Review: 1/10 Makinami Mari Illustrious

Alright 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.

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.

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.

Getting 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…

So 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.

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.

Sadly, 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.

The 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

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…)

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…