Asuka Langley Soryu is my favourite character from my favourite anime. I don’t really want to bore everyone with how much I adore her as a character so I’ll just say that she’s been a favourite for over 10 years and I’d been longing for a decent Asuka figure for awhile.. I’ve got a couple of smaller figures of her but nothing of quality! I fell a little bit in love when I first laid eyes on the prototype for this figure but have to admit I had a little difficulty in deciding whether I wanted this one, the gorgeous test suit Asuka by Kotobukiya or Alter’s take on Asuka, also in her test suit. Now that I look back, I’m surprised that I didn’t go for a more traditional looking Asuka in her full plug suit from the original series but I guess the newer figures of her are rather nice. Anyway, yes.. as you can see.. I ended up settling for this Asuka!

Asuka Langley Soryu is one of the main female leads in the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise. She also makes an appearance as Asuka Langley Shikinami in the Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance, the second of the Rebuild of Evangelion series of movies. Due to her notoriety, Asuka is a character that I feel doesn’t really need much of an introduction so head over to the Eva Geeks wiki if you’d like to know more about her.

The figure of Asuka I’m looking at is from Yamato’s Creators’ Labo line and is “as envisioned” by artist Shunya Yamashita and she’s been sculpted by Yoshizawa Mitsumasa (REFLECT). If you’re not familar with Shunya’s work, check out his website. Back in 2007, Yamato released a Rei PVC figure done in the same style (it received an updated improved version in 2010 in time for Asuka’s release) so an Asuka version was long awaited! E2046 answered with their take on Asuka and while I really like it, I much prefer this Yamato version.. especially her face.

Asuka’s overall look is certainly quite a bit different to how we’re used to seeing her and Shunya’s more sexed up design doesn’t really look at all like Sadamoto’s classic Asuka but it’s not supposed to; if you’re after a more traditional Asuka then this probably isn’t the figure you’re after. As a Shunya Yamashita version of Asuka though, I think she’s absolutely beautiful! She’s a 1/6 scale (around 25 cm tall) so she’s larger than most of our other PVC figures since we tend to get them in 1/8 scale.

Asuka’s sculpt is very detailed considering she’s not wearing much and her paint work is next to flawless. The sculpt gives enough depth that she really doesn’t need that much shading and most of it is on her skin with some also on her hair. I prefer how she looks in a natural light setting but she looks great under artificial lighting too, especially with her shiny plugsuit.

Here is a close up of some of the detailing on her suit. I’m really impressed by the lack of overpainting on my Asuka, I’m not sure if I just got lucky or whether she’s been painted exceptionally well. Although we own a few older Yamato figures, Asuka is the first recent one we have purchased so I’m not overly familar with Yamato’s quality. If this is the quality of all of their stuff, I’ll have no issues with buying anything from them in the future. We were actually so impressed by the quality that it pushed us to preorder another Yamato figure we’d be thinking about for awhile!

If you look up under Asuka’s hair you can see that she has her trademark 2 (indicating that she’s the second child/children/whatever term to you prefer) on the back of her plugsuit. She really looks nice from all angles and looking at the photos that I took of her, I really seem to like the view from the back.. well, that or it was my boyfriend was influencing me to take them! Probably both!

Another thing that I love about this Asuka figure is that her hip bones have been sculpted really well! It usually seems that a lot of anime figures either don’t have them or have very small, rounded hip bones so it’s quite refreshing to see them. Oh, and check out those thigh highs!

I’ve read that a few people don’t like her backside and consider it a bit on the flat side and I think it does look a little flat if you view it straight on from the back. However, I think it looks nicer from the side or at an angle and her suit shows it off very well.

You can see Asuka’s hip bones well in the above photo and I also like how her boots squeeze into her thighs slightly. Her outfit actually looks really painful to wear.. I think if she wore this in the series then she’d have a halfway decent excuse for that tempermental personality of hers, I wouldn’t be too happy to have to work in that outfit either.

Her hair is beautifully done and gives the sculpt a lot of motion. I would have prefered it just a touch more orange though. The back of her hair has very little shading done to it, I had to look really closely to see it but with the sculpt how it is.. it hardly needs it.

Coming back around to that pretty face of hers, ahh.. she’s so gorgeous! I’m not usually into uhh.. ears, but Asuka’s little sculpted ears are just so cute. I’m loving the glossy lips too. Really, I wouldn’t have her face any other way on this figure.

Her base is a simple red transparent disk with her picture and her name in silver. One of Asuka’s feet pegs easily into the base and she seems stable enough while on it although I don’t pick her up by the base when I’m moving her but grab the figure herself as she’s quite large and I’d be worried about the peg snapping or her coming off it. She seems balanced enough to avoid any leaning issues but only time will tell. If she can survive this Australian summer without starting to bend over then I’m sure she can survive anything so I’ll update with any issues!

Her box is very small compared to most of our other PVC statue boxes but there was more than enough room in there for her. Pretty standard looking box with a nice Shunya illustration of Asuka on the back of it. The box also features some pretty nasty looking bevel effects on some of the words and artwork though, haha.

While I was looking around on Yamato’s website, I noticed that they said that she comes with an illustrated postcard of some kind and thought I’d been ripped off by not getting one! Of course, it turns out I did and that I’d missed it when unpacking her.. you’ll need to take out the blue cardboard insert in her box to find it though! I’m very glad that I did find it, it’s a really awesome looking Shunya illustration of Asuka in a different pose while still wearing the same outfit. I wish that I could have found a good scan of the above art as I’d never seen it before but I couldn’t so I’m sorry for the bad photo of it. Hmm.. I’d like a figure of her in that pose too..

All in all, she’s one of the best Christmas presents I’ve received (thanks Luth!) and I have no regrets in choosing this take on Asuka over the other two I was talking about in the opening paragraph. She’ll be sitting in the prime spot next to my computer monitor for awhile.. and hopefully Megahouse’s Kaworu Nagisa will be joining her when my birthday rolls around! I’m a spoiled girl, hah! At the moment, she’s actually holding onto my Battle.net authenticator for me..

Luth preordered her for me over at Hobby Search during a shipping campaign for the price of 7480 yen which is 15% off her retail price of 8800 yen. As of writing, she’s still available there and also over at AmiAmi for the great price of 7050 yen (18% off) if you’d like her for yourself!

I actually had a bit of trouble when taking photos of her because I tripped over and smashed a lamp and had trouble working with a low light setting (grr stupid artifacts) but I got there in the end!

Thanks for reading my first review on our new blog! Again, apologies to subscribers of our old blog but you’ll need to to resubscribe as there wasn’t a way for us to import our wordpress.com blog subscriptions.. I’m really sorry about that!