Kit Review

Straight build

Size comparison with a cigarette pack

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - Squid Girl's iconic tentacle hair is nicely captured. (1/3)

Squid Girl's iconic tentacle hair is nicely captured.

The squid hat is rendered really nicely too.

Leg section

Inside the skirt. There's a stand attachment point on the back.

There's one face part and four eye parts.

Without the face on, it looks a bit creepy..;

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - For painters, a blank face along with wet transfer decals for the eyes and eyebrows are a

For painters, a blank face along with wet transfer decals for the eyes and eyebrows are also included.

Hand parts total 7 pieces.

Three different front tentacle hair options are included.

One for holding a beer mug, one straight, and one in soft material.

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - The soft hair (bottom) has a matte-ish finish, while the regular plastic hair is slightly

The soft hair (bottom) has a matte-ish finish, while the regular plastic hair is slightly semi-gloss, so there's a bit of a mismatch.

Unique accessories — a beer mug and a shrimp.

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - The beer mug is assembled by combining the cup part and the beer part, and the effect is

The beer mug is assembled by combining the cup part and the beer part,
and the effect is just amazing ^^

Articulation.

The two front tentacle hairs can move to some degree.

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - Cute pose~ (1/3)

Cute pose~

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - Greeting pose using the soft hair (1/4)

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - Greeting pose using the soft hair (2/4)

Greeting pose using the soft hair

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - Cute beer delivery shot~ (1/4)

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - Cute beer delivery shot~ (2/4)

Cute beer delivery shot~

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - Squid Girl loves shrimp~ (1/3)

Squid Girl loves shrimp~

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - Grabbing and delivering beer with her hair (1/5)

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - Grabbing and delivering beer with her hair (2/5)

Squid Girl (Ika musme) - Grabbing and delivering beer with her hair (3/5)

Grabbing and delivering beer with her hair

Together with Hoihoi-san. They're about the same size~

Squid Girl (Ika Musume), one of the breakout anime of 2011, has been released as a Kotobukiya girlpla. It was an anime I personally really enjoyed, so I had high hopes for this kit — and true to Kotobukiya form, it turned out beautifully.

A little background on the anime: Squid Girl rises from the sea to punish humanity for destroying the ocean environment, declaring she'll conquer the human world... but right off the bat at the beach, she breaks the wall of a seaside restaurant run by two sisters, and ends up working there as a waitress to make up for it. That's the comedic setup. Squid Girl is a powerful being who can stretch and whip around her blue tentacle hair at will — but the problem is she's just way too innocent and good-natured. Those tentacles, a weapon no human possesses, end up being used for multi-tasking waitress duties, and the squid ink she spits out gets used as pasta sauce;; Anyway, that's basically the story — this simple-hearted Squid Girl comes up to the surface to conquer the Earth, ends up doing part-time work to pay for the wall she broke, and gradually befriends the humans ^^

Anyway, it was one of those genuinely heartwarming, wholesome, and funny comedy anime that I really enjoyed — and you don't have to look far to watch it for free on services like Cook TV, so if you've got time to kill, give it a shot. (It's about 3,500 times more fun than Gundam AGE..;;)

The overall kit composition follows the same style as Hoihoi-san and Saber-san as an assembly-type girlpla figure, and it does a great job capturing Squid Girl's voluminous tentacle hair. The face, eyes, and skirt all come pre-painted, so a straight build alone perfectly reproduces the show's color scheme. The beer mug she's serving is also beautifully done with a realistic parts breakdown.

The beer mug can be held not just in her hand but also with her hair, and the front tentacle hair comes in both plastic and soft material versions, so you can pose it in a naturally bent shape too. (It doesn't stretch like in the anime though..;) That said, there's a bit of a color mismatch between the soft hair and the plastic hair, so combining them together does look a little off.

Regardless, in terms of recreating the cute poses and expressions from the anime, this is a fantastic gift for any Squid Girl fan. And even if you haven't seen the anime, the design is adorable enough that building it just for the fun of it will leave you plenty satisfied. Personally, compared to Hoihoi-san — which is based on a short-form anime and expands its lineup largely through imagination — I find myself much more attached to the Squid Girl model kit, which draws from a full-length series with a rich cast of characters. That's the power of a great source material! :-)

Squid Girl (Ika musme) | 2012.3 | ¥3,500

AIThis page was translated by Claude Sonnet.