I really don't though. It's cheap and/or just kind of greedy. It's not like it's such a costly thing for them to do; after all, they had no issue releasing most of the Ryuki riders with them. For an action figure line at this kind of pricepoint and with so much articulation, not including stands is silly. They at least sort of try with like, the 66 Action line. It's especially egregious when you have Riders with effect parts for kicks and stuff but no stands, so it's like...what exactly am I supposed to do with this?

It's just greedy. And it's costly for the consumer. And I'm probably mainly complaining because the first japanese action figure line I got invested in were figmas and those have had standardized stands since they started, so really don't pay me any mind.

Similarly, I think there are enough generic hand gestures that they could include with any given figure even if it's not completely necessary or accurate. It's a premium line of figures with fairly high prices (especially these exclusives). I really don't think there's any excuse to not include at least some gripping hands or something.

At face value exclusives don't cost that much more than the retail figures - like 1000-1500 yen at the most (although with prices seemingly having gone up a bit recently on both sides, the difference might start getting a bit wider, idk).

People seem to forget that the prices they pay on Amiami etc. are considerably lower than the prices Bandai set. Example, Amiami might be charging 3140 yen for Mach but his RRP according to the Tamashii website is 4320 yen.

So Bandai aren't suddenly ripping you off with exclusives, the stores you buy from are the ones making the price gap more noticeable. As for middleman fees and the like, again Bandai can hardly be blamed for that - not everything is going to be retail and more often than not the choices of what's retail and what's TWE are pretty justified.

I'm not going to mince words here.

While there's really no new parts on this figure and yes the form's not going to do that much (gotta save the screentime for Type Special) but overall it does look good for what it is and what it's meant to be.

If I had the money to spare I'd so buy this. Plus why let the Mashin Chaser suit collect dust when it's just such a neat design? I have no complaints here.

I don't mind the web exclusive prices for the most part, but Super Dead Heat is a bit perplexing because it's actually 756 yen more than previous two TWE figuarts I've ordered and almost 1300 more than Shin Zangetsu. I didn't mind that Drive didn't come with as much as Gaim did, but this just seems like a rather large price jump for getting a lot less.

Nothing will ever be as disappointing than when I first opened Type Speed and found 4 hands looking at me and nothing else.

They also had no issue selling a complete figure with a huge Mirror Monster and tons of accessories for about 4000¥. Obviously things have changed in 4 years, among that is the market itself and the overall strength of the Yen.

Look I don't know what other figure companies do and honestly I don't care. These figures are expensive enough as is and I don't need a stand packed in with everything. If the characters can or do levitate I appreciate a stand so I can display them in that pose, Kamen Riders don't need to fly most of the time so I don't need stands for my display.

If I want to do action poses for pics or something, the stands are available everywhere for 5-10 bucks in different shapes and forms so I got one. Or I just use one that was included with a different figure. Now you ask “If they are 5-10 bucks why not just include them with the figures and raise the price accordingly?”. I don't know, because that's how it turned out. They make more expensive and decorative stands which obviously can't be sold with the figures so they have their own market for stands and just choose to include the smaller ones from time to time if it's necessary.

I can see where you're coming from with this (literally), but I don't require and onslaught of stands which I'll never use.

Now, with this figure they could have included all the hands from Mashine Chaser (don't know how many there are), but after Drive this isn’t bothering me. Maybe just because I don't even bother about the figure itself and won't buy it anyways, but for a movie-exclusive form it's more understandable than for the main character of the show.

Also I don't know about the price, if he really is that expensive than yeah that sucks.

Yeah, I'm not denying that there's something iffy with the price here. Just addressing this mindset people seem to have that TWEs on the whole are considerably more expensive than retail figure.

I'd imagine they went all out with the Ryuki riders because they were competing with Figma at the time (who was producing similarly-scaled Dragon Knight figmas), hence why the line started off with a bang and included contract monsters for both Ryuki and Knight.

I'd also imagine they had a lot of faith in the Ryuki line and were willing to splurge on it a bit, considering this show had 13 Riders, 2 Psuedo-Riders, a non-canon Rider from Decade and two Super forms, and all of them were eventually released in the line, whereas we still have gaps missing from other Rider shows with much smaller casts.

Figmas are generally smaller and more expensive. They sometimes include more accessories, but only when it makes sense for the character. There are plenty of expensive Figma releases that include nothing more than a few hands, just as there are plenty of Figuarts that come with a boat load of stuff that wasn't really necessary. It just depends on the release.

This being a webshop exclusive that likely isn't going to appeal to anyone besides really hardcore Drive fans, they probably just didn't think anything else was needed. Exclusives are limited releases for a reason and making unique effect parts or whatever for them wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. Including basic stands with everything might be nice, but I'm sure we'd just be blaming the rising prices of figures on that.

Eh. Mashin Chaser was 4860 yen retail and this thing is 5940. Basically just about a 1000 yen markup for being an exclusive. Not that iffy to me.