Revoltech Melona - Queen's Blade 005

So, long time since I’ve done a Queen’s Blade figure review.  Today I’ll be having a look at the Protean Assassin Melona.  It took me a while to work out what Melona was supposed to be, but it turns out the she is a “goo-girl” as they are sometimes referred too.　That bubbles down to a slime character, or shape-shifter to you and me.

Having gone to the effort of getting most of the Revoltech QB figures, I eventually got Melona just to finish the set.  I wasn’t that huge of a fan of her design, but the creepy character kind of grew on me and in a way, she is kind of the Deadpool of the QB universe, taking on shapes that are unlikely to exist in the QB world.  She’s also probably the most evil of the bad guys trio, well, the most devoted to the Swamp Witch at the very least.    So the design of the character is interesting, how well does she translate into an action figure?




Essentially as well as one could expect.  Melona was number 5 of the QB toy series and sculpted by the same guy behind the designs for the girls in the Transformers Kissplay manga. An interesting point.

I think the design of Melona as an action figure is tricky, she has a lot of hair and being gooey makes this figure interesting.

First the box.

It’s a standard QB revo box, with character information and showing off the pieces etc etc.  I’m not really all that interested in the box and neither should you be.

The figure itself is a bit smaller than a figma.

 

She comes with accessories for pulling off her losing pose as well as some extra hands and squirts. She also has a “stand.”   Which is a couple of poles joined together with the Revolver joints.
 


I find these stands to be a bit on the crap side to be honest, the joints are too floppy to really hold the weight of the figure and Melona’s hair manages to cover the peg hole in her lower back rather effectively, making the stand very hard to use.  It has one foot peg, which is the handiest part of the whole damn thing.







The placement of the hole means you have to move her hair out of the way, which then messes with her balance a LOT and so you end up fiddling around with the figure, then her hair, plug the stand in, readjust the figure again, the stand falls over, unplugs from the hole, and you start all over again.  It’s just annoying and not fun at all.  Due to the weakness of the stand, you end up with a pretty crap pose as well.


I think they have done a good job  in sculpting the figure.  As a Revoltech she is made of parts, which can be pulled apart if you like.  Sadly she is rather hard to balance.
 
The colours are really nice, her hair has a nice bubblegum pink tone to it and the end fades into a see though plastic.  Her hair is made of three parts, the pony tails bit (with a HUGE revoltech joint) her main head section and her bangs.  Despite the different plastics used, the colours all manage to match up really well.  I had to take of the pony tail hair piece in some of the pictures to get a look at the figure, and for posing.  Taking off that piece fixes a fair few of the balance issues.

The sculpting is rather nice.  She has the right  shape, smooth and voluptuous and the face is a great representation of her from the book.  We’ll start with the face I think.  She only comes with two, a smiling one and one that represents her losing face.  It’s sculpted with a couple of drops on it, as if she is melting.

They’ve done a good job on the eyes and mouth I think, as her eyes always have the clover like pattern to her pupils, that’s cool.

All up she has four hands.  None of them look all that fighty, in fact, she doesn't’ even have a fist…

Her bra hands have nipple dents in them, but annoyingly with the hindrance of the revo joints, they don’t clip on like I suspect they are supposed to.

Since she is in all essence a slime girl, her costume is actually her body.  So her hair is controllable, and she can form her own clothes.  They’ve done well making the clothes look like gel all over and some places even have slime eyes one them.  Such as her shoes, pants and shoulders.  I get a rather DragonQuest slime feeling with those eyes on her costume.

So they have a great use of colours and various plastics for the clothes.  Her dress is made from pliable plastic and can be swapped over with her damaged version.  More on that later.  
Let’s have a look at sculpting.

As I said before, she has a voluptuous and smooth sculpt.  It looks great and is pretty bang on.  Her hair though is a fairly solid piece, which means it really affects her articulation.  A rather clever idea with the QB figure is the way they’ve done the bottoms.  Instead of sculpting a butt, you can swivel the thigh around depending on the pose, as it can provide a smooth thigh to hip, as well as a convincing bottom when the leg is bent.

This simple little fix just manages to keep the sculpt.  So simple and effective.  Thumbs up!


Sadly her fringe piece that also happens to be her bra hinders the shoulders somewhat severely.  On top of that, I notice that the eye paint on her shoulder sleeve has suffered a bit of severe rubbing. 
One nice detail is the love heart with wings on her neck.  It looks great and has some nice metallic paint on it.

Her bunny ears are also just swivel joints, so you can’t make them stand up, a missed opportunity I think.  Design wise, I think I’ve come to like the character a bit more, really the hand-bra is a clever concept and it’s just a shame the hand-bangs are so rigidly designed as it essentially makes her neck joint useless.  Since we’re talking about joints, let’s have a run down of what Melona has. (‘R’ = Revolver Joint)

• Swivel “ears”
• R Neck joint
• R shouldlers, elbows, wrists.
• R Diapragm, hips, knees, ankles
• Thigh swivel.
• R Pony tail

Now one thing I complained about in my, hrm, apparently only other QB Revoltech review (Alice if you’re curious), was the actual revolver (revoltech’s spcial joints) themselves.  These little buggers being the key to revoltech toys are a flaw as well (Turns out I whinged about it in Tamonten as well).  Once again they provide the biggest flaw as the clicks between settings is a bit too wide and they are just a pain in the arse to set right.  Plus once you’ve found a satisfactory pose in hand, actually putting her down on the surface leads to the joints flopping a bit and requiring the minute adjustments they need, but the revolver joints don’t allow easy minute adjustment.  Grrrrrr.  I’ll have to look into replacing the joints with something else one day.


Anyone know of any good revoltech joint alternatives? 


So due to the revolver joints giving many points of articulation, she’s pretty poseable.

I do think it’s a shame that she doesn’t come with a slime sword.  In her artbook and the anime, she can make her hair form a slime sword, where one of her bangs wraps around her arm in a sword shape. It leaves one of her breasts exposed, but it does seem like a fitting weapon for the character as well as being saucy enough for Queen’s Blade.

Her final items are bringing this into the slightly racy section.  She come with alternate bra hands and her damaged dress, which can be swapped over by  disassembling.



Now, since we’re getting into the more, ahem… adult area of QB, let me just put forward that from here on it get’s a tad lewder, for just a bit.

Since you can take off her dress, you can actually make her probably the most naked of the QB revoltechs.  But for now, we can just have a better look at her pantsu.

They’re see through and have eyes. 

Also, she does come with one attack item.  Alternate bra hands.  With squirty bits.





They just use the same joints as the other hands, also have a nipple clip ( ?) and look a bit like this when applied….



Well well well. This leads on to the “losing” aspect of this figure which is part of her accessories.  This will be carried on to the NSFW side of the blogging.  If you don’t want to carry on there, I’ll just be wrapping up underneath here which is fine because they’re an aside and don’t change the figure that greatly.

Finally at the time these figures were coming out, Kaiyodo was into giving these little coin things with them.  Worth 10 points, I’ve never been able to work out what they were for.

Well, to summarise this whole shebang, Melona is a nicely sculpted figure that looks cool.  All her bubble-gum colouring is great and has a really nice pearlescent effect to it.  She looks the part but is not without flaws.  Her hair could have definitely benefitted from some more joints, especially the bangs and around her shoulders.  The back piece is also rather heavy, which is annoying as the weight overpowers her weak-ass revo-joints.  Personally I would have liked to see some more accessories.   She is very light on them.  A character in a fighting game should not be without a weapon.

So, nice mould, great paintwork, crap joints and lacking accessories.  An average figure.