A few years ago, 1000 Toys unleashed the TOA Heavy Industries Synthetic Human, which made many people giddy because of its awesome posing capabilities. Since then, 1000 Toys started offering 1/12 scale versions of this release, both male and female. Me being me, well I jumped on the female offering.
So now that we've established you're buying this for it's posing capabilities, it should be no surprise that I'm telling you that the accessories you get aren't exactly mind blowing:
- 1 x Main Figure
- 1 x Hair
- 1 x Skull Face
- 3 x Breast Plates
- 8 x Posing/Gripping Hands
- 1 x "Ice Pick"
- 1 x Stand
The skull face is kind of neat, and plays to the whole "Synthetic Human" theme of the figure. The random Ice Pick/Impaling Tool is incredibly random... not sure why an Android would need any sort of weapon, and I don't see how useful this particular weapon would be in an actual fight. The hair is.. functional.
The stand is an interesting item. Unlike other figure stands, this one opts for the basics - it can be opened like a clothespin, anchors to one of the ankles, and that's it. For those who want to make it fancy, the stand is magnetic, so you can actually mount the figure pulling off gravity defying moves.
Did I mention it was cute that they offered different sizes of breast? As if I'd use anything other than the biggest one they included...
So first off, clearly despite being marketed as the female, this is clearly no T&A figure. In fact, It's more like a high tech crash test dummy, if anything. The body itself has apparently been adopted for use in other 1000 Toys product lines.
As the focus for this release really is the articulation, I'll quickly go over the Paint and Build Quality, both of which are new to me as I'm not familiar with this company.
Paint is an interesting one. Some of the aspects are quite well done, most notably being the face plates. Then, everything else seems like its half assed. To make things more confusing to me is that even in the promo photos, it seems that the paint is less than perfect, but in different ways. So is this haphazard paint on purpose, or do they just really suck at doing these?
Build wise, I'm happy to say that things are pretty good. Overall, I found the figure to be a very well made product. No issues with tolerances or poor finishes. Everything moved like it is supposed to, and poses could be held. There were no concerns from me that my handling might be too rough. Truly on par, at the very least, with Figma and Figuart.
So... articulation. The overall range of motion on the joints is quite impressive, though admittedly it's nothing that I've not seen at this scale. Don't get me wrong - there are some neat design choices, like the head and shoulder joints, as well as a multi sectioned ab area with ball joints.
But ultimately the high levels of articulation is mostly due to one simple fact - they just didn't bother to hide any of the joints, and in fact actually have parts cut to give limb movement priority over aesthetics.
There are collectors that will outright get offended at figures with obvious joints like this.
In the end, this isn't a bad figure. Weird paint aside, it's well made and it does what it was designed to - deliver a small, well articulated action figure. It's just that it doesn't blow my mind on the engineering side. I suspect much of the hype over the original Synthetic Human figure is that most 1/6 figures are made with source material accuracy in mind, with most of those being characters from movies with costumes and accessories, and the base bodies all very much follow the same formula.
Something like this comes along and people lose their minds because there's more joints and the focus is on something other than simply looking human. Basically stuff that you see on a regular basis if you're into Japanese stuff. on the whole.
I suppose this does mean that if 1000 Toys releases anything that actually interests me, I should check to verify that it uses this body. That way, at least I know posing the figure will be lots of fun when it finally arrives.
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