It is time for that monthly examination of figures that have recently been put up for preorder. It’s a mix of figures this time, with a few of the usual companies – Kotobukiya and Max Factory in particular – unrepresented. Hopefully they have some neat stuff to show at Wonder Festival, which is just a few weeks away already. Where does the time go? (Spent slacking off, in my case.) Anyway, let’s take a look at the upcoming cool things.
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As we’ve noted before, there aren’t that many figures of characters from Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere, and those that do exist are mostly from relatively minor manufacturers. Fortunately, a couple of exceptions have been recently released: Alter’s Kazuno and Tomo Asama by Kotobukiya. This happiness is tempered by the realization that those two figures may be amongst the last figures from the series to be released (Wave has a Beach Queens Kimi Aoi scheduled to drop next month, and Volks is supposedly doing figures of Kimi and Kazuno, but who knows whether those will ever materialize). A sad state of affairs, that, and it appears that figure companies are moving on to the next big thing, such as Kantai Collection, which somehow feels a bit like it’s worn out its welcome before even having arrived. The only consolation is that if Tomo is the last Horizon figure to be made by a major figure company, she is at least a very fine one indeed.
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Amongst anime hobby companies, Tamaki Kousaka’s popularity as a muse is everlasting. This isn’t always a good thing; the esteem in which she’s held by figure makers occasionally seems excessive, and a large segment of the collecting population greets each release of a new Tamaki figure with a collective rolling of the eyes. However, I pay no attention to that; I like Tamaki, and I own a bunch of her figures. It’s actually been over a year since I reviewed one; in other words, it’s been too long since we’ve looked at her. To remedy this insufficiency, we’ll look at one of her newest figures, which squeezes her into her Dungeon Travelers fighting outfit. We’ve seen this before; Kotobukiya made a figure of her in this outfit, but while that figure exemplified why, for a long time, people generally regarded Kotobukiya as a maker of mediocre figures, this one, by Kaitendoh, is quite a bit nicer.
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There is an absolutely gigantic box in my living room. We will examine its contents in great detail in the days to come but first, we’ll take a quick look at a dakimakura cover. This pillowcase is a companion piece to this one of Kanane Kurashiki, which was sold at the same time from the same place. Both pillowcases feature art by Yoshiaki Katsurai, one of the better-known artists in the ero doujinshi industry.
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