S.H. Figuarts Imperialdramon Fighter Mode Announced!

Now THIS is what I call news. In what I personally find to be the most exciting announcement so far this year, Bandai has released images of their upcoming S.H. Figuarts Imperialdramon Fighter Mode figure. While many of you may remember that the previous Digimon releases were in the D-Arts line, Bandai has been slowly moving towards merging D-Arts with Figuarts, with other examples being their upcoming Mario and Lucario Figuarts releases.

The figure looks absolutly spectacular, and from what I understand, it seems like it will be released in July, with a retail price of around 6,800 yen. I know for sure that I will be the first in line for this guy once it goes up for pre-order (and I'll try to keep you guys updated whenever that happens too).

One of the most important things to me that this shows is that Bandai hasn't given up on releasing new high-quality figures of Digimon characters. We've been getting the re-releases of Wargreymon and Omnimon recently, and the new release of MetalGarurumon, but I had expected that those would be the last we saw - but now, here's Imperialdramon! I can only hope that this figure goes over well enough to warrant more new figures (and more frequent releases) of new Digimon Figuarts.

Check out the picture below for the full gallery released by Bandai:

Digi-Warrior Rapidmon / Gold Rapidmon Review

I got this Gold Rapidmon Digi-Warrior figure in the mail the other day, and I must say that it looks GREAT. I bought it because it was very reasonably priced, and I don't own one. As someone who either owns or has owned almost every Digimon figure released in the US, I couldn't pass up the chance to get him, being an extrememly limited edition release figure.

I decided to go ahead and do a review of both Gold Rapidmon and the regular version of Rapidmon, as they both, just like all the other Digi-Warriors, are stunningly great figures in my own opinion. For being released around 2000, the quality of their paint, articulation, stability, and just overall design quality are extremely impressive to me. I honestly don't have a bad thing to say about them.

You can get the figure in almost any pose you want, as there are several points of articulation in each limb. At first it was a bit difficult to get a pse where the face of Rapidmon was showing, but with soe manipulation of the hip joints and torso joints, it worked out rather well in my opinion.

I'm hopeful to do some more Digimon reviews in the near future, as Digimon is a franchise very dear to my heart, and I'd love to get some more reviews out there of the figures. More awareness for the series is always great too, as I feel that this line is one of the overlooked gems in the recent history of toys.

Now that I've gushed over my love for these figures and the franchise, you can get a more comprehensive review of the two in my full video review below:

Finally Got Some of the Digimon Fusion CCG packs!

I picked these up off of ebay, got the first pack for $5.50, and then found a listing a few days later with 3 packs for $10. This will probably be all I get of this set of cards, as the cards are fun and have good art, but it's just a 60 card set and by the last pack I opened I pulled all but one duplicate card.

I did some pack-opening videos for them on youtube, and I'll link them below, so give them a watch if you're interested!

Finished posting Yugioh Auctions... finally.....

After many hours of posting Yugioh auctions, I've finally finished uploading all the cards that I have for sale right now. Like I said before, check out the tab on the top of the page to see them if you're interested. I'm also clearing out a lot of my old Digimon "inventory" and posted it as a bit lot and as a Buy-it-Now. Check it out too if you want!

No Luck Toy Hunting Today....

I went to the city today to see the touring production of American Idiot (which was great, by the way), and I figured I'd do some toy hunting while I was at it.

 I only had a couple things in mind - first off was the new Funko Blind Box pony figures. I found this one about a week ago at a Target, and only picked one up because I wanted to see about what they were like/quality/etc. I LOVED the figure, as it actually seems to be of higher quality than the regular size Funko pony figures, and immediatly wanted more. But, of course, Target had none, Hot Topic had none - couldn't find a single one.

Next up was one of these new Digimon CCG booster packs. They were released last week, and I've had zero luck finding any at quite a wide range of places that I've visited. I'm not so much into getting them for the card game itself, I kind of just want to get them because a lot of the card have REALLY good new art for the Digimon - kind of weird to want the cards for the art, I know, but it really is my driving force behind getting some. I may end up just giving up and ordering some of the $6 packs off of ebay.

Lastly, I was looking for either a Generations Skids figures of (by some miracle) Generations Rhinox. I'm sure Rhinox won't show up around here for another month or two, but the Skids/Waspinator wave has been makings its rounds. I've seen all of them but Skids over the past two weeks, but today, literally every single store I visited had an empty Transformers sections aside from some Construct-Bots and a couple Beast Hunters figures. *Sigh*

So, I suppose it was a decently disappointing day for finding toys, but not all was lost because seeing the play was fantastic.

Digi-Fusion Shoutmon Project

I recently purchased the entire first wave of the new Digimon action figure line, called Digi-Fusions. They're a pretty fun line to play around with, as all of their parts can be swapped around with the other figures to make new creations, or digivolutions from the show, such as Shoutmon X4 and MetalGreymon. The most fun aspect of the line though is that Digimon figures are back in stores! As a big fan of Digimon, and even bigger fan of the toys, I've been waiting to see this ever since their last release in 2004. Here's hoping the line does well!

Anyways, as fun as the toys were, I still had a few issues with the production of some parts of them. For instance, many of the pieces are nearly hollow, and make for a very light weight and cheap looking figure. Some of these hollow parts are neccesary for the "fusion" ability, but most are not. Therefore, I decided to "customize" some of the figures and try to make them just a bit better.

I am starting off with Shoutmon, just to try things out and see if I even have the skills to do this. I've repainted action figures like Transformers before, but I've yet to venture out into full-blown modifications, even as simple as these may be.

I used a combination of three types of putty/clay, being the Milliput Epoxy Putty, and Mr. Hobby Dissolving Putty. I began though with some simple Air-Dry Clay bought from Wal-Mart. I used this to fill the most of the holes on the figure itself. After this dried, I went over the top of it with a bit of dissolving putty just to seal it in there, and finally placed the epoxy putty over that.

The epoxy putty dries very hard and can be sanded down to be smooth. Any little knicks or imperfections in the sanded epoxy putty can then be fixed with just a bit more of the dissolving putty.

Although it kind of looks like a mess in the picture, the arm piece here is actually extremely smooth, just as the pre-molded plastic is. Putting a bit of primer and paint on this will (hopefully) make it look like it was originally produced this way.

I have about half of the pieces to the figure completed now, and I've been working at it for about a week. Most of the time is spent applying putty, waiting for it to dry, sanding, and repeating the process until you have a nice clean piece. I've also only been working on it sparingly in my spare time so it's going a bit slower than it could because of that as well.

And incase anyone's wondering, I'm using 400 grit sandpaper to start out the sanding, and moving to 600 grit to finish it up and smooth everything out nicely. I hope to get more work on this guy done soon, but honestly I have no clue when I'll get him completed (especially the painting part). Hopefully it will be sooner rather than later though.

 

Hello!... again!

Well, I know that I've only made a few posts on this blog and then disappeared, but I'm back to posting on it, hopefully in a quite vigilant manner. I'm still collecting toys (of course) and building models, and recently I've been working my way through the HMM Gojulas.

The reason for my absence before is because I kind of got "out" of models and collecting, basically meaning I didn't have enough money to buy figures, and I was too frustrated with the model I was painting to care about it any more. The new Gojulas model and the new Digimon Fusion toyline really reignited my spark for my hobby though, and I'm incredibly appreciative of that.

I'm not sure if I have mentioned it on here in my couple of posts before, but I have a youtube channel (Same name as here, ThePunisherMAX17) where I do toy reviews and show off my models. My progress on the Gojulas as well as my reviews of the Digimon Fusion toyline can be found there - Check them out!