I've been yearnin' & burnin' for this for like a solid year now. It was announced and promo pics showed up about a year ago, and it was due last November. It kept getting pushed back month by month by month; but finally my HLJ payment request came in last Tuesday - just in time for me to be totally broke for the JoeCon, of course.
Anyway, this toy is pure beauty thru 'n thru, totally worth the wait.
Firstly, if you don't know what I'm talking about when you read the words "Tachikoma & Motoko Kusanagi", get some taste in entertainment and go watch some Ghost in the Shell anime, especially the first movie.
This Tachikoma is from the Stand Alone Complex series, with optional detail parts to show its appearance in the Solid State Society movie. It comes in a big-arsed box with a styrotray in it, to keep everything nice and protected. You can see Motoko in the upper right, along with her 2 swappable right hands that have guns molded to them, a pistol and what looks to be a descendant of a P-90. To the left of them is the tachi's swappable snout weapon, a gatling cannon. To the left of that are the 4 swappable tachi feet that have the fully-spinning wheels extended for 'driving to the 7-11 for a Slurpee' play (the wheels on the walking feet also spin, just for realism's sake). To the left of them are 4 silver plates and 2 discs to swap out with the pod's red running lights and tetherline guns (which rotate a full 360-degrees). Below all that are the passenger pod, the tachi's main body, and the arms. I've removed the plastic retaining trays and scuff-prevention baggies for this pic:
Here we see an action shot showing the size diff between the fully-assembled tachi and Motoko. Frankly, she seems a bit undersized from what I can recall of the anime. I don't recall people looking straight across at the tachi's eyes, always a bit down. I'm thinking it results from the fact of needing to make the pod fit her and be in-scale with the rest of the tachi. Perhaps the animators fudged the scale when drawing people next to the tachis?
The tachi gives you an articulation demonstration. It's got ball joints where it's supposed to have them, and swivels there they're supposed to be. Understand that it's got the poseability of a real tachi, and that's all you really need to know. Also, the feets, calves, and main body are all diecast metal. I was thinking the 7-month delay may have been due to problems with making the entire thing diecast, as I'd assumed when I first learned of this. Some of the promo pics make it seem the hip joints couldn't hold it up. Perhaps that's true or perhaps GoodSmile use the same photographers Hasbro uses and they don't know how to pose toys worth a damn. In either case, this thing's got just enough metal to feel weighty in the hand and to counterbalance against the pod's weight, but not so much as to present problems in posing.
Interior shots of the passenger pod. It's got a fully-realized control panel, with scopes in the roof that come down right in front of her face, and handles right where they need to be. I'll say that Section 9 probably screens out claustrophobes during the hiring process, tho. It's a *tight* fit in there. As I type this, I realize she might have room to sit on her knees as I'd always assumed. The directions tell to put her legs thru holes to the front of the pod.
Here we see that the restraining bolt and coversheath for the primary snout weapon - a grenade launcher - both come off. Also, all 6 fingers are poseable, with the right hand's fingers having 2 joints each. Also the hands can extend from the forearms and spin independantly. The gatling gun swaps out with the grenade launcher per mission requirements.
A scale-comparison pic of Motoko with a few other 18th-scaled ladies. Her actual height isn't a problem for me as some chicks are just shorter than others, and she is supposed to be Japanese after all. Motoko seems to be a Microlady from the hips down, and a MicroSister from the hips up, lol. Having her alone in hand doesn't show her upwards scaling reduction, tho. Her head's no significantly smaller than other such female heads, she's just got a lot of hair surrounding her face, making it look cramped-in. She's definately very animated-looking in the face; but since she's a cyborg with a custom-made body, I can accept these issues here whereas I usually wouldn't for another character. Or maybe I just love Motoko so much I'll take every fig of her I can. I'm open to the possibility of being biased here.
She's got levels of articulation we Joefans have come to expect of real action figures. She's only got single-joint elbows and knees, but they're cut so that she can bend down to about a 70-degree angle for near-doublejointed goodness. She's got a barbell shoulder piece like the Hot Toys Colonial Marines, and it's the *only* thing about this entire set I would really wish had been done differently, but it isn't a glaringly open seam between her shoulder and torso in any pose other than 'just standing there'. She's got a ball neck joint like RAH/JvC figs, and it pops out nicely. She's got a pop'em ribcage joint like the upper MicroSisters and the chicks from the Motion Revive Monster Hunter set. There is no waist joint, like 25A Joes. She's got pop'em ball wrists and upper ankles, plus a lower ankle hinge and a foot-arch swivel for wide-stance flat-footed poses. Also pop'em ball hips, and above-the-knee thigh swivels. A small preference would have been for the kneepad to have been on the upper calf instead of lower thigh. It just wouldn't protect a knee at all there; but then again she's a cyborg that makes craters in cement when jumping from 20 stories high.
Now for a few size-comparison shots of the tachi, starting with a perma-WIP MCC idea, then with one of my MicroMan ScopeDogs, then the Pitt, and lastly with a DTC Swat Humvee as I think that's something every Joe fan has in some paintjob or another (and thus will likely be the only pic that actually gives an idea of it's size to most people, lol).
To sum up:
FUKKIN' SCORE! If you're a GitS fan, you need this. If you're a mech fan, you need this. If you want your toy collection to not suck swampy donkey balls, you need this.
The paint and detail looks amazing. How is the quality of the paint applications? The look very clean from your pics.
