This kit is Elena, released as part of the Arcarnadia series. It's a four-legged centaur-type girlpla unlike anything we've seen before — a pretty fresh idea — and it turned out to be a high-quality kit that exceeded expectations.
First off, the overall color separation and sculpt quality are clean and well done. An unprecedented number of slide molds have been used, resulting in parts with great depth and minimal seam lines. The overall articulation and joint strength are also better than expected, allowing for natural yet dynamic posing. The multi-stage waist articulation in particular was genuinely impressive — bending both the human upper body and the horse lower body at the waist causes the human back and horse back to fold together almost completely like a folder. On top of that, the legs have a wide range of motion and the knees rotate 360 degrees, so there's a lot of fun to be had posing with all those moving parts.
The included weapons are a spear and shield, which can be disassembled and recombined to form a horse head. You can swap out the human upper body for this horse head to create a unicorn-style warhorse — though with the small head and overly long horn and neck, the proportions end up closer to a giraffe (...). Beyond that, you can mount the large armor detached from the spear and the small armor detached from the chest onto both arms. The shield ornament can also be chosen between a ring shape and a horn shape, and swapping out the large armor on the spear lets you configure it as a light spear.
One minor gripe is that the retention on the flexible multi-joint waist is a little lacking — one of the joints among the several moving sections feels slightly unstable. It's not loose enough to be a real problem, but you do need to pay a bit more attention when setting poses. Also, the structures on either side of the waist fall off way too easily — I must have reattached them dozens of times while taking posing shots. It seems like an unavoidable structural thing, but it was still a mildly frustrating point.
So this is a kit that delivers high-quality articulation and styling that goes beyond its already fresh concept. The oversized bust area will probably be a love-it-or-hate-it thing, but if it's your style, that alone might be enough to make you hit the buy button. Finally, another big plus for this kit is its "relative value for money" — at ¥8,900 for such a packed set of contents, it feels reasonably priced for Kotobukiya. (Especially when there are plenty of kits out there with less parts volume that easily exceed ¥10,000.)
Anyway, this is a kit that genuinely gave me a culture shock for the first time in a while, and personally I think it ranks in the top 3 of all Kotobukiya kits released so far. If the style speaks to you, don't hesitate — just go for it. :-)
Arca Nadea Elena | 2024.2 | ¥8,900
AIThis page was translated by Claude Sonnet.