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Review: 1/10 Beach Queens Ika Musume

Well then, it feels like it’s been quite some time since I last did a review (Chag: actually, to everyone else who’s reading the blog, it’s only been 2 weeks =P)  I guess that’s what happens when the few things you actually like are all delayed…But now I can finally break this long dry spell with the finally arrived Ika Musume!

Ika Musume is…errr…Ok noone is quite sure what she is actually. She claims to be a genuine squid (ika) given human form to protect the oceans, and her various abilities seem to support this claim, but even the person in question herself is unsure of how she went from a lowly squid to a full fledged squid girl.

Even with this identity crisis, she is hell-bent on “invading” humanity for its mistreatment of the world’s oceans. For better or worse, this rather serious sounding premise gives way quickly to a heartwarming comedy show that sees any attempt Ika makes at actually invading failing miserably and instead slowly integrating herself in with humanity (although she still does diligently clean up the trash along the beach and will occasionally remember she wants to conquer humanity.).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CRz1bpR5MQ

I had originally planned to cancel Ika here because I just haven’t been terribly impressed with Wave’s quality as it where, but as misfortune would have it, Hobby Search pulled a fast one on me changing their cancellation policy and thus I was suddenly stuck with her. Ironically, in that space of time Kotobukiya has also released their own Ika Musume, but for me I still liked this one better for her face and pose which played up her arrogant side more than the cutesy look Kotobukiya chose, so perhaps not being able to cancel this figure was a blessing in disguise? Let’s find out, shall we?

The first thing to note is this is the DX version of this figure. Basically all that means is she comes with her lovely little white and blue one piece she usually wears, as well as the white swimsuit look of the normal version in addition to a more determined looking alternate face. The reason I went for this one was partly because her one piece is her more iconic look, but the bigger bonus for me was the alternative face that I thought looked to get her personality right more than “happy smiles” face (she can be an insufferably headstrong albeit lovable idiot most of the times…).

Opening her package has answered one question I had…In the promo shots you notice that Ika not only gains her dress but her shoes as well when changed, so I was curious how they where going to do this. As I thought, they give you a second pair of legs so you could technically do some mix and matching such as wearing the dress barefoot! Wave has also provided instructions on her for things such as swapping faces or removing her dress.

Removing her dress is a mostly painless process. Firstly you pop her head and then arms off, after this you simply roll up her dress which is made of soft plastic up over her body and voila — swimsuit! Her legs on the other hand are a bit harder to coax out, as I had to put a pretty considerable amount of force into popping em out. I’d highly suggest removing her arms first lest you accidentally damage them while trying to get a good grip on her! That tightness does come with its own benefits, as the fit on her legs is much more flush than her much looser arms and has a far smaller gap between her body and the limbs compared to her arms.

Changing her face is slightly odd, but not terribly hard. Generally with figures you change the face by removing the forehair and then pulling straight out, but Ika’s hat is glued to her head so instead you sort of pull her face forward and down. It took a minute to figure it out, but once you’re used to the process it’s even faster then standard face swaps. For some unkown reason though they gave you an extra hat which makes no sense as it looks exactly like the one she’s wearing and that one is firmly glued to her head? Am I supposed to make one of my other figures wear it?

Ah anyway er last bit of assembly has another quirk to it…Due to the swappable nature of her legs, the actual bit that connects to her base is first attached to her foot and then the base. I’m not quite sure why these two things weren’t simply glued to her from the start as there’s no possible way she can stand without a base?

Another oddity is the underside of her barefoot legs has a second hole for an additional peg unlike her leg with shoes still on, but her base only has a single peg? Erm ok…Now normally I dislike single peg designs especially for a figure on one foot, but Ika-chan is so damn light weight it really doesn’t matter!

Wave figures are small in general, but Ika takes that a step further for sure with her small body. She does technically look like a middle schooler in the show, so she is very much in scale, and the swappable nature of her body probably accounts for her waif-like weight, but there certainly is not much to this figure!

Well now that I’ve fiddled with her so much and have her in her swimsuit state I guess we’ll go with that first to talk about! Eh and honestly I don’t like her in this look that much…

I know the anime had fairly large heads, but Ika’s giant noggin paired with her very petite body just looks…odd. She’s certainly far from the worst BQ out there looks-wise in her swimsuit, with some nice amounts of body sculpt detail on her and some nice gloss paint on her swimsuit, but the overall look just isn’t that great.

Paint wise her exposed skin has a nice warm feeling with nice shading, although sadly she had a pretty big splotch of blue on her left leg. The other problem with her clothes off like this is of course the gaps where her limbs fit. No matter how hard you try to force them in there is a fairly noticeable spacing where they fit in sadly, so lets get those clothes back on, shall we?

Ahhh much better! Her dress nicely conceals all of the ugly gaps that stood out! It also adds a lot more balance to her head making it not look so conspiciously huge! The dress itself is pretty nice as well with some nice shading and very clean painting on the small blue detail areas.

Being soft plastic, the dress also has a very pleasent feeling to the touch. It’d be nice if Wave did this sort of thing more often, as this is easily one of the more impressive pieces of sculpting/painting I’ve seen them do with all its little folds. The slight fluttery look of the dress comes across very as very convincing with only a few very faint mold lines in it! It really does compliment her pose perfectly.

Moving from that, her legs with shoes thankfully have no blue on them like her bare feet legs did, and of course, they have the same pleasant skin shading they had. The white painting on her shoes and hat are a little rough, but it’s nothing you’d notice from a distance.

The glossy blue bits on her ankles and wrists however were done pretty much spot on with nary an error. I do wish her hair had that same gloss to it, seeing as they really are tentacles and always made a rather rubbery sound when touched, but they still look fairly good as-is. The base is Wave’s standard fake sand hexagon thing Wave uses for all of their Beach Queens.

Pro:

  • Great Pose
  • Character accurate faces
  • Generally well done painting and sculpting

Con:

  • Head looks far too large for the body when cast-off
  • Few paint slip-ups

Overall I gotta say I’m pretty damn happy with the way Ika turned out! I wasn’t expecting much from Wave, but apparently they are far more skilled at working with soft plastics than PVC.

In any case, Ika looks great with her face full of confidence, along with the body language to match! The dress and the way her hair is moving really just sells the whole package to give you that great sense of motion…just don’t take her dress off!

Haha…But yea, I honeslty wouldn’t suggest getting the non-DX version. I guess it wouldn’t have the same gap problem since you presumably can’t remove her limbs on that one, but that wouldn’t solve the problem of her head looking far too oversized. >_< So my reccomendation would be to go with this DX version and just forget about the swimsuit look.

13 replies on “Review: 1/10 Beach Queens Ika Musume”

the appeal of small squid girls 😀
She looks nice and has cute and also funny faces, her “conquer the world expression is really cool, but I also like the ultra moe face. I never came around to watch any season of Ika Musume, but I liked the design of this character, the simple white blue summer dress is so pretty.

Good that you received a better Wave Beach Queen figure now, the quality level is a little different with each of these figures it seems.

Wow really you never watched the show? I thought almost everyone had at least given one of the two seasons a shot. :p

Yea it varies pretty hard. They did do a nice job with that soft plastic dress…I’d like to see them do more with that it just covers up the flaws in their terrible bikinis so well.

Daww, she’s so cute — definitely one of those character you can fall in love with even without knowing anything about her. Come to think of it, why did I stop watching it anyways? I should correct this mistake. Also, completely agree on the dress being more appealing. When I think of Ika, I don’t think OH BOY, I SURE WOULD LIKE TO SEE HER WITH HER CLOTHES OFF…though she does have a nice pair of legs in this figure. Whoops, off to exhentai I go!

By the way, I’m freaking jealous of how easy you make photography look. “Oh, these are just warm-up,” he says, “I don’t really care about these,” he says. And they still end up looking great anyways! They might not live up to whatever lofty visions you have in your head, but they’re always so nice to look at, and you always manage to have just right right about of bokeh to make the shots look dreamy, but not a clusterfuck of blur.

Mmm I dunno maybe it wasn’t your type of comedy? That or you just forgot…Probably the more likely answer.

Mah you could always make her barefoot with the dress!

I put about piss to nill effort into these honestly…I originally had a beach idea but the beaches are so trash covered and overpopulated here people would walk into my shoots and it just generally looked bad…I thought about making a sand set but I don’t like the figure enough to bother…

If you say so still dicking around with the right settings for things. *shrug*

Hmm squid girl, first image that popped into my head was if she can pee black ink on people. LOL

Ika definitely look better with that summer dress on, I think it adds more to her pose and flows visually. The petite body and bare swimsuit looks a little bland to me.

I wish the BQ series are larger scale though, 1/10 just feels so small. The only BQ I have is Lynn Minmay, she doesn’t have many figures to begin with and they’re all small. 🙁

lol well she spits not pees it. :p

Yea its a pretty unexciting figure without the dress ofr sure.

Mmm they are far too tiny. I guess they wanted to save money or some such but the scale is so wonky…

A character who generally hangs out around the beach, perfect material for a Beach Queen figure right? Alas, I don’t like how Ika Musume looks without her dress. Even without the small gaps in the arms and legs there is something that feels off.

Put the the dress on and then you have a nice little Ika Musume figure. A nice dramatic pose, the inclusion of her trademarked I’m gonna invade expression makes her for a likable figure for me. I think I would have liked it more as a regular figure rather than a part of the Beach Queens line. Hmm… does Wave even do something other than the Beach Queens stuff?

Haha part of that was my fault I didn’t really put much effort into making them attach completely…Especially the legs takes some umph to make connect. Still like you said she doesn’t look great even if the parts were flush.

Yea Wave does the occasional larger scale figure. Not as much these days but occasionally. They also used to make extremely high quality very expensive pre-made mecha figures. Not sure if they still do or not I haven’t follow the mecha figure scene in awhile.

Great review! I only watched about half the first season and it was more like random episodes I watched over Zai’s shoulder. Ika’s head doesn’t seem as gargantuan to me, about the same proportions as the K-On figmas actually. Her faces both seem to fit with her character but I agree, the angrier one looks cooler.

Haha well I’m not a big figma fan either so that doesn’t surprise me too much that I dislike the head to such a degree. :p

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