[Kamen Rider Die]

A new tiny man arrived today! From a show I haven’t watched yet!



My box of Saber Book 1 showed up today, and I thought I’d post a little bit about the SO-DO body that’s being used. I mean, that’s pretty much the whole reason I bought this set, since I’m a year or two away from watching Saber. I may end up loving the series and decide to grab everything else down the line, but after getting all of Zero-One without actually watching any of Zero-One… I think I’m okay with just getting the main two Riders from Saber, sample the body design, and leave the rest for a possible future.



But here he is! Kamen Rider Saber! It’s a super-easy bit of stickering to get him finished, since so much of the suit is already painted. I mean, look at the body that comes in the second box:



You’re only stickering the driver, both left hands, and both feet. The other box is stickers for the sword, the right hands, four stickers for the right arm, and four stickers for the helmet. (The blade in the helmet is detachable, which is both necessary for applying the stickers to it and also just sort-of neat. I don’t know if it detaches on the show, but I liked that it did on the figure.) Way more of this thing is painted than I’ve ever seen outside of Chronicle sets, and maybe even more than that. This feels like a premium figure at a retail price.





Here’s the finished Saber. The new torso design… there are some Pros and Cons.

The big Pro is that he has a great new range of motion. His arms can flex in and out in very natural-looking ways. There’s a lot more dynamism to his posing, which is very fun.

The two big Cons are the ways the stickering on the sword and dragon pauldron limit those posing options. Basically, with the sword only being stickered on one side, you can’t really have the sword displayed too many different ways. He can’t swing it backwards, or turn it at too much of an angle. If it’s anything other than dead-on, it’s going to look not so good. The dragon pauldron doesn’t help that arm, since it’s tightness to the body (and Saber’s collar on that side) means that the more extreme angles the new torso design offers will cause that pauldron to pop right off. Not all the time, but often enough to be annoying.

But! He’s a great figure for the price. I’m not a huge fan of the suit’s aesthetic (I think that helmet is pretty bad), but it’s a hell of a figure for retail SO-DO. Some huge advances in paint work, and pretty much all the articulation you could ask for in a cheap candy toy. Definitely worth checking out, even if you don’t plan on collecting the line.