Seems every year around this time, I get into a melancholic mood and have difficulty building the drive to build my GK. The lack of sunlight doesn’t really help much either as it makes it harder to find the time to do the priming, which is where Sheryl is at right now…

But I guess such times allow me to look at my other purchases properly instead of just have them on display. So for this week, I thought I would take a look at my most recent Revoltech purchase. Orichalcum Reycal!!

I first posted pics back with my October loot post but now she gets a post all to herself!!

I pretty much fell in love with Reycal as soon as I saw the first promotional pics. I think it was Ngee Khiong where I first saw her and he was kind enough to included a link to the first translated chapter of the Manga. There was also something really familiar with the design so, after a bit of digging, I found out that the manga author was Tsunashima Shirou, who also did Jinki: Extend!! Having really enjoyed all I could find on jinki and jinki: Extend (save for the pretty awful anime), it comes as no surprise that I enjoyed reading Reycal as well. It has a bit of a large “Shonen jump” feel to it (you know: new enemy appears -> enemy beats up hero -> hero powers up to new level, in before “over 9000″ -> hero defeats villain) but it’s still pretty fun.

Anyway, the story goes that the main guy, Mitsuaki Tsukurugi, gets given some special clay from a “mysterious teacher” and, when he makes a figure from the clay, she comes to life. Mangafox has the first 3 chapters translated for those interested. It may not sound much but, like jinki, the chapters are around 50 pages each so there’s plenty of reading to be had! Those 3 chapters constitute the entire first volume afterall!

This is Reycals original pose, just before she becomes alive, and promptly hits her masters face…

I have to admit that the announcement of Reycal was a big surprise as the manga is still relatively recent, with only 4 volumes out (so we can guess maybe 16 chapters or so) and I don’t think it’s gained major popularity, afterall Jinki wasn’t hugely popular but still reasonably successful.
The revoltech would also have very limited appeal to the western market because nobody will know who she is!!!
Heck, the only other person I know who has Reycal is Q!!

Reycal, handling one of my modelling tools, much like how she does in the first chapter of the manga… My full sized modelling knife was too big for her to hold properly.

…But it’s not like I didn’t try!!

Overall, I think Reycal is pretty close to 1/1 scale. (EDIT: the manga has her height at 19cm, which makes her a little taller than the Revoltech, which is around 14~15cm) Although her height does tend to vary a little from page to page.
One thing which did surprise me was the choice to make her into a full revoltech figure instead of putting her into the fraulein line. There were also some other design questions which popped up as I was taking the photos but the reason for it will be shown later.

Reycal comes with 2 additional faces, an “attacking” face looking to the right and a “shy” face looking towards the left.

Overall, the design of Reycal seemed OK but not great. The poseablility is great but, as expected, the Revoltech joints were quite obvious and somewhat oversized as well with no additional bonus given when compared to frauleins of figmas, or at least initially.

In fact, with the pic above, you can see that the elbow joints look a little large for the arm! but my chief complaint would be the neck!

Even Reycal is embarrassed by her neck. It’s just too long and far too visible. Most figures have just a single joint to hold the head in place, but Reycal has 2 with a plastic cylinder tring (and failing) to hide it. The shoulders also lack the grace of the Frauleins as well. I’m sure they could have “borrowed” the idea from that line for Reycal!

The designers also added joints to the hair to allow it to move a little. Seemed really pointless initially…

There were some really good design ideas tho!

Here’s Reycals hand next to Figma Fates. As you can see, the connection for Reycal is a smooth cylinder while fates has a ball at the end. At first glance, you would think that the figma hand design would be better as the cylinder design for the revoltech might make it more susceptible to falling off, but the fit is tight enough to eliminate the problem.
But the thing about the Figma design is that if you keep changing the hands (and you will!) then eventually, the rubber on the wrist which holds the hand in, will eventually be unable to return to it’s original shape due to repeated stress and the wrist will become more and more loose the more you do parts swapping. Worst case scenario, you could end up damaging it to the point where it is unable to hold the hand parts in at all!!

That problem isn’t present with the Revoltech idea! It’s not infallible, but I bet in repeated tests, the revoltech wrist will outlast the figma ones.

Reycal also comes with her “armour howl” “knight Eagle”

It comes with pretty much no extra features of poseablility, but that’s because it’s main function isn’t to retain it’s shape. Instead, it’s meant to combine with Reycal!!
So it goes from this…

To this

The combining feature is pretty simple when you put the 2 together, but forming Knight Eagle back again afterwards can be annoying.

But what you end up with afterwards is this!

(I was going to to a youtube video showing the complete combining feature but I was too lazy it proved too difficult in the end. But I might add it in later)

It was this feature which made me fall in love with the figure because, for some reason, it reminded me of this!

Anyone else remember Samurai Pizza Cats? Fond childhood memories of my last Saturday morning Cartoon in the UK before I gave it all up and had to go to to school on Saturdays.
Seriously tho, I can’t be the only person who thought of this similarity!

Aside from looking pretty cool, Adding the armour actually makes some sense of the design issues I mentioned earlier!

The long neck allows reycal to see over the chest armour (and the neck itself becomes less visible) and the gauntlets on her arms are a litttle wider than her standard arms so fit the joints much better!
The gimmick also explains why Reycal is a revoltech. She simply couldn’t be anything else! The armour parts requre the removal of the forearms to put the gauntlets on and the armour on the thighs are much easier to add on if you pull the lower legs from the thighs first!. You can’t do something like that with figmas or frauleins without permanent damage!

The hair movement idea is also explained as it allows the hair to avoid getting in the way of the wings and connection to the stand.
However, the armour does tend to restrict poseability a little compared to before

One of Reycals attacks from chapter 2. Seriously!! She fires herself, with her weapon in that position, at the enemy! Would you also believe that the staff point is also made of wood?

Overall, I think I would have a hard time recommending reycal to others, primarily because she is almost unheard of and explaining things would take time. You also get the feeling that she’s more like an experiment to see what kaiyodo can do with the revoltech line and how they can diversify. Since reycal, we’ve had Alien revoltech, transforming valkyrie revoltechs and zoids revoltechs so diversity in their tech is one of their strong points.
But at the same time, I really like reycal for one simple reason, she’s really fun!! I know a lot of collectors of other lines such as figmas take them all over the place and play with them but I don’t do that. I tend to treat figmas and frauleins like my other figures, I set them in a pose and that’s about it. Occasionally, I will change the pose but not that often. I don’t take them out and do random photoshoots and the like but I found myself constantly playing around with reycal.
It’s a bit of a shame that She’s likely to be forgotten due to lack of exposure of the source material, kinda like Krauser and the DMC revoltechs. Remember them? But perhaps this is just the start of things. There are other characters in the manga which could be given the revoltech treatment and the combining idea might be used for other franchises, Saint Seiya perhaps?

In any case, at the very least Kaiyodo have given me a very fun figure to mess around with and expanded their profile over just the “poseable human” figures done by figmas and which is a market which is quickly reaching oversaturation (or it might be there already)

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