Hello there folks, and welcome to another god-awfully rainy week! Yay~~~

Ah boy…So yea, here we are with yet another older figure (it’s not my fault they don’t make more things I like a month! T_T) from the recently translated eroge Demonbane!

"Don't you feel like you could just lose yourself in those eyes..."

The series has been around for a while with an OVA, eroge sequel, and finally a TV adaptation under its belt. It borrows heavily from the Lovecraft mythos to tell its tale. Specifically, Al Azif here is the embodiment of the grimoire Necronomicon in the form of an absurdly cute little girl. She does occasionally morph parts of her body into pages (an ability that no figure maker has capitalized on, unfortunately) and has a chibi mode, but for the most part she retains the form you see presented in this figure. Of course, being over a millennia old and extremely powerful, she is a rather arrogant little girl, but with her myriad of personality quirks she is easily my favorite character in the series by far!

I was lucky enough to pick Al Azif up from Aka who was selling her for a pittance and I have to say it was an extremely wise decision, since as I predicted after having played the game a bit I would absolutely love Al as a character, so I would be hunting this very figure down right now if I had not bought her at the time! The only downside of this is that she was slightly damaged, but I’ll obviously not be dwelling on that as it’s hardly Max Factory’s fault.

So with that said, let’s see how well quality of one of Max’s older releases holds up against the harshness of time, shall we? Read more »

July 7, 2011 Ashlotte Figure, Review 29 comments

Hello one and all, and welcome! With Menace‘s abundant curves taken care of, it’s time to take a look at someone with a slightly more slender frame!

The road that got me to this point was a rather strange one that began when I developed an interest in Persona 3. Eventually I ended up playing a large number of PS2 RPGs, culminating with Persona 4.  In all honesty I didn’t much like any of the RPGs I played, and while Persona 3 was a good deal better (specifically the music is just plain godly…listen to the OST like…now!) than most of the others, it was still plagued with a great many glaring flaws (*cough one giant tower dungeon cough*). Thankfully, Persona 4 corrected almost all of these and it is without a doubt a game that makes owning a PS2 completely worth it!

Of course, being the figure collector that I am, the first thing I did after finishing the game was rushing to see what figures had been made of the girls from the series. Sadly there wasn’t much to pick from…I had wanted to get Yukiko as she was my favorite, but since she was an exclusive from some time ago, the mark-up was far more than I was willing to pay, thus I settled for this Rise. This isn’t to say I dislike Rise, though! Honesty, all the characters in Persona 4 have their own unique charms and I’d be happy to own a figure of all of them!

Rise in particular has a very cute character design with her petite build and her fluffy hair. The fact that she was voiced by Teh Rie just made her even better, and while her personality swings around a lot during the game as she resolves her conflicted feelings about being an idol, she was always enjoyable to spend time with so having a figure of her is a great joy for me!

This particular figure was based on the above official illustration, which is rather rare for Alter. As this is my first swimsuit figure from them (and probably the first figure I own of theirs that shows so much body sculpt), let’s see how they tackle swimsuit figures, shall we? Read more »

June 29, 2011 Ashlotte Figure, Review 24 comments

Stupid storms…can’t shoot my bikini figures…….Oh hey there all! *ahem* Yes welcome, welcome! Today we will be ogling half-naked Rise be taking a look at the recently released Racing Miku by GSC!

Racing Miku is a rather odd creature. If you asked me to make a list of potential companies that would sponsor a race car, GSC wouldn’t be anywhere on there, and the fact that they picked Miku to be the face of their racing team is even more bizarre, but hey, I certainly won’t complain about more Miku!

This whole thing started with the original Miku racer car which was a BMW. Sadly I’ve heard the car did terribly so they swapped her out for a Porsche and changed the livery on it while they were at it. Instead of the serviceable but not terribly exciting Kei art they commissioned Redjuice to do some absolutely spectacular images for the car using an appropriate racing theme that the earlier one lacked!

"Oh Redjuice how I love thee~~~"

The design for the stickers for the Porsche actually went through three different incarnations. The 1st and 2nd used the look that this figure portrays with the third and final version using new Redjuice illustrations with Miku sporting a modified Race Queen version of her original mechanic outfit. Sadly, GSC made very little merchandise for the final design, as as luck would have it, that design is my favorite. Anyways, I enjoy the look of the illustrations so much I actually went out and bought a few sheets of stickers of them and slapped em all over my bike…ah yea, I’m hopeless.

"You know you're too far gone when you have an Itasha. Also, I don't think I'm ever going to be a professional sticker applier."

In any case, the point is I love Redjuice’s art and I absolutely love the look of the 2010 car. They’ve since made another racing Miku version for 2011 while swapping back to a BMW, but I couldn’t give a damn about that one as this version is more to my tastes.

So without further ado let’s get this thing rolling! Read more »

June 17, 2011 Ashlotte Figure, Review 21 comments

Hey there all, I’ve finally recovered enough from doing that horrid Yukari review and subsequent gaming binge to get back to reviewing! And to start us off after that trainwreck we have Menace, a figure that I’ve taken forever to actually photograph! Read more »

June 7, 2011 Ashlotte Figure, Review 24 comments