So I'm a bit behind on this one - unfortunately the one I received at the start of the year was a bit damaged out the gate. Fortunately, Giantoy worked with me and sent me a replacement with really little pain and suffering on my end, for which I am grateful for. The unfortunate part is that the 10 minutes I had spent with the figure already set me up for the inevitable - the fact this figure honestly is average at best.
Bayonetta is of course the titular character from the now Nintendo exclusive series. Now, if you're a collector of Nintendo stuff, you'll know that they are SLOW to grant licenses to third parties, if they even bother. So it's no surprise Very Cool Toys took advantage of this and just made an unlicensed version of the character as a 1/6 figure. There's several versions of this character, but I believe word on the street is that this is from her Super Smash Brothers appearance.
Now, the prototype looked alright - I knew it wasn't going to be AAA stuff based on the make and the price ($200 USD shipped) but I figured it would be decent and do its basic job well, namely to look bad ass.
Hindsight, folks.
So here she is. Contents of the set are relatively light, but again, price point I suppose:
- 1 x Main Figure
- 1 x Glasses
- 4 x Pistols
- 6 x Posing/Gripping Hands
- 2 x Sleeves
Now before I go on and lean into this figure, I should point out there are some things I didn't mind about this release, or at least they didn't overly disappoint me.
For better or worse, the head sculpt came out exactly like the prototype photos showed. It never was the most accurate looking Bayonetta head, but it was functional. It's just nice to say that there wasn't any noticeable downgrade, so if you bought this for the head, well congrats, this passed your test.
The hair is a combination of sculpted and rooted hair, effectively the same as the Genesis Emen Mai Shiranui, without the option to swap out. It's a choice. Some people won't mind it, some people will freak out. My take is provided you have the means and ability to keep things under control, rooted is always the way to go.
You'll notice the shiny gold earrings and chain in her hair. All made of metal, which is a nice touch. The glasses, on the other hand, are made of a flimsy plastic and don't really sit all that well on her face, so if you're like me, you'll just pop these out for a quick photo session, and then put them the hell away, never to be touched again.
The suit itself is actually quite well made. While this isn't the right body style for the character (and lets face it, 99% of the time it's wrong no matter which company makes it), at least the outfit is tailored perfectly. I've seen some third party outfits that really are nothing but cut pieces of cloth with minimal stitching. This suit actually looks like some trial and error was undertaken to make a pattern, creating a suit that is both form fitting, but leaves enough slack (and uses the right material) to allow for actual posing. The boots are basic hard plastic with some felt, but it's functional. The material is some sort of pleather, the same sort of stuff used on the the Hot Toys Iron Man 2 and Avengers Black Widow figures, and appears to be durable enough to display and pose, and provided you don't do anything extreme and return the figure back to relaxed positions, should last for a while.
The hair sleeves come separately on a piece of wired pleather, and just slide onto the elbow. Does it get kind of messy looking? Yes, but they're functional, though I would preferred the long sleeves from the second game.
Now the thing to watch out for on the outfit are actually the dangly shiny bits. These metal chains are great to look at, but they are literally hanging on by a thread, so when you're posing the figure you should make sure there's nothing caught that would cause the chains to rip off the body, because fixing it would be extremely difficult.
The guns are... well they're ugly. They're shaped the right way, but the paint finish on them is extremely crude. The paint finish on the figure overall is isn't great, but because of the high concentration of paint applications here, it's that much more painfully obvious. The metal charms on the grip are a nice touch.
Connecting the guns to the heels of the boots is an exercise in futility. First off, presuming you can get the thing to actually clip on in the first place, as there are QC issues with tolerances, you're pretty much guaranteed paint scratching as it's one of those situations where the gun slots into a hole. The next problem you'll likely encounter is that due to poor material choices, the plastic is extremely brittle and likely will crack, eventually rendering the heel unable to hold the gun.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the guns is that the hands she comes with, you know the ones meant for holding her guns, are unable to actually hold her guns.
If you look at game art, you'll notice pretty quickly that these pistols are not held with a standard finger position, as she extends her pinky. Having said that, this could be forgiven if Very Cool had actually followed through and delivered hands with separated pinky fingers, like the prototype photos promised.
So all in all, her weapons are basically useless as accessories, and unlike the game, she only has these to use... which of course begs the question of why they included standard gripping hands if she has nothing else to hold?
Finally we have the body itself. It's a seamless body, which of course is the preferred weapon of choice for those who enjoy having ladies with curves and flexibility. As mentioned above, the suit also makes the body look great. So everything is good, right?
Well... you may have noticed that Bayonetta has the look of someone who has spent too much time getting oiled up. That is because the it's almost like they didn't use enough dye or whatever it is they use to colour the body. From what I can tell tell, this is effectively a TBLeague S23 body, and the prototype was shown to be using a TBLeague body. Unlicensed figures using TBLeague bodies or alternatively, Jiaou Doll bodies, isn't exactly news.
From what I can tell, either Very Cool somehow got their hands on TBLeague tooling and created their own clones using crappier silicone material, or they paid TBLeague to make a bunch of these bodies using their tooling and branded it as their own. Either way, it looks pretty bad, though fortunately this is something that can be fixed, provided you feel like dropping the $65 USD and have the time/energy to get this done.
At least from a functionality perspective, it doesn't seem like this body has lost any flexibility compared to an official TBLeague body.
So overall, yeah, things look decent, mostly, but the fact you can't really put the figure into poses with guns intact really takes the fun out of ownership. Bayonetta is known for her outlandish poses while she puts caps into asses, and as such this figure effectively fails at the one thing it was supposed to do. While yes, there are things that can be done to fix this, I really shouldn't have, regardless of price, not to mention that Very Cool themselves did something to remove this feature from the final product, most likely as a cost cutting measure.
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