Tets' Toys and Shenanigans: Pirate Body Stray Marion Build post.

Ah Link Travelers, Gashapon Quest follow on and Slightly irritating wave spreading summabeech that you are. Here I will go over the build for the Pirate version of ノラマリオン - Stray Marion that came with the Candy set.

This is what the candy boxes look like after being ripped open,

Yes, distribution is a total pain in the arse with the Link Travelers. They have gacha in the balls. Gacha online. Candy sets, which involves lucky dip things, which I never seem to see in store, but to be honest with the way things are spread out you are better just buying a complete box online anyway....

I digress, much of that ranting I will cover in an up and coming review. Here I will painstakingly

Pain

Staking

Go through the building process of Pirate mode Nora Marion here. As a slight aside, I quite dig the pirate theme and I like the look of this figure.

For archival purposes, I will place a copy of the assembly instructions that I stole from Bandai's website in this post. As I have noticed, especially with TakaraTomy, they don't like keeping their information around after a couple of years...

It is a rather long image. And interestingly in one of my video reviews, I pondered if ノラマリオン was a reference to the same nora as in "nora neko" (stray cat) and taking into account that file name for those instructions were "Stray Marion", it would seem I was correct.

Damn I am smart!

Just to let you know what you're in for, if you are randomly buying these sets, you will need to get lucky with 3 boxes to have all the bits for Nora Marion. You'll need:

Base build body
Arm weapons (also comes with Idol clothes Upper)
Leg equipment set. (also comes with Idol clothes lower)

Greaaaaat.

We will start with the base build.

The base build looks like this out of the box, so open those bags and you get this.

As always, I like to start with the head, so they may watch proceedings in a comfortable spot. Your head pieces consist of:

Face
Blue fringe
Head front (hat brim)
Head back (back of hat)
Chain hair thing x 2
pointy ear things x 2

First thing we're gonna do is shove the face into the back of the head. Then I recommend plugging the ear shards into place. The slide the blue fringe over the face, put the front of the hat on and finally add the chain hair pony tails things to the back. They'll often pop out, just be aware. I did the hair chains too soon, and it was annoying as hell.

Be aware that there ear shards have specific ways to go into the head.

You'll end up with a rather cooly themed head. It has hints of robots, sharks and pirates, all mashed together.

Then place it in a spot to view the proceedings.

Jetfire is a scientist.

Next up we build the body. You'll need three pieces.

Put the silver piece in first, that's robot guts! Then place the stomache and bewby bits on.

Simple!

Next up we'll be looking at the arms. Pirate NM here has two types of arms. One hook hand and two normal arms. I'll be making one normal arm and a hook arm. There are left and rights here, but just cut from the same side of the tree and you'll be fine.

Simple, just plug them together and you have yourself an arm. If you want two plain arms (boooring), then just do the exact same with the other side.

If you want an awesome hook arm though...

Line these up and get ready!

The brown tree section is the shoulder joint. You'll have to snap them together to make a weak hinge joint (that I really hate... [looks at his Gashapon Quest figures....], it breaks apart so easily).

I have them in the wrong order in these photos... sorry....

Then just grab the blue flarey looking piece, put it in between the forearm and the upper arm (at the elbow) and slide it all together.

Then just slap the hook into the wrist!

The plug them into the chest piece.

So far, so good!

Next up, legs!

These are pretty simple. The most difficult section is that the knee joints are left and right, BUT they are marked, so no dramas there amiright?

Legs, you'll need these:

Thighs
Knee joints
Lower legs
(no feet)

The thighs are pretty obvious which is which. The knees are not so, BUT luckily they have little "L"s and "R"s on them. Match those babies up and you can't go wrong.

Slap 'em together like this:

And preeeeeesssssssssssss.

Then shove them into the thighs, make sure you match up the tabs properly.

The grab the lower legs (once again, L/R marked) and connect it all together.

Oh yeah, shove them thighs onto the ball jointed hips.

Grab the floating head and pop it onto the neck ball joints (watch out for the teeny tiny collar, it can get in the way) and Congrats, you have yourself a renegade pirate robot! (Who has no feet, make up the crappy simple stand they supply).

I really like this design if I'm completely honest!

I've found her to be pretty poseable on the stand and kinda good fun to mess with!

In another batch of Upper Idol clothes set, you'll get Nora Marion's arm weapons:

For now we'll be skipping the idol body. (WHAT????!?)

So you'll only need these:

In case you are wondering, these bits are a back plug and a different type of stand (oh my):

TO make the weapon arm, you'll need to assemble the elbow, so cut out these two pieces and snap them together:

You'll them want to shove one bit into the tube looking piece (in the golden end). Make sure you use the side of the joint that has the line marked on the peg:

Now to assemble the "palm" and "fingers." You'll need the golden round piece and the long shard looking things. If you look close at the fingers, they have a little canyon kind of thing by the attachment area. That will allow for easier joining to the palm. The palm has little tiny pegs that will slip into the hole in the fingers.

It'll be difficult!

The canyon thing

They don't actually straighten this far out, so don't do this

Persevere and you'll end up with this:

Now we're just going to snap all these pieces together:

I recommend making up the forearm before trying to put the palm on, it'll give you more grabbing spots.

This is your end result:

Repeat the process for the other arm if you so wish. Then all you have to do is remove her current elbow and shove this thing into the upper arm. EASY.

I ended up making the other one and keeping her hook arm, because it's more PIRATEY.

Oddly there is a piece left on the tree, that doesn't seem to have a home and I've checked all the other instructions trying to find what it's for, but there is no use of this tree anywhere else (yet).

These...

At first I thought they might be add ons for the hand weapon as you put them in the middle hole, but they sit awkwardly as they have two pegs. Curious. I ended up placing them on various parts of Marion, but they didn't really fit anywhere well, so I shoved them onto the vehicle for safe keeping for now.

Phew! Looking good Stray Marion!

However we have one more set left to go and that is the Leg Equipment. I thought this might allow us to give her a peg leg, but they end up boosting her height too much, so it's either two peg legs or none. Luckily the legs are super easy to put together.

The leg Equipment comes with the Idol dress and boots.

The other piece with the legs is another type of stand... Hello, I'll have to check it out to see if it's better than the original one.

These are the pieces we will need.

Clip clip, snip snip!

Now just attach the golden circle to the peg on the blue piece. Make sure the gold piece is jutting away from the blue piece.

Repeat for the other side.

Then you'll just need to take Marion's lower leg off, fold up the knee hinge peg and slide the blue peg onto the side of the knee joint.

And you'll end up with a decidedly taller looking Marion, who will definitely need a stand now as she

Still

doesn't

have

feet.

But it does look pretty cool.

Now, to have a wee looky at Nora Marion with Marion.

These two have a nice contrast with each I think. The white, clean, slightly angelic (but evil) Marion and the rebellious, rough and battle damaged Nora Marion.

I think I like Nora a bit better. She seems to have a nice bunch of thematic er themes going on for a clearer feeling of character over Marion who strikes me as a bit bland. However considering the possible story (I haven't really checked on what it is though) that could well be Marion's character.

So, with a powered up Nora Marion, you will end up with a bunch of left over bits.