A long time coming, this is the final piece of swag I got during my October 2023 drive to the US, the Blizzard Collectibles 1/6 Overwatch Widowmaker statue.
Now, I've heard of Overwatch and even own a few character goods, but I've never played it. Blizzard has a history of creating some wonderful characters, and this game was no exception. Merch was everywhere, and even made it to Japanese figure makers. But the one thing that always interested me was the lineup of 1/6 Resin statues. From random photos I'd see, they actually looked pretty good, which isn't something I normally say about product sold by American companies, and were probably the best looking non-Japanese product.
I met up with a seller just outside of Philadelphia, and picked this one up for $100 USD, which is less than the MSRP of $150 USD and from my brief investigation, under the current market value for these statues
Encased in a Styrofoam cocoon, Widowmaker survived the week long trek in one piece. Not sure how the pricing thing works in terms of production costs, but I can say this statue comes in four pieces - the base, the right arm with Sniper rifle, the body w/head, and the pony tail. Having never played the game, I have no idea about this particular pose, though based on experience I'm guessing this is in the character select screen or something.
The ponytail connects via a metal post where as the arm connects with magnets.
The Base is an Overwatch symbol, and is nice and weighted to prevent silly things like toppling from occurring. Feet connect via a tab and metal post system.
Sculpting on the statue is actually pretty good. There's certain allowances I give when it comes to reviewing an American statue, but it seems they aren't really necessary as this holds up even compared to import statues, and in some ways it's better than more expensive statues such as the Sideshow Black Widow I looked at - at the very least, the barrel of the Sniper Rifle isn't bent.
Details are prominent and generally sharp. but feel somewhat softer than they could be. That's one of the benefits of having an ABS/PVC statue over a Resin one, that the functional sharp points actually mean something. Or perhaps there might have been a harder Resin mixture that could be used, at the expensive of greater fragility and loss during production. Details are, however, sharper than any Domestic statue I've seen at Gamestop.
I just wish her ass was perkier.
Finishes for the various parts are pretty good, so basically you don't find any areas where there are burrs or any other signs that you need sanding. Some of the finer details look like they could use a bit more TLC but again, I've seen some pretty sketchy things and this is well above reasonable.
Greatest area of weakness has got to be Paint. I mean, it's again, much better than your run of the mill American piece, but it still kind of sucks. I've mentioned that some of the details aren't as crisp as they ought to be. Well, you can probably see that a poor paint job just amplifies these issues - just look at the back of the neck. The vast majority of paint is pretty good, but even on larger areas you can see a discrepancy when one area is painted by spraying, and others by hand - the brush strokes are obvious. Unsurprisingly, brighter colours are generally the culprits for rougher paint applications, as these generally require multiple layers of less than stellar workmanship. Decals are pretty good.
A slightly less offensive issue would be the Build Quality. While the magnet arm goes on pretty smoothly, tolerances are not as good as they could be, which makes inserting the tab and pole parts challenging. The ponytail isn't that bad, as the hole is actually large enough for the ponytail to rotate, but the fit on the feet is kind of tight and there always concern that I might snap something off during insertion or removal.
So ultimately, not too bad at all - like I said, certainly above average for an American release and at least doesn't make one embarrassed to say they spent money on a collectible. To be fair, it's not just American stuff - Play Arts stuff is generally terrible, with the company relying on the fact they have the Final Fantasy and other Square Enix licenses by the balls.
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