So how do these recent FRS compare to the old Master Grade kits we used to have years ago? Any real differences quality-wise?

Aside from being half the size and nowhere near as intricate, they're much better it terms of proportions and likeness, and the build quality is much better as well.

Nice! I've been eyeballing them for a while. Glad to hear they're done well.

The newer ones are definitely the best. W was a serious disappointment, but Den-O is damn near perfection.

Yeah I felt like W could've been better if they didn't have to incorporate the split gimmick, as cool as it was.

Den-O is certainly a highlight in almost every regard.

yea, that's the worst case in my mind, I was expecting too much too, since FRS is my favorite toyline.

btw, do you guys think the dragender is articulated?

Dragreder is 100% articulated; the two images we've been shown have him in different poses.


I disagree on W being a disappointment. The Form Swap gimmick isn't intrusive in the slightest; it does make his structure slightly offset but to my eye mine looks perfect. My main disappointment is a small lack of parts, such as extra scarves. Still an extremely good kit; my ranking so far would be Den-O > Ex-Aid > W > Zi-O

I know it's a bit early, but I wanted to theorise on Agito stickers because it could potentially be exciting!

As a reminder, this is Kuuga's full set of stickers:-

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...64/unknown.png

That's the silver eyes; the forehead gem; the red dots on his ankles and wrists; and two belt stickers. Very simple design led to a very small set of stickers!

Likewise, Agito's design:-

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...a08b73ce78.png


As a Rider originally designed as Kuuga 2 Electric Boogaloo, Agito is exceedingly simple as well. Judging from Kuuga, we can certainly expect the standard silver eye stickers and a sticker for the blue forehead gem.

As he has no wrist/ankle dots, that's actually an improvement over Kuuga; as it means his arms, legs and chest should be free from stickers! The only possible places I could see stickers would be the silver lines on his lower legs and the black colour timer on his chest, but they're all so big I can easily see that being parts separation.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/...20191128101252

Finally, the belt; always the biggest sticker magnet of FRS Rider. The Altering (the best pun in Kamen Rider that never gets talked about) is itself pretty simple though, and much like Kuuga it's possible the centerpiece could be parts separation! Only a maybe though, as there are some small details like the yellow lines that could be stickers. In a similar vein, a lot of the details along the side of the belt itself will likely be stickers as well.

Only gripe I have about it is hearing that there is no Plat Form broom. That's horrible. :lolol

https://hobby.dengeki.com/ss/hobby/u...Ss3moe8OWi.jpg

https://hobby.dengeki.com/reviews/1053175/

Dunno if anyone has seen it yet but Dengeki Hobby put out an article a while back where they put out some tips on how to disguise FRS Faiz as a "true bone carving" Figuarts release. Basically, trimming on his height on and stuffing him up inside to give him heft.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eax0WXHU...jpg&name=large

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EayCxwXV...jpg&name=large

Some have done the same for Kuuga too.

Interesting! I don't think I could ever do any customising beyond what the instructions tell me to do but it's awesome to see what others get out of this. That Kuuga's hip balljoints in particular look dead on, even beyond just the height comparison!

is this the same case as Souchaku Henshin Kiva back then?

The split gimmick was fine, cheapening out on the hands and not providing stickers for the center black line as well as just having really lazy weapons for the other forms is what killed it.

ah... can't wait for the next 3 month, or 5 month

ya know, new reveals, more images

We are promised more info on Ryuki closer to release date! I’m most interested in when we find out the retail price; I could see Dragreder making it potentially double the usual. Which I’d be fine with as it’s a one-off thing and these are cheap to begin with, but...

I keep telling myself I don't need a Dragreder (especially because a 1/12 scale would be too big for me!), but in my ongoing search for 1/12 scale accessories for the rest of the Figure-rise riders, I realize I would eventually seek out a Dragreder, so why not?

If FRS ever branch out to rider vehicles, doing a Dragreder now leaves room for a Ride Shooter!

Also how perfect is this for you-know-who:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/hykAA...xV/s-l1600.jpg

Well speaking of to-scale accessories...

I recently tracked down the S-RHF Auto Vajin. This is supposed to be a 1/12 scale bike and figure but the figure size is more 6.5 inches compared to 6 inche Figure-rise Standard.

Side by side this is very apparent. I'm also convinced this Auto Vajin toy is just big even compared to its own included figure.

https://i.imgur.com/uYDTpZN.png

It almost works. But if you're familiar with the actual size of bikes, its just too big for a FRS. FRS Faiz can ride it well, but his feet won't reach the ground for any kind of standing pose.

In battle mode this thing towers over Faiz. There's a bit of camera trickery I'm taking advantage of to hide this, but he's definitely huge.

Well, I still love the Auto Vajin so I'm happy with the pickup, but I really need to stop trying to force different lines to play nice with each other!

Ah, it turns out the scale I gave was wrong, I'm so sorry, I only measure by faiz only and not with the bike

Posted to the Bandai official youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SArLHDfbbs

it's the same as in the interview one

yeah, basically it is

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qIGNo3Dod...1/IMG_4405.jpg

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Tti7AXebx...1/IMG_4487.jpg

That semi-matte black along with the vibrant gold really makes this pop.

Very lovely! Looking forward to mine; should be arriving this week...

wait, isn't rising mighty's hand pad is supposed to be gold-red?

and btw, where did you get those pics? it looks familiar

Right, so! I heard someone really liked this form, or something? Probably my imagination, not like he talks about it often and went on a whole dissertation in Fish’s rewatch thread or anything.

https://i.imgur.com/k1fyYj1.jpg

Jokes aside, my Amazing Mighty kit arrived yesterday and I’ve spent all day building it and kinda sorta gushing over how gorgeous he is!

But before all that, as a point of interest; stickers and parts!

https://i.imgur.com/TRzg5Xq.jpg

As you might expect from a figure as low on stickers as FRS Kuuga, his repaint has a small set of stickers too — especially keeping in mind that these stickers are split between two separate figures this time. What Amazing and Rising Mighty end up with in comparison to standard Mighty is a coloured triangle on the back; a coloured strip for each gauntlet; stickers for the back of each hand and... that’s it! Six entire stickers more than the original. You might notice though that there’s only four hand stickers, and... I’ll get to that. For now though I’ll just say that these stickers were easy and satisfying to apply; and as this is my first experience with FRS Kuuga, I want to say here that ALL his stickers were like that, even the eyes and belt which were usually the most dreaded parts of any other FRS! Den-O’s build just wins out for me on the fun of building Plat and then building Sword out of it, but Kuuga’s simplistic yet revolutionary style nets him a solid second place. Zero problems and plenty to enjoy!

https://i.imgur.com/RoiXfnd.jpg

Moving on from that, the Rising Mighty parts and how they’re separated. You would hope especially for a Premium Bandai release that all parts for Rising would be kept completely separate from Amazing on their own sprues. And that is... MOSTLY true. Yeah, so, this picture here is of sprues C3 and D2, which exclusively hold the parts for Rising. However, there are certain parts which are on sprues mostly holding Amazing’s pieces. For the sake of brevity and hopefully helping someone out, I’m going to briefly list them:-

A: 38, 39 (belt parts)
B2: 25, 26 (Lower right leg)
C2: 18, 19, 22, 23 (glove plates)

It’s fortunately few, but it is still annoying and I hope this saves someone else some confusion.

Talking of those glove plates though... oh boy.

So I have an answer to this, potentially.

You know how FRS Riders’ hands are done? There’s the hand, and then there’s a separate piece that attaches onto them? Well, Kuuga does that too... but see, he has 9 hands. And the Amazing kit only provides 8 plates which are to be halved between Amazing and Rising.

Now it’s easy enough to take the plates off and put them on another hand, thankfully; but it’s still absolutely baffling that they did it this way ESPECIALLY on a Premium Bandai product when no other kit to my knowledge pulls anything like this. These are quite small pieces; would it really have hurt so much to print 10 more of them (plus the relevant stickers) on the sprue? I imagine in this image, the person’s decided to use Rising’s gold plates for Amazing’s other hands and left Rising with the standard issue ones. It’s a big annoyance which, while there’s a workaround, is a needless mark against a kit that is otherwise marvelous.


https://i.imgur.com/mPWAUC9.jpg

... but. Yea. This is a MAAAARVELOUS FIGURE. I really didn’t appreciate enough how beautiful gold against matte black is on this design and it’s pulled off with perfection; the gold glistens no matter the lighting, the red eyes shine through in a way both inspiring and intimidating, and everything comes together to make a beautiful piece. Lack of hand plates aside, this is a figure that SCREAMS “Premium” and I am very, very happy to have got him. On looks alone (and he has a lot more than looks), he’s easily my favourite of the bunch I’ve got!

https://i.imgur.com/Nl8khrQ.jpg

ow oof my hand phones are not meant for typing that much at a time my laptop cant be repaired soon enough ah ouch

*fangirl squeel in the distance*

Ahem, uh, Kurona! Calm yourself! I know Amazing Mighty is the best Kamen Rider Form ever, but please!

Joking aside, MAN does he look good! It's a shame about the hand parts, but dang, if I didn't already have the Seihou back when it was (relatively) cheap, I'd've dropped money on this in a heartbeat!

There's something I find really hilarious about that kit, and it's that the cover illustration's recreation of the iconic "I turned black" pose subtly changes Kuuga's body language in a way where it comes off to me less like trepidation at the implications of this new form, and more like Yuusuke is just going "man, this color scheme is awesome!"

Does anyone else get vibe? I might just be projecting, because, yeah that looks pretty nice huh. Glad you get to finally enjoy the majesty of Kuuga Penultimate Form recreated in plastic, Kurona.

Also I hope your fingers are feeling okay!

My first Kuuga, would you believe! Though, I hope to follow it up with Mighty and Rising eventually...

And hey, while I’m here; couple more photos I didn’t put on the first post! It wasn’t until messing around with these figures that I realised Amazing (and hence Ultimate) shared a colour scheme with Ohma Zi-O; right down to eyes and horns and colour placements — even the grey on Kuuga’s belt and mouth match the grey Ohma uses. It’s obvious in hindsight — the protagonist of Heisei’s 20th losing himself and embracing world-destroying power? Why wouldn’t that resemble the ultimate weapon of the Linto?

https://i.imgur.com/UT7yBdq.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/JXaAQ0q.jpg

...Well now I just wanna skip straight to Zi-O instead of making Wizard my next Phase 2 show.

Oh definitely. And in both instances, Yusuke is entirely correct. Amazing Mighty is awesome, and a surprise! An awesome surprise.

That is a very pretty colour scheme on a very pretty figure.

So I mistakenly posted this on the SO-DO thread when it should have been here. Anyhoos. :lolol

So suppose Bandai decides to go all out and releases G3 shortly after Agito is out in shelves. Not G3-X, just vanilla G3. My question; would you convert it to G1? :lolol
For those unfamiliar, it's from the Agito S.I.C serialized story and it is a prototype of G3 that is colored like Kuuga Mighty Form and details further resembles Kuuga from the horns to the belt buckle.

maybe not, since they're only making main riders from the series and some repaints, like genm and kuuga amazing mighty.

True, but this is more of a what if question. Would you still be willing to do it if such an opportunity is available?

yes if i can (i have no customizing figures skill ⋟﹏⋞)
and if i can, i will redesign G1 so it doesn't look like a a SIC figure.

OPEN YOUR EYES
FOR THE NEXT FIGURE-RISE

https://challengerscomics.com/images/kr/sodo/faiz2.jpg

Hey, I built a Kamen Rider Faiz kit today! This isn't a super-thorough Kurona-style review, but I do have some thoughts to share.

Mainly, I almost completely hated building this kit. It's easily the most unsatisfying build I've done yet, with a mixture of frustrating stickers (both amount and application); lack of stability in construction; accessories and options that exist in an uncanny valley where they're sort-of nice to have, while being wrong enough to go unused; and ten pounds of instructions in a five-pound bag.

But! But.

Let me get into those complaints first.

--"TEN POUNDS OF INSTRUCTIONS IN A FIVE-POUND BAG"--

Like, here's the two-step process on building the torso:

https://challengerscomics.com/images.../faizsheet.jpg

Oh my God, fuck you. That is an absurd amount of overlapping steps, enough that they probably deserved more than a half-page. (The arms are just as bad, with a weird Do These Five Things At Some Point And In Some Order unhelpfulness.) I get that certain parts of Faiz, like incorporating the Axel gimmick, need some complexity. There's a part of me that weirdly appreciated how much extra work I was getting out of this kit, in a mixture of thriftiness and masochism. But the instructions treat building this beast with the same level of detail as building a beginner-level kit like W, and that's nuts. Nearly every part of the instructions have three to four things happening at once, and that's totally unnecessary. Just add a couple more pages to the instructions! Let this goddamn thing breathe!

--"ACCESSORIES AND OPTIONS THAT EXIST IN AN UNCANNY VALLEY WHERE THEY'RE SORT-OF NICE TO HAVE, WHILE BEING WRONG ENOUGH TO GO UNUSED"--

It's really two things, if I'm being honest. Most of his Faiz Gear is frustrating to sticker (the phones) and build (THE PHONES), but the end result is neat. The biggest offenders are the Faiz Edge and the Axel Form.

The Faiz Edge is all-silver with one sticker on the hilt. In a kit with a billion accent stickers and red plastic, why is the blade of the Faiz Edge left silver?! They included two different sticker options for the phone, but left nothing for the goddamn sword? So dumb. Basically makes the Faiz Edge a worthless addition.

Axel Form is the biggest offender, though. Here he is:

https://challengerscomics.com/images...o/faizaxel.jpg

I mean, because I barely remember Faiz (a show I watched two months ago), I was pretty jazzed at how this thing was coming together! The chest panels rotate up, the chest looks pretty cool, the Faiz Axel watch-or-whatever looks good... I was digging this addition to the kit. So nice of them to throw this mode in!

Then I got to the second-to-last page of the instructions, the thing that tells you how to put the Faiz Axel on his wrist, and there's a little note: "Painting is required to recreate the Faiz Axel form." Wait, what?

And then I realized OH SHIT AXEL ISN'T RED. They give you all the pieces to make Axel Form, they have you apply the chest stickers as the second thing you build, but you'd need to paint every red line white if you want it to be accurate. All of the extra steps, and they're wasted. Super fun to realize at the end!

--LACK OF STABILITY IN CONSTRUCTION--

I can't move his right arm without it disengaging from the shoulder. Moving the chest panels to rotate them pops them off, every time. The tiny silver pieces on his pauldrons like to pop off about half the time I move his arms in or out. It's not like it's a disaster, but there's just enough frustration in posing him that I try not to spend too much time posing him.

--FRUSTRATING STICKERS (BOTH AMOUNT AND APPLICATION)--

Scroll back up to that photo of the chest instructions. It takes sixteen stickers to do the Axel chest, a thing you can't even use unless you opt to paint the model kit into only that form. A big chunk of those stickers need to go slightly underneath plastic. The head and chest have several stickers that are very thin and need to curve, literally the two worst attributes for stickers. Several accessory stickers go on top of raised details, making sure that the sticker bubbles and looks unsightly up-close. Applying the stickers is a bummer, and I don't remember feeling that way about Ex-Aid or Genm, who had way more stickers. These, there're less, but they take twice as long to apply. It sucks. It sucks so bad.

But. But.

https://challengerscomics.com/images/kr/sodo/faiz1.jpg

Oh my God, I love how it looks. It's so pretty. It makes the SHF Faiz (an older figure, to be sure) look like hot garbage:

https://challengerscomics.com/images...faizshffrs.jpg

And the FRS Faiz cost so much less! There's a term that gets tossed around for some recent Transformers: mini-Masterpieces. The Masterpiece line is the ultra-high-end collector line, with ridiculous engineering capable of making a real car look like a cartoon robot man. What's been happening lately is that the main line toys, the ones you buy at Target or wherever, they're executing some of those engineering tricks with less parts and for a third to a fourth the cost. This FRS Faiz looks like a goddamn Seihou to me, but a fraction the cost. That's insane.

Equally insane is how my emotions swung wildly in this process. (Inoue would be so proud!) I was so mad at Bandai when I was building this tiny man, and I was so happy with them when he was done. The most gorgeous FRS I've put together yet, and one I'll cherish as long as I don't remember what I went through building him.

I agree, whenever I see Faiz in my collection, I recall the less-than-stellar build, but at the same time I'm in awe with how good it actually looks. The stickers match the red lines so well I sometimes forget which were parts and which were stickers.

I also tell myself that if for some strange reason I have to get rid of my collection, I would at least keep all the heads and maybe the belts. Those things have never looked better at that scale. I just love the look of compound eyes!

I think one of the advantages the FRS kits have is that the suits are layered out of necessity (things plugging into other things is pretty much how kits work), but it ends up making the finished product look so much more real and natural. An SHF will always have some parts-on-parts, but it still uses a lot of paint to bring out detail and dimensionality. For a FRS, it's a lot more pieces plugging into things, just like how the real-life suits are made. I think that can give FRS a bit more accuracy, when done correctly.

I love my FRS Faiz kit, it was the first piece of Rider merch I purchased and the first kit I bought. I don't remember it being a pain to assemble. Really the only annoying part were the little plugs that allow the chest pieces to rotate and adding the hinges on the phones

I didn't bother with any of the stickers, mostly because I didn't want to hide any of the beautiful molding Bandai was able to create on the smaller pieces. I ended up just painting mine and I'll totally share pics once I finish it

That sounds awesome! I'm excited to see it!

lmao, this is a good catchprase if Figure Rise Kaixa is revealed, or any Faiz related characters