Hello there, everyone! I hope you're able to stay cool throughout the rest of the month; August is broiling hot here, and we just had a thunderstorm that has upped the humidity 1000%. Welcome to the Hobby Haven!
I am slowly getting caught up on my backlog of figure reviews here. I'd hoped to have these out a few months earlier, but such is life. Today's figure comes from the anime series Ushio and Tora, which is one of my top 5 favorite anime from the past few years. (I'd tried it completely on a whim looking for something new to watch, and ended up hooked.) If you like shonen anime with fights, monsters, romance, and interspecial bro-ness, you might like this! It's about a boy named Ushio who accidentally unleashes a centuries-old monster named Tora from his family's basement. Tora wants to eat Ushio, but ends up being thwarted by the mystical Beast Spear which Ushio finds. And thus begins an epic tale of a boy and his pet monster as they travel throughout Japan and eventually save the world.
I picked up the Nendoroids of both Ushio and Tora, but today we're just looking at Tora. I pre-ordered them from HLJ (you've undoubtedly read me chattering about them earlier) back in March. These were surprisingly expensive; Tora was 6,900 yen by himself, which is about $65; almost twice the price of most Nendoroids. I wasn't thrilled about that, but it was either pay that much now. or pay more than that when scouring the aftermarket for him.
So let's take a look. First of all, the box is huge. Easily 1.5 times the size of the average Nendoroid box. I like the stark, monochrome color palette we've got going on here: black and white, broken only by the orange of Tora.
Below are some standard shots of the box.
You'll see this in the next review, but you can actually hook Ushio and Tora together to recreate the scenes where Tora carries Ushio on his back. It's weirdly cute.
Not sure why they're putting all of the seals of authenticity on the bottom of the box?
Okay, I do like this. The inside of the box is printed with a (setting? rising?) sun. It feels like a diorama.
Before I show you the contents, let me just exult for a moment in the fact that 1. The instructions are in Japanese AND English, and 2. They finally label the parts and confirm that they give you extra neck joints. I mean, how is a newbie supposed to figure this out?
They also show you how to assemble Tora. This is your first hint that it's gonna be complicated.
Whew, that's a lot of stuff. Besides Tora himself, you get two extra face plates, an extra chest (! ?), and extra set of arms and legs, and extra set of hands, some...sort of joint thing...an extra tail, and a hamburger. Tora loves hamburgers and has accepted them as a substitute for eating human flesh. Win/win, I'd say.
And wowza is Tora heavy. His hair is like 50% of his weight alone, it's massive. It's hard to measure since I don't have my scale right now, but he legit feels about as heavy as a baseball. I would not recommend throwing him, though. Would scratch the paint.
Check out the job they did on his hair! It's a rusty orange, with slightly lighter notes here and there.
You can get an idea of how they constructed him here. It couldn't have been easy; Tora's not quite bipedal or quadrupedal but switches between both. They did a chest joint here--you can use the other chest piece for standing Tora--so he can sort of hunch over to walk on all fours. I splayed his limbs out so you can get a better view of the ball sockets for his limbs.
Here you can see his back, plus his tail, which is removable.
This is where you plug in the stand to make sure he doesn't fall over. I couldn't get him to, unaided, sit hunched over without some careful maneuvering.
And now for the faces! First we have his goofy face...
...and here we have a more devilish one. He's up to no good, I tell you!
And here's some more shots of the instruction manual. They also show you how to assemble Ushio and Tora together, which is nice. Looking at the pictures, it doesn't look like something that would immediately occur to you.
Here's some of the extra parts. You almost have enough to make another Tora!
This piece allows you to clip Ushio to Tora. You would use this instead of his normal hairpiece (it seems a little weird to call it that, but hey, if the name fits...)
And here's his extra legs.
We only get one accessory, but it's the most important one of all.
It's very easy to take him apart, actually. You can sort of rock the front hair piece loose.
I like the shading here. It gets almost reddish toward the front, but fades into a burnt orange towards the back.
Okay, so this is a little creepy. This is what headless Tora looks like.
I tried to assemble him so that you could see Tora in his standing mode, but it is damn hard for me to get that wiggly little stem to plug into the other chest piece. I probably need to keep at it, but I got frustrated enough initially that I gave up and just took a picture of the parts. Better luck next time, I guess!
Last but not least are his tails, which go in different directions. Important stuff.
The range of motion for his limbs--plus chest--is very good, and the only downside was that the extra hands tended to come off too easily. A lot of thought went into this, and I am guessing that the increased cost is due to the amount of Tora pieces we get. I can't really think of many accessories that would come with this, except for maybe a little lightning bolt piece of a flame piece? (Tora can breathe fire and make electricity) In any case, I'm excited to show you Ushio next time! Miss Scarlett, signing out!
