Review: 1/8 Kujikawa Rise (Swimsuit ver.)

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?

Despite having a pretty straightforward assembly,  Alter does the nicety of giving us some instructions on how to slot her tiny little accessories. Getting her glasses on isn’t too horrible although they are extremely small so you have to take a lot of care with them. Her hand can either hold the cell phone or a second pair of folded glasses, which is an unexpected nice touch. Her hand is more shaped to hold the cellphone though, as the glasses just sort of awkwardly plop in her hand. Thankfully they didn’t fall out even when I gave her a little shake so the fit isn’t quite as precarious as it may look.

As she is a swimsuit figure, the most important part is obviously her body. Alter’s high quality is of course known to virtually anyone in this hobby, but when it comes to body sculpts I find that Altertend to be a little on the under-detailed side and rarely if ever match up to say, MegaHouse or Native, so I’ll start with that aspect first.

The paint is rather excellent on her with a nice pale color that still has enough shading to give her that lifelike look as opposed to in Chag’s words, “looking like a corpse.” Speaking of shading, Alter also gave her joints — especially the knees — a nice rosy hue to them that I always like!

Moving our eye to the body sculpt they gave Rise a lusciously long pair of legs! Proportions-wise, these puppies are quite long, but since I love me some legs, you won’t hear any complaint about them from me. Alter also put a fair amount of detail in her feet, although it’s nowhere near the amount Menace has. Going northward you’ll find some seriously wide hips! For a slight girl those things are quite a sight to behold and they transition nicely into her stomach which has a fair bit more detail to it then your average Alter sculpt.

Her arms are appropriately thin and Alter put some fine detailing into her fingers going so far as to not fuse them together on her right hand despite them being next to one another. Her shoulders though are rather underwhelming. They have a distinct lack of shape to them and she has only a very small hint of collarbone showing. This is kinda disappointing when the rest of the body sculpt was going so well.

Her backside isn’t much to look at either sadly. They did give her some very nice detailing on the back of her knees that I appreciate, but her butt is distinctly flat. It’s even more jarring when you remember that her hips are so wide! The contrast between having such a nice thin waist with wide hips and then a flat as a board butt is rather off-putting. I know she’s slim, but slim girls can have a nice ass too!

It is nice that Alter gave some love to her between her cheeks and her legs, but it feels like the sculptor just gave up after that point. Further evidence of  that can be found in her back sculpt which isn’t really anything to get excited about…She has a nice curve to her lower back, but that’s about it. The detailing isn’t very convincing and her upper back is just a bore being mostly flat looking and lacking in shoulder-blade detail.

So to sum it up, Rise’s body sculpt  is very much showcase for her legs! They are extremely nice legs though so I shouldn’t begrudge Alter too much, but it would be nice if they had lavished that same amount of love to her upper body as well.

Her swimsuit is pretty much what’d you’d expect from Alter with excellent sculpting and not a single paint error to be found anywhere. Her shoes too have a very pleasing level of detail with the various straps and bows.

The same can be said for her accessories with the little Kuma key chain taking the cake. For such a tiny little thing, it has been painted precisely with scary amounts of attention payed to it. Hell, even the little strap part has “persona 4” printed on it in tiny letters!

However, Rise’s head was the one thing that made me hesitate on this figure, and while I don’t dislike it as much as I feared I would, she doesn’t entirely look like the Rise I know. The biggest problem is probably her lipstick. Instead of the nice subtle pink in the original illustration we got a much more adult looking red. That coupled with making her smile much smaller and removing the wink changes the feel from being a cute innocent girl to a more mature look. Not entirely a bad change, but it’s one I wouldn’t have made.

Other than that, the facial structure and eyes look pretty much like Rise. Her hair sadly has absolutely no shading, which is kind of sad considering how big her hair is and how much it dominates the figure. It is fairly well sculpted swishing around in the imaginary breeze, and it definitely has that “fluffy” look her hair possesses so I wouldn’t say I dislike its overall look.

Lastly we have the display base, which is actually a pretty cool piece of plastic! It has the iconic lines that were used in a lot of the interface of Persona 4, as well as the logo from the game printed onto an clear plastic platform of the appropriate yellow color. I couldn’t have asked for a better base for this figure.

Pros

• Lovely long legs
• Excellent Alter quality paint throughout
• Well sculpted hair
• Great base

Neutral

• Rather un-exciting sculpt on her back and upper body in general

Negatives

• The changes to the face really didn’t need to be done. Borderlines on making her look out-of-character.

So there we have it! Man, swimsuit figures can be a pain to review haha…Ah well, I’m still glad I bought her. It is a shame that Alter continues to lag behind in the body sculpt department. If they could just nail that they’d probably easily eclipse any other figure maker for me. It’s still a pleasant surprise that her legs look so nice, so I’ll just focus on that one positive spot. =P

Oh well, here’s hoping that with the upcoming anime, figure makers will get off their asses and finally show us more figures from Persona 4. You here me figure makers? I want my Nanako figure!!