Atheonyirh

Those pictures make me so glad I bought two sets.

Figma's opening pre-orders for the Prime version Samus Aran on April 18th, according to their twitter.

Defender is currently available for pre-order at HLJ again.

Depends on the item. If you find items at the SAHRA store it'll tell you shipping. In general you're going to start at ~$20 for EMS shipping, and it goes up based on size/weight of the item.

I keep myself to a monthly budget on silly things like this, so being able to spread out the cost can help on some months where the budget is thin but other months are better.

I went with MyKombini for the 50% deposit rather than 100%.

Oh god no. I don't have the money for that. I just like gerwalk mode the most so I had always intended to leave it that way. If I get the white version that people keep talking about coming eventually I'll either putt hat one in gerwalk and revert Keith's to fighter mode, or leave Keith's in gerwalk and the white one in fighter mode. Just depends on how they end up looking.

That piece provides a lot of rigidity and securing for the Draken in at least gerwalk mode. Not sure how necessary it is for battroid though. Just one more reason I'm glad I don't really intend to ever take mine OUT of gerwalk mode.

Oh wow. I was pretty sure that piece WAS made of diecast for some reason.

Nowhere near enough movement in the mounting joint for that. It's in hte middle of the plate that sits atop it in gerwalk mode and on the back in battroid mode.

Weird, http://p-bandai.jp/item/item-1000107417/ still says April 17th for release date.

I mean, the entire in-canon justification for Valkyries transforming into giant robots was that they expected the aliens to be giants and thought being able to fight hand to hand with them would be useful, isn't it? Spartans IIRC mostly see use after the time skip as crowd control/policing units for the full size Zentradi workers as I recall, so in that specific use being able to grapple and hold their own in melee is important.

Got my Millia's VF-1J in. The plastic feels fine, the color looks beautiful to me. Closest thing to an issue I found was that it felt like the gap you feed the wings in to clip into the body was tighter than with the others. But last valk I put wings on was back in November, so I could just not be remembering how tight those were.

It was honestly a fine movie. They had to westernize things some and make conceits for a western audience, but for what it was it was more than adequate and put to rest any concerns I had regarding its handling of characters. Aramaki owned hard as all hell, too.

Huzzah, my Millia has left Japan now. That usually means it'll be here on Monday. Tuesday at the worst.

Five minutes into de culture and chill?

Mine had no local span, just showed up at the airport. Where it still seems to be. I'd hoped it'd be airborne by now, but oh well. Hopefully it gets here early next week.

Oh nice. My MyKombini pre-ordered Millia seems to be moving now, and they actually refunded me the excess shipping costs for shipping it.

Mine went to "shipped" and they gave me a number, but that number has shown zero activity in the last day, not even picked up yet. I suspect it's just their automated systems being dumb and continuing to operate despite the fact that they went on vacation.

The Hi-Metal R missile effects parts for the VF-1s have a release date of April 17th listed now on their page.

Weird, MyKombini said they were on vacation until April 3rd. But I just received notice from them that my Millia's VF-1J shipped, with tracking number and all.

HLJ has the Street Fighter Figuarts up. Cammy: http://hlj.com/product/BANN15828/Act Rashid: http://hlj.com/product/BANN15829/Act

Huh, so that's what was meant when someone said they fixed the stripe that was painted wrong on Max's VF-1J. I never noticed that either and wondered what the hell the painting error could be, since I don't remember hearing anything here about it.

I didn't make a judgment on the right or wrong of it. But it is pretty simple economics. Besides, capitalism isn't exactly well known for being polite in obeying laws when there's profit or market share to be had. If something is in demand but the only source of it is an inflated secondary market then it's ripe for someone to swoop in and provide a replacement at lower cost to meet that demand. Right or wrong, theft or not, that's just the reality of the situation. A sealed Max or Millia's 1/60 VF-1J goes for, what, $600 or so now from what I saw? It's perfectly understandable for people to find that price absurd. It's also perfectly understandable that people are going to start looking really, really closely when someone else starts manufacturing knock-off copies of those Max/Millia VF-1Js at a drastically lower price. If Arcadia's business model is such that they can't afford to reprint an existing mold in a specific set of colors to meet demand, than their business model isn't proving sufficient to meet demand for their items. I mean, it's just iterations of the VF-1. Different head, different colors, maybe slap in some FAST Packs depending on the version, different tampo printing maybe. They could follow Bandai's business model of doing web exclusive pre-orders and manufacturing to match demand if they're that concerned with over-producing stock, which is apparently what did Yamato in eventually if I'm remembering things right. I know I'm vaguely tempted by it if only because a mistake on my part resulted in most of my 1/60 scale VF-1s ending up yellowed to varying severity. But I'll probably remain content with my Hi-Metal Rs due to the smaller size being convenient. Depending on price, availability, and quality I might just be tempted though. That's not even just economics, that's human nature in general. If I can spend, say, $300 for an item that's no longer being manufactured and is only available via secondary markets ooooor spend, say, $90 for the same item of comparable quality, why would I spend $300 on the secondary market just to have the official version when the original manufacturer doesn't benefit anyways at that point? If that second version is of clearly inferior quality, but only say $50, even that can be tempting from a cost-benefit analysis standpoint. If we end up with Transformers Masterpiece style KOs you could end up looking at a near perfect replica, with say minor paint issues or a bit of flash or something, for well under $100. The right or wrong of that aside, it's not hard to understand why people thirsty for VF-1 toys could find that tempting. The whole thing definitely calls back to when the 1/55th scale toys got bootlegged and people were buying them up for customs, repairs, or just plain to give to kids because they were actually toy level priced rather than the secondary market prices that original chunkymonkeys demanded at that point.

Roughly a week ago, on the 17th of March.