February 19, 2002 CURRENT RUMBLE edicom's 1/6th Scale Jin-Roh figure happened along at just the right time for me. I have been on a real die-cast kick lately and quite honestly haven't been all that interested in 'things 1/6th'. In this case absence absolutely made the heart grow fonder, for I can hardly put this figure down. Something about the apocalyptic nature of Jin-Roh, the harsh post war era, just makes for a bad-ass character design. The figure was originally sculpted by Katsuo Takuma and produced by Kaiyodo as a limited run soft vinyl kit. The sculpt is superb and perfectly captures the essence of the character. In addition to the stock kit referred to above, the figure comes with an alternate Fuse head. The heads are a bit of a pain to swap, the vinyl used for the Fuse head is quite hard and you have to break out the ol' hair dryer to pop it on the neck. The great part is, with either head, once it is in place there is a great range of motion that lends itself to some interesting posing opportunities. The figure comes 90% completed, built up on Takara's 'Combat Joe' body. The MG-42 needs assembly and painting and the backpack needs to be attached. I left the MG-42 in the box in favor of grabbing up some accessories from Dragon Models to complete the arsenal for our boy Fuse. The articulation is fair, the armor obstructs quite a bit of 'action posing', but overall you can still get some pretty cool poses. Luckily, the figure has quite a solid feel and is much less a 'Garage Toy' than the Kerberos predecessors . The detail is amazing, down to all the individual leather belts and straps (thin strips of vinyl on the figure) used to hold the armor pieces in place. The only real tragedy with the figure is the price. The toy is a Medicom Collector's Club Mail Order Exclusive - ¥9800 in Japan, IF you have a Japanese mailing address, otherwise be prepared to pay twice that easily to get him in the states.  RUMBLE INDEX  |  CURRENT RUMBLE