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Review: 1/10 Makinami Mari Illustrious

P1000931 copyAlright then boys and girls, this was SUPPOSED to be a review of Ami’s Menace figure, but sadly the weather apparently has no love for me or half naked desert princess’s, so I’m going with something that could be shot on a cloudy overcast day that we’ve been having around here lately…

So with that said lets take a look a Mari from Wave.

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Ah, ya know I wasn’t the biggest fan of the new movie mostly because I’m purely an Asuka fella myself and could care less about Rei really… So you can probably take a guess at how I felt watching 2.22. Thankfully though we got Mari as a side prize – and what a prize she is!

While she was short on screen time and character development she absolutely stole the show every single time she showed up. Granted, it’s not really hard when your a deliciously extroverted battle nut in a cast of introverted wierdos, but it was certainly enjoyable to see her. The fact that she has glasses and dresses like a catholic school girl doesn’t really hurt her appeal with me in the least either… :p

As for the figure itself… It was released quite a bit back though sadly at the time I hadn’t seen the movie yet, and because I knew nothing her, I didn’t think much of it. Thankfully after watching the movie and falling in love with her character I was able to rather easily secure a copy of her thanks to HLJ!

I picked this particular figure of her out of the available choices because frankly I think her face looks wierd in the Kotobukiya version and Max Factory’s still unannounced 1/6 scale figure of her has incredibly boring body language… I’m still holding out hope for Alter’s, though.

Honestly, if I had to pick between test or regular suit I’d go for test 100%. Barring the utterly stupid helmet, the green with the webbed sorta leggings look far better on her then the silly pink with angel-esque design elements of her standard suit.

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Anyway, enough prattling. Mari comes in an extremely small box… Although a smaller box is to be expected from a 1/10th scale figure, this is still very very compact packaging here (Penny pinchers like me will rejoice at the equally small shipping costs too!).

Even though it is small the design is quite good. While its not overly eye catching the size of the window and inner packaging job make it perfectly viable to just leave her in the box. Outside is just some photos of the figure… Very minimalist, but not bad in any case.

P10008761Getting her out is quite an easy affair…I wish I could say the same for the set-up…Trying to to jam her leg down onto the peg of the base is annoying at best. I definitely had to wiggle her around quite a bit while pressing down and supporting the base from the bottom. I could see someone with a decent amount of strength cracking the base, seeing as its just an hollow plastic disc.

After you’re done with that speed bump you’re ready to go. One thing to appreciate right from the start is her face…I’m not really sure how to phrase it, but several other figures and GK I’ve seen of her make her face very…odd…I hesitate to say “ugly” or “bad”, but just very unappealing…It still technically feels like the character somewhat, but…yea…

P10008861So anyhow none of that here. While the expression is slightly quirky, her overall face shape, glasses and all, is very clean and accurate to the anime. She has this sorta mischievous sideways glance going on that’s different from the norm, which I quite like as well.

Sticking with her head Wave has done a pretty good job on her hair… There’s not much in the way of shading, but the sculpting detail survived the mass production process admirably especially for something of this scale.

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Moving from her head to the body she has excellent body language with her hips slightly tilted to one side, which compliments the mischievous feel that her face set. Your eyes can’t help but to naturally flow down the slightly curved angles that her midsection sets. With her hand firmly placed on hip the figure defiantly exudes a nice amount of personality at even just a glance.

P10009191Sadly, I can’t say they did as well on her legs. While they are nice and long, the grid patterned grooves they carved into them and the accompanying paneling detail is sloppy to say the least. It gets really bad near the vector arrow strapy things on her legs… They just look really half-assed and tacked on. Bad sculpting, bad paint, and just really meh overall… sad for a leg lover like me. On the bright side, sculptor Kawanishi Ken gave her a nice cute round butt!

Aside from the mess on her legs there are a few mold lines and errors here and there, but nothing like what happened to her legs. Quality wise I’d place this around mid-tier or so with the likes of Koto’s lesser efforts.

P10008961The base like I mentioned before is just a crummy little hollow round disk with pegs slightly too large for the holes in her feet…

Pros

  • Nice face / Good expression
  • Beautiful pose
  • Nice sculpting detail in parts and decent paint in some areas…

Cons

  • But some truly awful work done on her lower half.
  • Crummy base that barely fits her peg hole
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Overall, Wave’s 1/10 Makinami Mari Illustrious is not a half-bad little figure. Height wise she isn’t really that terribly much shorter then my 1/8ths, but due to the pose she’s extremely compact looking, for better or worse.

I’d say she’s worth snagging if you want a nice inexpensive Mari figure for your collection, but the size and quality sadly makes her feel like an upgraded trading figure and really makes me want to get a more full-size version of her preferably with the berserker look she had near the end (ALTER please?). T_T

Oh well, hopefully next week the weather will cooperate with me more and we will see a Menace review… So in the words of Misato: “More service next time promise!” (Time will tell if I’m as big of a liar as she is…)

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P.S. Messing with layouts…Mostly because I hate using plain “Review” photos and Chags says they are needed, so this is my half-ass compromise. Full size shots are the “fun” ones and the small thumbnails are the detail review-ish ones that I tried to keep as normal as possible…Probably still need to work on this a bit though…

18 replies on “Review: 1/10 Makinami Mari Illustrious”

Oooo, I am really digging the wire fences and the the green-tinted ground! You’ve got quite an eye for outdoor photography, don’t you?

The messiness of the lines on her bottom half is a real shame, because like striped panties, those lines do a really good job at bringing out the curves on her body, ESPECIALLY her bum. Still, despite this disappointing flaw, this is probably the best green plug suit Mari figure out there right now. I wish she used it more in the movie to warrant more figures, but alas, those few brief moments were far too short.

On a side note, I find Wave’s attempt to sell their bucket-head Mari as an exclusive absolutely hilarious.

Meh I wandered around abit and just shot where I thought would be appropriate…About the best you can do post apocalyptic wise down here is a Tennis court destroyed by hurricane I guess… >_>

Aye the lines are a genuine shame, but as long as you don’t get too close to her they look ok-ish enough. There wasn’t enough Mari in general from the movie as far as I’m concerned though… T_T

And yea that helmet is just…ugh…Lot of the new designs were very hit and miss eh?

Do own Wave’s Rei, and I didn’t surprise with this kind of quality from Mari. Although Rei isn’t have much detail like Mari, but she also suffers from bad painting if you have a close look, does Wave have difficult in painting the lines!? But she still looks nice, way more refined than your Mari xD
I like her pose and face, they accurately describe her personality, her white suit also goes well with that white base. About Wave’s Mari, her upper body looks good with nice detail from her suit. And I don’t care much about her face, not so great in terms of quality and characteristic, but not odd like a bunch of them out there. So far I have not seen a figure that does enough justice to Mari, except maybe Max Factory version, it probably has the closest face to the original with great quality overall. Yep and I’m still waiting for Alter to do the job, since I already have pre-ordered their Asuka 😛

Lines are pretty hard and sadly with a figure like this it just highlights that general problem with sooooo many little lines on her!

Max’s Mari technically looks nice, but its such a godawfully bland pose… >_<

But yea after Alter announced Asuka I was really hopeful to see what they do with Mari, but some part of me thinks we won't see it until the next movie is released. T_T

Although I still haven’t finished watching 2.0 I still think Mari is a great Character with cool design! However I do think there are better figures of her out there!!

Also dont you think she slightly looks like Kotoha Isone from Yozakura Quartet ?? (google her!)

Kotoha eh…Mmm well she’s abit more well endowed then Mari, but sure will go with it. :p

Hey, Chag.

This is an off-topic comment. Thanks for pointing out your blogroll friends to me. I just got around to checking out all those other blogs. You fellas have a nice circle of blogs going. I like the pictures and wordy reviews and I’m definitely going to follow you all.

^^

You’re welcome! I’m glad you enjoy their work. It’s a big world out there, and a little exploration can sometimes lead to some real gems =)

Some nice pictures, I like how Mari’s green testtype suit fits in with the colours of the scenery and sky. I like her ass, but wow that plugsuit really invades it nicely. Someone really needs to make a 1/8th or better scale figure of Mari in her testtype suit, and they need to keep that ass and those curves for sure.

Some constructive criticism if I may… the thumbnails need to be larger. They’re just much too small to really be useful I feel. Also, no full shot of Mari from the front? Would have been nice to get a full frontal and rear from top to bottom, perhaps in portrait orientation. I know they’re not creative shots generally, or fun, but they’re useful! Useful for getting a sense of proportion, such as how long her legs are. I really can’t tell in this review since her legs are always separate from her upper body. Anyway, I don’t mean to come off too harsh, I’ve had a terrible day at work and feel like I might be…

Rofl I love critisim Aka so I’ll never fuss about it…And I wouldn’t exactly have much interest in defending these shots anyway as my heart was hardly into it (Reason why it took me months to be bothered to post this…).She is half-decent and that bum is oh so delish…I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Alter as I kinda doubt Koto will give us a test one like they did with Asuka… T_TI ended up cutting her in half subconsciously alot because I guess I felt the lower was so inferior I was trying to hide it and forgot to take a proper full body “reviewish” one in the end…Wouldn’t be the first time I forgot that…I’m aslo always trying to mask scale so she doesn’t look like the tiny plastic figure she is, which was hard when I tried full body…I need your discipline for taking those kinds of pictures haha… :p

The thumbnail thing was me being a noob with blog writer…thing…it looked nice there and then I posted it here and the whole thing got mangled…Should just make Chag post it, I hate technology…

I find I use the preview feature of wordpress for every tiny little miniscule change I make. It takes me ages to get my layouts and I always feel like they shouldn’t. That post I did for Wonder Festival 2010 (Summer) was absolutely retarted to make. I spend the better part of a week making that damn post because of all the changes and preview viewing.

I wouldn’t put it past Kotobukiya to give us a test-type Mari. I mean, the shit sells, why the hell wouldn’t they? It’s like free money.

I never really thought it took dicipline to do the review shots, I suspect it’s because they require no creativity and so I can pump ’em out. But the creative angles and stuff…. aaahhh

Ugh I can imagine…this is why when everyone kept asking me “Why don’t you make a blog” I kept saying I had no interest…But now that I have my own slave, errrr partner who can do all that tech crap for me I’m fine! :pKoto I dunno…For some reason with all the off the wall, random, and old school stuff they throw out I have a hard time envisioning them in that “If it makes money sell it” mentality…But then they have made 3 versions of one Tama figure so I guess.Heh I suppose thats what makes the world a wonderfully diverse place…Me I hate doing that crap. I can imagine what sort of utterly disinterested face I’m making as I sorta randomly point the camera and take those detail shots…Like Tier said recently I’m less inclined to want a figure anymore if I can’t think of an interesting way I’d want to shoot it!

Good looking pictures, I like them – she fits in pretty well in a typical urban or suburban environment (looking through my collection, I don’t own many figures at all that I can say the same about). Man, I really don’t like her test suit, though. Or Asuka’s, though Asuka’s test suit is a pandering attempt to sexualize her while Mari’s is a big bag of WTF in my view.

I’m probably going to use a layout not too dissimilar to what you used here. I don’t do a lot of detail shots, but sometimes there’s something I want to highlight that’s not too obvious because I shoot mainly full-body or waist-up shots.

I’m still wondering what’s up with Wave’s obsession with 1/10 scale.

Hah yea…Seems like most of the time people shoot outdoors (Myself included) its all nature, nature, nature so I figured for a gal from a post apocalyptic setting lets get alittle more urban and grimy.

Haha well the suit is wierd and hardly my favorite body suit design in general, but I just can’t bring myself to love her pink one so this wins by default…Really I’d just like one of her in that school outfit…

Detail shots suck…meh but whatever if its what people want I’ll sneak em in like you say…

I have no idea why Wave likes 1/10th…Maybe there trying to be different? Its nice they make the figures cost less, but damn are they tiny…

A very complete review Ashlotte!! I also love the pros&cons and the grunge photos. They’re good, very good ^^ Personally I didn’t own so many 1/10 scaled because they’re small and doesn’t suit my collection very well…but truth is they’re eating less space than the normal ones.

If you didn’t take plain photos you can always show her best angle and its not a fair review, its biased! (mental post-it: I also biased most of my reviews xDD)

Heh thanks Yuna…Its always nice to try new things…Keeps your brain from going to mush! >_>1/10th are kinda disappointingly small…I have two now and its sad how small they are, but oh well.Haha well I wouldn’t want anyone to convict me of being Bias..I just think from an artistic perspective those “normal” detail shots are incredibly dull! T_T

I definitely dig Mari’s test suit more than her normal pink suit. It gives her a very military look that is really befitting of what I imagine her to be like (though I’ve not seen the movies). However I’m not a fan of her tiled leggings, they remind me of a dirty bathroom wall – never a good thing.

I like what you’re trying to do with the different sized thumbnails. Although they are a little too small here I think you’re on to something. Having bigger artistic photos to help make the review more exciting and adding in smaller thumbnailed photos for illustrative purposes – so those who want to can examine them up-close can if they choose to – is something I’ve been planning to do for my posts for a very long time. If I start blogging again that is.

Aye I think it suits her better too having watched the movie…It goes well with her school uniform too!

Haha that seems to be the big complaint eh…*jots down “must make thumbnails bigger”* :p

But yea trying to strike a balance…failing but trying at least!

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