Reika Shimohira from Gantz: O (Prime 1 Studio White Version)

First, a couple of administrative notes: this site recently went through a database upgrade and I’ve noticed a couple of odd things. One is that the sidebar mysteriously disappeared until I tweaked the site layout, and another is that special characters appear to be corrupted. I don’t use non-English characters that often but this might have rendered some commenter usernames unreadable. If anyone notices anything that looks awry, please let me know. Second administrative note: I’ve historically done a Five Favorite Figures post but I haven’t yet photographed most of them, and I’m not entirely sure when I’m going to get to them, as I’ve got some other figures that I’d like to shoot first. Therefore, I’m just going to list them here: 5) Ch’en 4) Prince of Wales 3) Kelly 2) Rika Shiramine 1) The Literary Type. My favorite figure that I received in 2021 is Luna.

With that aside, let’s take a look at Reika Shimohira. We’ve looked at a couple of Reika’s figures before – this one from FREEing, which is derived from her manga appearance and this one from Union Creative, which takes rather more liberties with her design. This statue, however, is a relatively faithful representation of her look from the Gantz:O feature film, aside from the stylistic changes made to her clothing. It’s also considerably larger than the other two, even though it’s nominally of the same scale size as the FREEing figure.

This version of Reika is produced by Prime 1 Studio, a statue manufacturer located in Japan. They’ve made a number of statues, many of which are from movie properties, but it appears that they are making more products derived from anime and video games; they recently released a colossal diorama comprising the three androids from Nier: Automata, and they’ve announced products from familiar titles such as Date-A-Live, Sword Art Online, No Game No Life, and that slime anime that I’m very much trying to forget about because I greatly dislike its main character (entirely due to its broken kit in Epic Seven).

Reika measures about 53 centimeters in height, which is quite impressive, even considering that she is sculpted in 1/4 scale. She requires some minor assembly, some of which is a little fraught, as I’ll explain in a bit. A number of statue manufacturers use the premium price of their products to justify creating very elaborate and extremely large bases for their figures; they usually look quite nice but they take up an inordinate amount of space. Reika’s base is a very simple and compact disc-shaped platform, which is something I appreciate.

Reika is sculpted in a relatively realistic style, and perhaps the most striking aspect of her facial design are her eyes, which reflect light in a remarkably life-like manner. I’ve never seen eyes like this on a statue, even ones that cost considerably more.

This particular statue is labeled the “White Version”; there’s also a Black Version which has a different face. That Reika is sculpted with a happy smile rather than the more serious expression shown here; I wasn’t sure how I felt about that grin but having seen more photographs of it, I think it turned out really well. The Black Version statue is still in stock at Prime 1 and I’ve given some thought to picking it up as well.

The names of each version are of course derived from the color of Reika’s panties. I think that’s sort of funny and maybe less than dignified, but I suppose it is the most obvious difference between the two statues. I think the black version’s color scheme looks a little more cohesive in that it’s perhaps not totally obvious that she’s only wearing her underwear, but it might be a mistake to say that this sort of outfit has any kind of cohesion at all.

Reika’s outfit is a modified and considerably abbreviated version of the Gantz suit she wears in the series. It reveals a lot of skin which is certainly the point, but it’s also a little surprising being that Prime 1 does not appear to make a lot of fanservice-heavy statues.

Prime 1’s products appear to be very high quality but one aspect of this statue that I found quite disappointing is the shape of Reika’s backside; there’s a pronounced lack of definition there.

I’m not that familiar with the Gantz universe but I believe this weapon is called the Z-Gun. It comes in multiple parts and I was afraid that it might not be stable, but the parts have held together over the last year, so I’m not that worried that it’s going to come loose.

It’s worth mentioning how convincing the detail is with this figure. Reika’s face and hair are exquisitely sculpted, and her clothing shows a futuristic texture that highly impresses. This is a sexy and superbly-made statue of a character that’s gotten quite a few figures and statues, but I’m not sure that any are better than this.