figure and you wouldn’t notice any differences. There was a time when I thought of Alter, Max Factory, and Good Smile Company as being the three highest-quality figure makers, but for a while it seems like the latter two have slacked off and fallen behind. GSC has made some solid figures in recent months, though.
Yes! That’s some amazine work there Tier.
It’s a real shame she didn’t turn out more like the promo, her skin colour there was more pleasant, though I don’t mind what’s been received either.
She’s a bit odd to look at, her head appears to be reasonably detailed, there’s an expression and her hair isn’t simple, it’s got shape some shading perhaps. And her body sculpt is nice given her bust size, but that swimsuit inbetween it all really looks out of place. It’s brown which is an ugly colour for a swimsuit, and there isn’t a hint of detail to it. Just solid brown. As Morishima is rotating to look back there should be wrinkles as you say. Also missing is the signature cameltoe for pervy figures.
I do like though that her hand appears to be grabbing her own ass rather than just touching or something. You can see some indentation on her cheek.
Unrelated question though, why do female anime characters always do that with their hand? two middle fingers together with the outer fingers separated. I’ve never been able to do that and while I know many people can, it just seems like every single female anime character does it at least once.
Gang signs, plain and simple. lol
Yeah, the swimsuit is not flattering at the least. It looks like something her mom ought to be wearing. I don’t have a big thing for the conventional blue school swimsuit, but at least it conforms to a fetish; this one just looks kinda fugly.
A good question, and I must admit I have never noticed this particular finger positioning before. I did think it was odd while processing the pictures; I was surprised to see that the sculptor had put that much detail in her fingers while ignoring her swimsuit.
I think it’s hard for guys to resist this especially the lady bend over to that pose. My next question is that after 5 years, will the figure still be able to stand as well in balance?
I hope so; she’s not a very heavy figure, so I think she’ll be okay. Though then again, I think my Xecty figure is leaning forward now, even though she didn’t seem a likely leaner candidate. I probably ought to fix her position before it gets worse.
dat water splash.
Seeing the water splashing on her ass reminded me of the 4chan images I’ve seen of otaku jizzing on their anime figures… Anyway, a good set of photos as usual, will you be doing a shot breakdown for this one or is there not much to talk about in this particular case?
A strange fetish, that. I bought a can of condensed milk to simulate that sort of thing; I thought it’d be funny, but then I reconsidered and decided that it would have looked pretty dumb. So now I’ve got a can of condensed milk on my desk and I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. Maybe I can make dulce de leche or something.
I’m not planning on doing a shot breakdown, since this whole shoot involved very little imagination and a great deal of “Ahh crap, I better try to get a post up this week.” The shoots are pretty straightforward – the white shots are just two lights hitting the background to blow it out, one key light, an overhead light, and a reflector. I think the water shots are just a key light, overhead light, a rim light on each side, and one background light. One curious thing to note on these photos is how the inverse square law can be an unexpected annoyance; on the side-view shots like shot 03, the key light is placed behind the figure to keep her face lit up, but because her legs are so much closer to the light, her thighs and butt get lit up much brighter than her face. That’s annoying and sort of distracting, I think.
“Seeing the water splashing on her ass reminded me of the 4chan images I’ve seen of otaku jizzing on their anime figures…”
Remind me never to visit 4chan. Oh my! But that hand in the water, did you use any effects or is it just a beautifully captured shot? As always, great photography and writing. Thanks!
A good plan, 4chan is not a place anybody needs to go. Though I visited /h and /d a lot back in the day, and I like going through the /jp and /toy boards.
The “hand” in that shot is just completely random luck; there’s no manipulation there, though I certainly wasn’t trying to actually make the water look like any object. I was culling the pictures and I had to laugh when I saw that shot. It even looks like it has the right number of fingers.
It’s a shame you haven’t seen the show; it’s not a harem in reality. I generally dislike harem. Hell I find most romance quite distasteful, but I rather enjoyed Amagami, particularly for its relatively unique method of storytelling. More series (VN adaptations, at any rate) should do it in the manner Amagami did, instead of butchering multiple routes and stitching them together in some unpleasant manner.
Anyway, she’s a nice figure. I was interested in her when I saw the preorders up, but she lacks a weapon or kemonomimi, thus has no place in my collection. Perhaps strict rules, but ones that have saved me thousands of dollars.
I particularly like the water captures, such stills have always been quite interesting to me, I assume it’s the flash and fast shutter that allows you to capture that?
Yeah, you’re right, I should’ve said “multi-girl” or something instead, since Junichi doesn’t pursue more than one girl at once, from what I understand. I suppose I might watch it one of these days, though I have such a giant backlog of shows to watch that I’m not sure if I’ll ever find the time. (On the other hand, I’m still watching Mayo Chiki!, despite how dumb it is, and if I can find the time to watch that, I ought to have the time to watch at least part of Amagami.)
Yeah, it’s a combination of both of those things. The fast shutter speed kills the ambient light, and the flash freezes the movement of the water.
Amagami is a very cute and touching game-to-anime translation I thought. Although the protagonist is of the spineless sort in appearance, he’s actually remarkably gutsy at times, almost shameless. It’s too bad two of the routes are so disappointing. If you do decide to watch it, I would skip the second and fifth arcs (wild sex hair girl Kaoru Tanamachi and childhood friend Rihoko Sakurai). The former is kind of boring, the latter lacks resolution. The rest are gold, I think, although some people may object to Nakata Sae’s overly timid nature.
But you’re right about Mayo Chiki. I vowed to drop it after the first episode and I’m still following it for some reason, still vowing after every episode to drop it.
That’s unfortunate, I kinda like how Rihoko looks with her messy hair and curvier appearance. Though I’m not sure how she qualifies as fat, since I’ve heard her weight gets brought up.
I’m watching Mayo Chiki mainly because of Kanade. Subaru is cute, I guess the little sister is cute, I’m certain I’m going to dislike the other twintailed girl, and the male lead is boring as hell. I ought to drop it and I might still do so, but for now it’s occasionally funny and also amusing to see what dumb things are going to happen in the next episode.
What sort of shutter speed captures water that crisply? I don’t think I’ve ever used anything below about 1/10, though my camera can do 1/6000 (so it claims) but pictures are just way too dark even beyond about 1/4 (at f 11-13 I’ve found gives best DOF for figures with my 90mm) so I figure I’d need a huge amount of lighting to use high speeds.
I would be very interested in details of this shoot. ^^;
Any shutter speed that is sufficient enough to kill ambient light. The main thing with using flashguns is that you have two exposures, one for the flash and one for ambient. Flashes fire extremely quickly – as befits their name – which means that if ambient light is negated, the flash duration becomes the effective shutter speed. For example, a low power pulse from a Nikon SB-900 typically lasts around 1/8000 of a second, which is sufficient to freeze motion even at a small scale like this. (I’m a big proponent of the philosophy that you don’t need lots of gear to shoot [even though I have a relatively large amount of gear for a guy who only photographs anime figures]. However, this is one case where you really can’t get around not using a flash. Or bright sunlight, but that introduces some other issues.)
“Ordinarily, I’d rather have nothing to do with a harem-based school romance show, given how bad Princess Lover! was”
Princess Lover is actually one of the better harems IMO. Teppei was a good contrast to the usual worthless harem lead. He could handle himself with women, knew how to fight well, and actually had a good amount of control over the women in his harem.
I think the last episode I watched involved Teppei and Charlotte going to an amusement park. I missed the next few episodes and the next thing I heard, they dropped terrorists or ninjas or something into the show and I was like, “Uhh …” I guess I liked most of the characters aside from the snotty tsundere artist girl (I think she was an artist, anyway) but the show didn’t really hold my attention. I liked the OVAs better for obvious reasons.
thx for linking, so you’ve also ordered her ^^
Interesting to see that the number of figures we both have in our collections increased recently, normally I only have 2-3 figures in common with other collectors 😀
This figure has a pretty face, what I don’t really like is that her blush marks appear rather orange than red. Somehow I love the less revealing swimsuit of Haruka, its nice how it follows her curves. The figure is very sexy unfortunately her butt and her private parts doesn’t show the same level of detail like the stomach. With a pose like that there is no need to make this figure appear tame anymore ;D
Your pics are so sharp and crisp, btw have you flooded your desk with water during the shooting?
Yeah, I actually got this figure when she was released, but I didn’t take her out of her box until just now. I also need to take Yamato Super Sonico and photograph her; she might be next up.
I didn’t use that much water this time, but I’ve had a few times where I’ve damaged backdrops by using too much water. Most of the backdrops I use are made of foamboard, which doesn’t withstand water very well. I also had this other time where I tried to construct a mini-waterfall. On my desk. Fortunately, I lost confidence in the idea early in the shoot so I didn’t do anything stupid like drown my computer monitor.
For shame Tier! As Asa said, if you really did watch the anime (or play the game), then you should know that a harem is (lamentably) impossible as once you get locked into one scenario, you can’t get any other girl. Still, the pseudo-stalker girl who pushes everyone else away in one story arc was pretty damn funny! None of them are as good as Mizusawa Mao from KimiKiss though!
Morishima Lovely Haruka (yes, that’s actually her middle name) is probably my fave girl out of the series, top 3 at least, but this figure really did nothing for me. For a swimsuit figure, everything about it just seemed so bland! Some of the GK I have seen, with the characters simply standing up in their uniforms seem to have more energy than this figure!
Ha, and if you had read what I wrote, you would know that I stopped watching after the first episode! I’m not that interested in romance anime, movies, or novels. Particularly romance anime, since the male leads are often bland and at least one of the female leads often displays an objectionable personality.
True, but then the Male leads MUST be bland since they’re usually the role of the Player in these adaptations. It wouldn’t work otherwise. Same with most Eroge adaptations as well. They can’t be anybody because they’re technically everybody!
And lets face it, with a potential 7 girls, at least one won’t quite be right in the personality department. Gotta make them all sufficiently different afterall. At least they’re not yandere… Well, one might.
True enough. It’s unfortunate that the anime directors almost never take the opportunity to do something more adventurous with the male character’s personality. I would think that making the character more interesting is a more rewarding option than playing it safe, but then again, I don’t really watch these sorts of shows very often.
“Anyone else think the water here looks kinda like a hand making the universally-accepted gesture for male masturbation?”
OH MY GOD. Mind=blown.
The water idea is fantastic. The sight of liquid splashing off of Haruka’s gigantic ass is sublime. Have you even considered substituting water for condensed milk, by the way? =P
It’s funny how it turned out that way. I was just pouring water hoping to get something that looked cool, and I got one picture that was way, way, way better than I could have ever planned it.
You mean substituting condensed milk for water? Nah, mainly cuz of the messiness; cleaning up plain water is annoying enough but I gotta guess that the milk is a real pain in the ass if it splatters. Though I don’t know if it would actually splatter or not; it seems pretty thick so it might just ooze down rather than giving those cool and sometimes wildly unpredictable splashy effects. Hmm …. though maybe if I shot it out of a squirt bottle or something …
Haruka wasn’t my favourite Amagami SS character. Although I will admit she looks hot here. Her pose is very seductive and the slight hint of uncertainty in her facial expression is very appealing. Down side to her pose is the viewing angle of her face is limited and her hair is rather dull looking. At least her sexy body more than makes up for that.
I was reading the comments “brown swimsuit” and thinking, who’s got a brown swimsuit? Scroll back up… oh. That’s how interested in the swimsuit I was – I’d blanked it out completely and assumed it was blue. One piece swimsuits can be so dull, maybe if it was removable or something. A bikini would have looked superb on Haruka as well, why not the bright blue one she wears.
It’s a shame she’s not as coloured as her promo shots, that seems to be quite common with Max Factory swimsuit figures. Xecty for example looks a lot paler than her promo shots.
Yeah, it’s a boring-ass swimsuit; they had the chance to do something a lot more interesting but I guess they valued accuracy over excitement.
That reminds me of Akibahobby’s photos of Xecty. She sure did look bad there. While Xecty’s not the most interesting figure around I think my opinion of it has improved as of late. Though she seems to be suffering a leaning problem, compared to Kureha.
The water falling on the figurine pictures look amazing. They are great looking pictures. I can’t help but really love how those pictures were taken.
Thanks XD I must admit I was completely bereft of ideas for this figure; I had hoped the paint splatter pictures would turn out well and I intended for them to comprise most of the photos … but then they turned out crappy and I had to come up with another idea. I’m fortunate that the water in one of the shots turned out humorously, since that gave me an extra picture to use.
Sadly I was only thinking of a really cool water effect when I see it… I almost didn’t see the fapping hand ^^; Besides, when I think of clear liquid, it’d be from females, not males…
Anyhoo!! My main reason to get this figure, if I were to get it, were the knee pits… BUT, the face just didn’t appeal to me. I was short on cash, and my reason for turning this one down was the face. Most figures I have to check the faces, even with Ayanami Rei. I would buy Rei figures right away, but if the face don’t look good, I won’t buy it. So despite the perfect knee pits, and the character that popularized knee pits, I had to skip on Haruka because of that face…
Yeah, they could’ve done a better job on the face. Or rather, they did do a better job on the face but curiously, it didn’t carry over from the prototype to the production figures. I wonder if they’ll do more Amagami figures? It seems like a show that ought to have tons of figures made of its characters but then again, I thought the same thing about Kampfer. I’d buy figures of the Kampfer characters for sure – heck, there’s a big opportunity for figure makers to make two versions of a character and make more money. I wonder why there aren’t any Kampfer figures?
Please try the condensed milk at least once. I’d like to see it.
I’ll try and save a litlte after making dulce de leche. I wonder who would be a good candidate for milk application … Senhime, maybe? Maybe Miku Append? Hmm …