[Tokumonkey]

The Shodo KyuuKyuu Sentai Gogo V showed up in the mail recently, and I'm seriously impressed!

The last time I'd handled candy toy Sentai, it was Lupinranger vs. Patranger, and they were... fine. I couldn't help but notice the cut corners like wrong-colored parts. The stickers didn't delight me.

Shodo Gogo V - the figures themselves - require no stickers at all. Everything is painted. (I thought the unpainted torso backs might have been a cut corner, but nope: that's screen-accurate.) Even the visors, which would be an obvious place to sticker, are painted.

The articulation is better than I'm used to at this scale: in addition to ball joints, the shoulders have some forward-back motion, and the upper torso rests on a ball joint. The upper arms have a cut below the shoulder for additional range of motion. The legs are really the only weak point, and I'm probably only noticing that because for the male figures, you can't get their feet together without popping the legs off their ball joints. GoPink, on the other hand, has no such problem, but her lower body movement is somewhat restricted by her skirt.

These are much higher quality than Yu-Do, and that's even before you get to the accessories. Each figure has a pistol-in-holster by default, but it can be swapped for a separate, empty holster when you want them holding the pistol in question. They've got their pistols, melee weapons, a second pistol I'm assuming a combined-with-sword modes, their V-staves, and the bird-drill-thing. Those are where stickers come in. I haven't yet tried applying them, as without then the pistols certainly look less toy-like. It appears the bird weapon may separate into individual parts? I'm still sorting through the accessories.

The hands are what dazzled me most. Although there don't appear to be any special hands for their mid-roll-call poses, there's practically everything else I could imagine wanting: hands to hold everything, flat hands for saluting, a more curved flat hand for... I'm not sure yet... pointing heads for the final group pose, and more. What blew my mind...

Well, let me give you some context. I picked up the LvP Yu-Do figures, and while that line eventually started adding swappable hands in the Kyuranger line, they were already a little big, they weren't always appropriately-colored, and Pink and Yellow had to share overly-large hands with the male figures.

Each Shodo Gogo V member has an individual sprue with a selection of hands, plus a separate sprue with three more. For the male figures, these appear to be identical. However, GoPink has an entirely separate two sprues that give her proportionate hands. This is above-and-beyond stuff.

The whole set cost me about as much as a current S.H. Figuarts. They look just great on my shelf, and now, I'm hoping Bandai's candy toy division gives this treatment to other teams. I'd love to see this with, say, Goseiger, Gekiranger, or Megaranger. It looks like Gaoranger is likely to be next - I may pass because I'm iffy on those suits - but I dunno if I'm going to be able to resist buying teams I like if they're given a treatment this nice.