It’s been a while since my last post and even longer since my last figure post, but this August has and will continue to be a busy month for me. With that said, my presence online will be significantly diminished, but you can expect one or two more posts before the end of the month.

Today lets take a look at Xiao Mei, a 1/7 scale figure by Max Factory. I don’t know much about her other than she’s a Chinese cat-girl from the game Shining Hearts. Sadly, I can’t find her name written in Chinese anywhere so I don’t know which “xiao” and which “mei” her name is comprised of. I think it’s safe to just refer to her as “Mei” though.

As with all of the Shining Hearts figures released so far, Mei was also based off of an illustration by Tony Taka.

Max Factory did a good job, with the help of sculptor Nanako, bringing Mei into the 3rd dimension. A couple of differences I could find between the illustration and the figure are the placement of her feet (right in front of left instead of left in front of right), and her face is turned more towards the front. One difference that I did like was that Max Factory decided to put Mei’s legs closer together, which I think looks more feminine.

The original illustration only show Mei from the front, so Max Factory had to assume what she looks like from all other sides. I think they did an excellent job, as you can see below.

Mei is one of the few figures I’ve seen that manages to maintain a high level of sexiness and cuteness at the same time. Her clothing helps accentuate her slim wait, perfectly-sized bust, and curvy hips. At the same time, her “nyan” pose combined with cat ears and a tail give her a sweet and innocent look. I applaud Tony for creating this combination of clothes, and I applaud Nanako for being able to sculpt a goddess-like body.

I couldn’t ask for a better overall design or sculpt for this figure, but what really determines the quality of a figure are all of the small details.

Starting from the top of the figure are Mei’s cat ears. Her ears change in colour from black to  grey as you move towards the tip. What really impressed me here was how the interface between the two colours isn’t a smooth line, but a jagged edge, just like a real cat.

The inside of Mei’s ears have some fur, something I would’ve forgotten if I were making a figure. There is some black paint on the edges of Mei’s ears that got on the inside, but it’s not visible unless you stare inside her ears.

Mei’s hair buns (I forgot the actual name for them) are nicely shaped with no clumps, but there is a small seam line that runs across the center of both of them.

Something new to me are eyes with light reflection painted in. I’m assuming this was done to make Mei’s eyes look more fluid, and I think it works.

The pink ribbon over Mei’s glove is cute, but there is a small amount of pink paint that got onto the glove.

Thankfully, the pink trim and the designs around it on the shirt were painted very precisely.

I think this picture speaks for itself, nice sculpt.

One of the more subtle details about this figure are the folds in the clothing. Not only do they match the illustration, they are both painted and sculpted in. Figures with folds that have no change in the shading around it look bland unless you shine a light on it from just the right angle. Painting shadows into Mei’s clothes really helps make them stand out and ensures they always look right.

More shading can be seen on Mei’s backside. I also like how they’ve sculpted her shoulder blades showing through her shirt.

A white bow on the side draws attention to Mei’s hips.

For those wondering about the tail, it fits snugly into a slot in the back. The slot itself is rather big so you don’t have to worry about the tail falling off.

I’ve mentioned how much I liked the overall sculpt, but here’s a look at the finer details. I see a lot of figures with horrible looking fingers and I’m glad this is not one of them. Any figure with fingers that actually have joints is fine by me.

This is more for the guys. Yes, she does have a nicely shaped bottom and wears white panties.

On the other hand, I am rather enamored with Mei’s legs, which was a major reason for purchasing her. They are long, smooth, and simply beautiful.

If you don’t like bare legs, Mei also has one leg with white stockings, quite the fashionista.

Mei’s shoes have the same design that was on her shirt. Again, the precision of the paint job here was fantastic.

The base is a simple solid white with the Shining Hearts title on it. Since Mei stands relatively straight, there was no need for a large base so Max Factory only made it slightly larger than 9cm across. This is now the smallest figure base in my collection and really helps when trying to conserve space.

Overall, Xiao Mei is a stunning figure. I absolutely love her character design and the sculpt. The paint job has some minor mishaps, like the pink ribbon over the glove, but is excellent otherwise. I will probably never sell this figure, especially considering how well she looks next to Taiga.

I’ve had these pictures for months and Hinagiku for much longer, so I think it’s about time I finally wrote up a post. For those of you who don’t know, Hinagiku Katsura is a popular tsundere from the anime Hayate no Gotoku. She’s the student council president and excels at sports.

This nendoroid is my first from Max Factory. All of my other nendoroids have been from Good Smile Company or Phat, so it’s interesting to see what differences MF adds to the mix. Below are usual 360 shots.

There are a few things that you’ll notice about this nendoroid that’s different from regular ones. First of all, she has jointed arms, allowing you to bend her elbows. Unlike articulated figures though, they aren’t ball-jointed, to bend her elbows you have to twist the arm around. While it’s not very obvious, Hinagiku’s skin tone is rather gray compared to most nendoroids. It’s not much of a problem in photographs, but when you look at her in real life she just doesn’t seem right.

The last big difference is the base. Almost all of my nendoroids have come with the regular circular base and support. Hinagiku comes with this W (or M) shaped base that holds her by the bottom of her skirt.

Hinagiku comes with a pair of cat ears and a cat tail. She looks cute with them on, but you may notice something around her waist.

To my dismay, MF decided to attach Hinagiku’s tail by using a piece of plastic that wraps around her waist. Personally, I think it looks ugly and gets in the way. I’d much rather have a hole somewhere on her back where the tail can be attached. Her hair is long enough to cover it up when you don’t want the tail too.

Besides the cat ears and tail, there’s also a wooden sword and an annoyed face. The two of them together make for some great poses, and I’m sure they’d look even better with Hayate in the picture.

A bit redundant, but Hinagiku also has a bamboo sword. She could potentially dual wield her swords, but I would rather have a different accessory. Her last face is an angry/shouting expression, which again I think is redundant. Hinagiku is a tsundere so besides the default smiling face, I was expecting a tsun face and a dere face, instead I got 2 tsun faces.

One big problem I encountered with my Hinagiku nendoroid was that one of the pegs on an arm broke and got stuck in a slot on the torso. Luckily, I have had experience with this problem before and was able to get it out without damaging the torso piece. Upon investigating, I found that the part of the peg that got stuck actually solidified at a different time from the rest of the arm piece. What does that mean? Either the same mould was used twice and there was some leftover plastic in there, or a piece of plastic fell into the mold before it was used.

Another problem I had was that the faces didn’t fit perfectly into Hinagiku’s head. This leaves a pretty big gap when you try to put on her front hair. The easiest way to cover it up is to just put her cat ears on.

I think Max Factory could have done a far better job with this nendoroid, especially since they’re borrowing from Good Smile Company (as evidenced by the logo on the ball joints). While the paint job is fine and I like the elbow joints and the base, some of the accessories seem redundant, and the manufacturing quality is poor. Taking Hinagiku’s character type into consideration and perhaps having more QC staff would have made a better nendoroid.

My first thought was that maybe I shuldn’t have gone and bought these things. The Emuemu figure comes with a Kemeko head, but you have to buy Kemeko’s body (which I couldn’t find in stock anywhere) separately, and the Dengeki Daioh “magazine” is a 4cm thick book that I can’t read since everything is in Japanese. But then I reminded myself of two things:

1. The Kemeko suit just gives me the creeps and Emuemu looks way cuter just by herself.

2. I only bought this issue of Dengeki Daioh for the calendar that came with it.

With that being said, I went ahead and opened the figure and admired the pictures in the calendar.

One of the things I like about figures by Max Factory is that the faces are really close to what the characters actually look like.

Here’s what Emuemu looks like coming out of Kemeko’s head. I was wonderng how she fit inside the Kemeko suit for the longest time until I remembered something covered in one of my math classes called a hypercube. Basically, a hypercube has more space inside than outside because it’s a 4-dimensional object, so I guess Kemeko is a 4-dimensional suit.

As you can see from the above two pictures (well, maybe not so much in the second), this figure is very detailed. The text on her arm in the first picture reads “weapon discharge area! beware of blast” and in the second picture, the text underneath KMC reads “Mishima Industry Custom Image”. Just to give you an idea of how small the text is, the height of the letters under KMC are the thickness of a mm measurement line on a ruler and the letters in the first picture are slightly bigger.

The cotton ball thingy (what is that supposed to be anyway?) looked very fragile so I avoided touching it as much as possible. The hair spikes on Emuemu are also really sharp; I almost cut myself when I was detaching her body from Kemeko’s head.

I’m running out of places to put my figures, so I decided to get some sticky tack and put Emuemu on my monitor.

I wasn’t expecting anything from the Dengeki Daioh book itself since it’s supposed to just contain a bunch of chapters from various manga, but there was one double-sided pull-out poster.

On the first side is a rather well-endowed witch girl with what appears to be a list and a basket of treats. I hope my name is on that piece of paper ^.^

The other side has what looks to be a girl doing some acrobats.

And here are the pictures from the calendar that came with this issue of Dengeki Daioh. Since I’m not very good with a camera and the calendar was small enough to fit in my scanner, I scanned the images instead. Enjoy ^.^