Tag: Play Arts Kai Page 1 of 2
Continuing my thoughts on the SDCC reveals from last week…
Hasbro
Hasbro has four big licenses action figure franchises: Transformers, G.I. Joe, Star Wars, and Marvel. I don’t really collect Transformers or G.I. Joe at all (with a few exceptions), so I’ll just comment on the other two.
Star Wars
There was 3.75″ stuff, but I don’t care about any of that. The important thing here is Star Wars Black 6″.
To quote Mordecai, “Yay-yuh!”
My SWB6″ collection will probably be fairly small, but this guy will definitely be in it. I must admit, I still don’t think Hasbro is quite reaching the quality of the best of ToyBiz’s Marvel Legends or Lord of the Rings with any of their 6″ lines…but it’s Han Solo. In 6″ scale.
I’ve now played through and beaten every Halo game except ODST (which I’m sure I’ll get around to someday). Halo 4 came out just last month, and represents something of a new direction for the franchise as it begins to explore the “Ancient Aliens” origin of the Halo megastructures. It also begins to (finally!) develop the characters of the franchise’s hero, the Master Chief, and his artificial intelligence-based guide and love interest, Cortana.
I’m not going to pretend that the Master Chief is some sort of deep, memorable character. He’s basically just the most prominent iteration of the Doomguy, only less expressive since you can never see his face. But nonetheless I’ve had an affinity for the Chief since playing through the first Halo.
The Arkham series of videogames is my favorite take on Batman since The Animated Series. Yes, I even like it more than the Nolan films, which are great but are bit too grounded in the real world to really feel entirely like Batman to me. Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City straddle the line between the grim and gritty realism of The Dark Knight Returns and the Dark Knight Trilogy while still giving us all the “unrealistic” villains like Mr. Freeze, Clayface and even Solomon Grundy.
Both Mattel and DC Collectibles has tried their hand at Arkham-based action figures. Mattel inexplicably allowed someone other than the Four Horsemen to sculpt Batman and several of the other figures, made them all out of scale with DCUCÂ and half of them out of scale with each other, and gave them middling-to-bad articulation. DC Collectibles’ offerings have great sculpting but minimal articulation (although the upcoming Series 4 does appear to finally have ball-and-hinge hips).
So – where can one turn to for fully-articulated action figures based on the Arkham games? For now, the answer is Japan-based company Square Enix and their Play Arts KAI line.
When did the toy world get to busy that I’m completely out of the loop half the time? Anyway, Square Enix’s Play Arts Kai line, which up to know has generally featured videogame-based characters, is expanding into movies and comics, evidently – specifically, The Dark Knight Rises and The Dark Knight Returns.
Oddly enough, the live-action-based Rises figure looks pretty good, but I’m not so sure the PAK aesthetic works for the Dark Knight Returns. And while the pinhead made sense for the Arkham videogame figures, since Bats does have a pinhead in those games, it looks wrong on the DKR figure.
Thanks to Toyark via Battlegrip for the tip.
