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Con Haul

Tuesday, August 26th, 2025

Here are some of the items I got at the con. I’m not including the half dozen or so volumes of manga (mostly isekai trash) or the many stationary items (postcards and stickers) since I haven’t yet decided which will be gifts and you may even see a postcard in your mailbox one day.

The above is an English ‘special edition’ of the Weekly Young Magazine, a Japanese manga weekly from Kodansha. This is a hefty (1000+ pages) volume containing the first chapters of 14 series translated into English. Readers can vote on which ones they want to see serialized, but it’s unclear whether this format (an anthology magazine) will continue or if they’ll be serialized online.

This is a beautiful book, printed in Japan and with the same feel as the Japanese anthologies. I had to join a longish line to get one (for free) at the con, and the next day I saw a big pile just sitting around for the taking at Kinokuniya in the city!

This is a vinyl figure of a kaiju that I bought from the designer. The monster itself is from an old (1980s) Korean film which I’d never heard of, but the guy who designed this figure also designed two of the kaiju in the recent Godzilla x Kong film and had a few impressive 3D prints of his work on display. His was a somewhat out-of-place booth for an anime con but I’d been looking for a vinyl kaiju figure and this one wasn’t expensive and scratched the itch.

There were hundreds of anime figures available, almost all of the prize variety. I’ve got loads of these BiCute girls, and picked up the above two at the con. Prices were extremely good – possibly due to competition? – and had I more space I probably would have bought more.

Bandai had a display and shop for Gundam kits, as well as an area where you could sit and make a beginners version for free. I charmed the dude into letting me take one! I like that it’s on a single runner, and will certainly assemble it one day.

I got the above clear file at the Japan Tourist Board exhibit. I was just throwing all the free handouts into my bag and didn’t even notice it was a clear file until I got back to the hotel. It promotes a 2022 short anime that reimagines Japanese castles as transforming robots, which was partially funded by local tourism agencies.

Loads of exhibitors were selling TCG cards, mostly Pokemon and One Piece, but one booth seemed to specialize in Weiss. I’d been considering buying a Weiss box for a while, they had them for a decent price, so I bought this Nikke one. I’ll let it age a year or few before opening.

Speaking of TCGs there were also a few being launched at the con. They all had the whiff of scam about them – companies wanting to cash in on the current TCG mania – but I wasn’t going to decline a free promo card. Maybe I can sell it for a fortune and retire one day. Or maybe not 😉

I’ve put most of ‘the cute stuff’ together. This is what I bought specifically for Kristin, and all of it came from artist alley booths. The envelope with Korean text is a blind pack of animal stickers, and the frog pin was also a blind box item. The bottom left is a capybara coaster. Had KLS been with me we would have purchased much more like this!

Even though it wasn’t a con purchase, here’s a bonus pic: dollar-bin comics purchased at Midtown Comics. I have no interest in recent superhero comics, but always find the late 80s and early 90s stuff a fun read. I wonder which of these will be best and which worst?

Posted in Anime, Books & Comics, Cards, Collecting, Models, Otaku, Toys | No Comments »

Not-LEGO UFO

Thursday, July 10th, 2025

Bernard generously sent me the above: a Tuomo brick-building kit of a UFO. Tuomo is a competitor to LEGO, and a well-reviewed one as well. Let’s build the kit and see how it is!

Much like LEGO, the pieces are separated into bag groups, numbered 1 through 3. These correspond to steps in the instruction book, to make assembly more streamlined.

The instruction book was in a bit of a state since it seemed to have been shoved into the box after all the bags. This has never happened with a LEGO kit, which usually protects its instructions in a cardboard envelope. Happily the book wasn’t damaged, just folded.

The instructions included steps with many more pieces than the average LEGO kit. I’m in the camp that believes LEGO has gone too far in recent years as far as dumbing-down instructions so I think this is actually a plus. It reminds me of LEGO instructions from my youth.

The pieces are the same size and look and feel like LEGO. The vast majority of the pieces in this particular kit are identical to LEGO pieces, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they all are. I could only detect two obvious differences: the ‘grip’ of the pieces seems stronger than LEGO, and of course they don’t have the LEGO logo on them!

The kit includes some metallic silver pieces. I’m sure LEGO have these, but I can’t remember seeing any (aside from little coins in the castle kits). I can’t tell if these are painted or cast with metallic plastic, but they look good and you can even see my reflection in the curved one.

There are no stickers, which is a massive positive. LEGO claims stickers keep costs down, but this kit has about twenty printed pieces and is much less expensive than LEGO.

It includes a light brick, which is turned on by twisting the top. The LED and battery seem to be sealed inside the brick and not replaceable, but I believe this is true for LEGO versions now as well (like the flame in the medieval blacksmith kit).

And lastly before I get to the assembly, the instructions contained a single error. You’ll see it asks for three corner bricks with a diagonal face, but the bags actually contained two normal corners and only one with the cut face. The diagram itself matched the bricks provided, so it was just the bricks listed in the blue box that were wrong, but it was an error regardless.

This could potentially be confusing for a builder, but I’ll forgive it since the diagram is clear and I’ve had LEGO kits with errors in instructions as well.

The base is built first. Previously in these Chinese brick kits I’ve seen things like woeful instructions, poor structural integrity or questionable engineering but this was solid, easy to put together and rests flat on the table. I’ll say this again, but if I didn’t know otherwise I’d just assume this was LEGO.

I didn’t take a lot of photos of the saucer assembly, but I found the design ingenious especially the ring that held the top and bottom halves together. This is a hidden-stud model, which means the top and bottom halves are inverted, and I was impressed by how this was achieved in a relatively small model.

Notably the kit has no minifig. While LEGO no longer has a copyright on the brick designs, they do on minifigures, which is why the competitors either have different figures or omit them entirely. The alien in this kit is made of sixteen pieces, but I believe the model would be better with an alien minifig in the cockpit.

And here’s the final product! The saucer sits on top of the ‘tractor beam’ and the light brick is underneath the saucer and easy to turn on or off.

And here’s what it looks like with the light on. I’ve placed my only minifig inside to show scale, and I think you’ll agree it looks fairly good.

This is a well-designed model, was fun to build and looks good made. This is by far the best LEGO competitor I’ve ever built, although it feels weird to call it that since the pieces are essentially identical. I don’t remember exactly how much this cost but I know it’s significantly less than were it an actual LEGO product, which is another positive. In short, this is essentially LEGO with a different name.

This is another example of why LEGO is under increasing pressure from these competitors, and why their prices are increasingly eye-opening as these competitors become more widely distributed. And as good as this particular mode is, I’ve read that another LEGO competitor makes an even higher-quality product so I’ve bought one of theirs and you’ll see it here as well one day.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Models, Toys | 5 Comments »

30 Minutes Fantasy

Tuesday, July 8th, 2025

Bandai has a new series of model kits out called ’30 Minutes Fantasy’. They are inexpensive, fantasy-themed, and they don’t take long to assemble. But the big gimmick is they are modular, and can be modified to create different fantasy-themed character classes.

I bought the above in Japan, and (for a model kit) it was very cheap at only ¥2100. As you can see it’s a knight, and part of the ‘Liber’ nation. I believe these are the good guys, with the other nation (‘Rosen’) being the bad ones. There’s an elaborate story behind the series, involving a ruined Earth and mechs using elemental magic and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if an RPG is being developed.

The lore goes deep with elements and jobs (the Japanese term for ‘classes’) and as you can see this knight is a starter class, at rank I. But it’s still a class, and much like any other RPG there’s a level below, in this case called a ‘silhouette’. Assembly of the kit begins with making the silhouette.

There’s a lot of runners for such a cheap kit! If you’ve made any humanoid model kits before you’ll notice how much simpler this one is, including no ‘under gate’ pieces and the lack of stickers or decals. I’ve made loads of kits, and I’m here to say that yes, the silhouette did indeed take me under 30 minutes:

In D&D parlance, the above is the ‘level 0’ equivalent character. The peasant that hasn’t adventured yet. The young man or woman about to join the army (fighter) or enroll in the magic academy (mage) or dedicate themselves to a pious life in the local religion (priest). Of course the big difference is this is a mech, but you get the idea.

For such a simple kit it’s very posable, and of course there are several different hands depending on what you want to do with it. But it’s also fairly generic, which is unsurprising since it’s the basis of all other classes. So let’s change its job!

Since I bought the knight kit, it came with the knight armor, and as you can see from the above pic the first step is to remove a handful of parts from the silhouette build. You then go through about 10 minutes of further assembly attaching the knight armor, until it looks like this:

It looks great for such an inexpensive and easy-to-build model kit! I don’t paint my models, and I feel this guy looks good enough without it. It’s very posable and holds the sword/shield well.

You can also see it’s got some obvious holes and slots as well. In Japan I saw impressively assembled and painted examples that had gems in a few of these empty holes, but I’m not sure if that was a custom job or if you can buy the gem pieces. Regardless, the holes are there for upgrades into higher level classes, such as these two shown in the instructions:

The advanced class armors are available in upgrade kits (for under $10) and once you own a silhouette you can change it into as many classes as you buy upgrades for. There seems to be about a dozen available now, and knowing Bandai many more are on their way. I don’t think I’m going to get many of these, but I’m impressed with what I’ve seen based on this knight I’ve made.

And I’ve also got this bishop kit, which is another silhouette with two (Class I and II) upgrades included 🙂

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Berserker Armor Guts

Wednesday, May 7th, 2025

I recently assembled the above model kit. It appealed to me not just because it’s a character from a manga I love, but because it’s designed to not require painting and has a cloth cape!

This is a Kotobukiya kit which means it’s got a slightly different design approach to Bandai, and from experience kits from this company are a little more finicky and difficult to assemble.

Appropriately, I used my new ‘GodHand’ nippers to make this kit. I bought these during the last Japan trip, and they cost more than a typical model kit! They are designed to produce a clean cut from the runners, which minimizes sanding and cleanup. They work very well, and I should have purchased a pair years ago.

There were no stickers and a tiny amount of pre painted pieces, but aside from these and the sword blade…

…everything else is black. This proved a bit problematic during assembly, since it was sometimes difficult to see the tabs and holes on the tiny pieces. Some parts are also very sharp, and I almost cut myself once or twice!

Overall I’d say assembly was a bit frustrating and a bit difficult compared to the average Bandai model. Aside from the reasons already mentioned, I was surprised to see some pieces required rotations when you assembled them, and others even required glue! The joints are also very stiff, and I even broke a wrist joint during assembly although the kit seems to consider this a possibility since the runner contained extras.

Here he is finished sans cape and sword arm. Incidentally – and unlike Bandai – the instructions contain no English.

The cape looks great and is threaded with wire to make it poseable, but it was a massive challenge to actually get it correctly on to the figure. A sort of collar device is supposed to lock it into place, but despite Herculean effort I never managed to get it working as the instructions suggested, so my cape is a bit ragged around his neck.

What’s interesting is while this is a model kit, once assembled it feels like an action figure. The seams are all but invisible in the black, and the stiff joints and excessive possibility mean you can display Guts into all the usual poses, including the crouching one I’m leaving him in.

And although it’s a kit (or action figure) once posed it looks like a statue, and will look nice on display. This may have been frustrating to make, and a little pricey, but I’m happy with it 🙂

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Robo Chan Man

Sunday, September 8th, 2024

While I actively still buy and make model kits, I rarely blog them these days. This one is a bit different though, so let’s look at it:

It’s a Bandai kit from the early 1980s called ‘Robo Chan Man’. I believe this particular kit is based on a kids cartoon of the time, probably forgotten now.

I found this at an antique store in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t very expensive, and I was surprised it was intact and unmade after 40 years.

It’s a small and simple kit, but you can see it includes a screwdriver, screw and a pull-back motor.

The plastic is thicker and more brittle than what Bandai uses today, and it’s almost impossible to easily get rid of the cut lines when the pieces were removed from the runners. As you can see it’s also two-colour only, and while it is snap-together, it obviously needs painting to look ‘good’.

There’s the finished kit. It has very minimal articulation, and the girl (called ‘Patty’ apparently) is just a single solid figure.

With his legs up he can be pulled back and released, at which point he rolls around with surprising speed! I can’t show that here so I’ll illustrate with a photo of the manual:

It’s difficult to find information about this kit online, but it seems it was one of many including some based on larger properties like Gundam. Here’s a photo I found of five of them including the one I made:

I wonder how many of these kits still exist? Mine is made now, so there’s at least one less. It’s simple and unsophisticated but this was a fun look back at the early days of Bandai model kits 🙂

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