Did everyone have a good holiday? Even if you aren't celebrating anything, I hope everyone is enjoying the time off from school and work! I'm starting to look forward to the new year, and with that in mind, this is the final figure review for 2014! Bringing some cheer to the cold winter months is the much-anticipated Nendoroid #400, Sakura Kinomoto from Cardcaptor Sakura!
The heavily-edited English version, known as Cardcaptors, was my first magical girl show, so I have a lot of nostalgia for the series and a lot of love for this character! GSC has done a fantastic job at bringing her and one of her iconic outfits to life, and I'm very pleased with her! Right out of the box she is absolutely adorable. Even on the smaller scale, she's absolutely true to character and CLAMP's designs. Everything down to the bows sits perfectly on her. And if you were wondering about the hat, it stays on her head thanks to a slight magnet and can be removed. The sculpting on her skirt in particular is very impressive to me. The waves and the frills look great, especially when considering how small a scale they're on. She even has frills on her underwear! (No, I am not showing you pictures of that.)
Her paint job is very clean as well. The only flaw I could find was a slight smudge on one of her shoes. The seamlines are virtually unnoticeable (which the obvious exception of the removable parts) unless you are holding the Nenoroid an inch away from your face. On the other hand, her joints gave me some problems. Her arms fall off at the slightest brush while her legs are so stiff that they barely move at all. The hole in her torso that holds her skirt in place is also slightly too large, which is something that I'll get into later.
However, for the most part her display options more than make up for this. To start, she's meant to be displayed with a pair of wings that fit over the back of the stand. This completes her outfit and adds a little bit of flair as well, since the wings have a little bit of articulation to them to match whatever pose Sakura is in. The stand itself also deserves a mention, since it's the first time I've seen a Nendoroid stand where the final joint moves from side to side rather than up and down, which makes a lot more sense for posing Nendoroids. I hope that this is something that will stay for future releases.
Her first real accessories are her wand and the extra hands that can hold her cards. Kero is also included as an extra, acting functionally similar to the rabbit familiar included with this year's Snow Miku and the Kyuubey that comes with Madoka. However, he does not come with a separate body that Sakura can hold. I'll let GSC off the hook on that one, though.
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| Release! |
However, I ran into a lot of problems with the final pose, which requires the rest of the extra parts. Sakura also comes with a longer staff that attaches to a different skirt piece to recreate the way she flies around in the series and in the opening credits to the show. But when I went to put this pose together, nothing seemed to want to stay in place. The idea seems to be that Sakura's hands would partially hold the wand in place, taking some of the pressure off of the middle peg holding the skirt in place. However, my Sakura's arms are only long enough to just touch it. Thanks to the slightly too large torso hole I mentioned earlier, Sakura's bottom half would fall off with a few seconds. In the pictures, the tip of the wand is touching the base, but I don't like that as a long-term solution, since it's holding up all the weight.
Making matters worse, there's some weird smudge on the back of one of the wings that I haven't figured out how to get off yet. It doesn't seem to have affected the paint, but it's troubling all the same. It's disappointing that this pose has so many problems for me, since this is how I wanted to display her.
But for all my complaining, Sakura is pretty adorable regardless. The problems that I had with her seem to be caused by the random variations that always happen with mass-produced figures, rather than problems with the runline itself. The rest of this figure is absolutely stunning, and the above problems are really the only thing holding it back from being one of GSC's best Nendoroid releases. Her expressions and accessories make her a great addition to any Nendoroid collection, and the accuracy and nostalgia are sure to charm any Cardcaptor Sakura fan. After all, how can anyone say no to that face?
As of the writing of this post, Sakura is still widely available at many online stores for a little under SRP. If you've been thinking about getting her, now is a great time!
Images by me.
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