Wonder Showcase Plus + Rei Ayanami & Asuka Langley Souryuu grimrock! Mix Edition

Product Information/Specifications

Introduction

Rei Ayanami & Asuka Langley Souryuu grimrock! Mix Edition make their way into Kaiyodo's Wonder Showcase Plus product lineup.  As the name suggests, these pair of figurines were from a Wonder Showcase Plus convention.  From my understanding, the Wonder Showcase Plus is held every year in Japan to allow garage sculptors to shine with their works.  The Rei Ayanami & Asuka Langley Souryuu grimrock! Mix Edition are creations by KAWANISHI Ken (grimrock!).  These figurines were extremely popular from the convention from what I heard.

Kaiyodo had reissued the Rei Ayanami & Asuka Langley Souryuu grimrock! Mix Edition once after it was sold out quickly from the first retail release.  The one I have is the first release.  The reissue occurred shortly after Diamond Comics started to import them overseas.  I managed to get my set from Ultra Action Toys for a good price.  They accidentally set the price as the Diamond price as they didn't know that this was the Japanese version I think.  The price I got it at was lower than the Japanese retail price.

Some of the pictures aren't clear & good.  If I have time, I'll redo the bad ones & repost them.

The Review

Rei Ayanami & Asuka Langley Souryuu grimrock! Mix Edition box

I have to admit.  This is a very nice box.  In fact, I have yet taken out Rei & Asuka from the box.  I actually plan to keep them there & display them like this.  The problem with the box I have is that it's curved outward from the bottom; making the box hard to stand straight up. 

Although the box says that these are action figures, they aren't.  They aren't poseable.  I think Kaiyodo used the wrong wording to describe these figurines.  As mentioned, this is the Japanese version.  How can you tell?  Look at the pic below.

How to tell if this is the Japanese or Diamond version

As you can see from the "Distributed by" line, this is from ORGANIC Co., Ltd.  This means that this is from the Japanese market.  The Diamond version will have Diamond's name instead of ORGANIC's.  Quite simple really.

Pretty

The box is a book-style design.  Open it & you see a nice display of Rei & Asuka under a plastic window cover.  The poses they have is static, but still nice.  On the left side, you see a history of the figurines.  On the back of the box, you see a description about what Wonder Showcase Plus is about.  It's all in good English, so you can read it.  Since I didn't buy this because it has a nice box, let's examine the detail of the figurines.

I have to say that this is the worse quality I have even seen from a Kaiyodo product & it's a Japanese version. I couldn't believe the paint job on these figurines.  Look at Asuka's plugsuit.  The black panel lines are painted badly, especially on her right side.  Major paint bleeding.  It's not noticeable in the pic, but I could see that the painter tried to correct his/her mistake on it.  There's a big blob of red paint around it & it's very noticeable.  I assume the painter did this to redo that black panel line area.  You can see what the results are.  Rei's plugsuit isn't bad.  Although it looks good, wait until you see her face later in this review.  On a positive side, the choice of colour isn't too bad.

Those angel "pets" aren't bad.  They are much better than Rei & Asuka.  Anyways, the red angel is connected to a real chain  The paint job is very fine & clean since there isn't much details on them & they are basically one colour.

Remember what I said about Rei's face earlier?  Here's a pic of it.  The eyes are bad.  Poorly painted & not detailed properly.  They look okay when you view them from a bird's eye view.  But looking at them directly, they are bad.  Asuka, however, is much better.  It's painted much better if minimal bleeding.  However, she does suffers a bit on the pupil part like Rei.  Both of their eyes don't seem to be focused properly.  This made their facial expressions a little bit on the weird looking side.  The choice of hair colour isn't bad, except maybe for Asuka since I'm not too use to see her as a blond.

Overall Conclusion

Rei Ayanami & Asuka Langley Souryuu grimrock! Mix Edition I brought was terrible in the paint job department.  There were two sets at the store I got it from.  But when I decided to buy it after leaving the store, there was one left.  The other one was better in terms of the faces, but the body was much worse than this one.  I don't know how their backs look since I haven't taken them out of the box once.  Currently, these girls are put aside in my storage.

A scale of 7/10 is what Rei Ayanami & Asuka Langley Souryuu grimrock! Mix Edition gets from me.  The paint job was a serious problem; especially for a Kaiyodo Japanese version.  The box pretty much is what held it's scoring ground.

Unless you are going to spend some time fixing these figurines, I recommend staying away from the Rei Ayanami & Asuka Langley Souryuu grimrock! Mix Edition.  From the looks of it, I have to say that this was a mass-produced figurine set.  I did have plans to fix them up before I brought them, but I haven't got the time to do it.  The retail price is actually not bad, considering you are getting two figurines.

Between the Diamond & Japanese version, I say get the Japanese one.  I have seen the Diamond & it was the same or worse than this one.  The black panel lines are darker & thick on that one.  Plus, the colour is much more heavier.  So heavy, you can see the blush from Rei & Asuka's faces so brightly.

If you do plan to get the Japanese version of this set, you better give up & go for the Diamond versions.  You would probably have better luck finding those as Diamond are usually mass produced.  Since this is an old item now, don't think you can get them easily.

Photos were taken using Sony DSC-F828 digital still camera.

8Last updated on February 19, 2008