Once upon a time, a merry band of figure bloggers played a little game called The Exiled Realms of Arborea (TERA for short). The game played like a mix of Monster Hunter and God of War, which sets itself apart from most MMORPGs. It also has the trashiest designs for female characters I’ve ever seen in the video game, and I loved it for that. Seriously, when half of the game’s population is strutting around in skin-tight leather, skimpy dresses or thongs, it was easy to see why TERA appealed to me. As the intrepid Elin mystic “Babycakes”, I had loads of fun with our little guild (tastefully named “Night Shift Nurses”) for many dozens of hours.
But as time went on, the game became repetitive in more ways than one. Quests seldom went beyond the “kill X boars” or “harvest X items” model, boss mechanics were recycled, and the game even opted to reuse low-level armour models in the late stages of the game where progression was slow enough already. It also didn’t help that the mystic is the least damaging class in the game and all attempts to solo with my mystic felt like pulling teeth. The game started to feel like work to me, and without much in the way of end-game content to look forward to, I had to put it on hold indefinitely. I’m fairly confident that the game will eventually be free-to-play since it already has a pretty whorish cash shop, and when that time comes I’ll probably try it again.
But if nothing else, the game was pretty. Having played games on minimum settings all my life, I was far from a graphics whore, but when faced with the dazzling sights of TERA, I just had to drop a couple hundred bucks on a new CPU purely for the sake of playing the game on high settings. It was hard not to be mesmerized by the game’s graphics, which was pretty much like pouring sweet honey right into my eye sockets. Being the figure collector that I am, I wanted a piece of TERA in my display cabinet, and there was one garage kit from Cerberus Project. Of course, I can’t paint anything to save my own life, but that was where E2046 came in.
To put it bluntly, E2046 is a bootleg figure business. They take original garage kits sold by the artists, make new molds from those, and make recast resin garage kits, some of which (like their Gathering line) are pre-painted. As luck would have it, Cerberus Project’s Elin was amongst the selection of pre-painted garage kit figures being offered. Still a little unsure, I asked Ash if he thinks the garage kit would eventually get a PVC release, and when he said the chances were “piss nill”, that was the end of that. The figure even depicts the mystic class, which just so happened to be my main character! I had to get it.
Of course, little did I know that Yamato would eventually announce a PVC version of the same garage kit at summer WonFes 2012 — THANKS ASH!
