For Beginner Figure Collectors #01: Nendoroids

By TReina - Thursday, December 31, 2015 - No Comments

To All,

From today onward, I would do my best to bring you a series of tutorials on the 1st and 15th of every month!

This series of tutorials suits those who want to start collecting, or have bought a few figures out of interest or from anime conventions and would like to take a step deeper into the world of collecting.

What I would be covering in the first part of this series would be the various different types of figures, followed by a brief introduction of some of the figure companies I keep a lookout for, then lastly, several websites you can frequent to pick up new figures up for pre-order or for good deals. I would provide a brief outline of my schedule for this series of tutorials at the end of this post!

Now, let's start with the type we are all familiar with: Nendoroids! I absolutely adore Nendoroids!

(Image credit to Kahotan)

Firstly, what are Nendoroids? To me, they are cute little figures (in chibi form) which are approximately 10cm in height. They come with many exchanges of limbs, face-plates and accessories. By changing limbs, you can create many different poses with a single Nendoroid!

Here are some images to let you view some of the different poses she can make:

Isn't she just adorable~?

Of course, you can change her pose as you like and create a uniquely posed Mako (or any other Nendoroid) just for yourself!

However, that's not all! The charm of Nendoroids also lie in how most parts are interchangeable among Nendoroids.

And now we've made our very own Fight Club Ryuko!

Can you imagine putting those crying parts on other Nendoroids? I wonder how that would look like! There are actually people who collect only certain parts of some Nendoroids, especially accessories such as food, for use with their Nendoroids or to create their own custom Nendoroid!

But that's not all! Do you know that there are actually other types of Nendoroids?

Super Movable Edition

These are Nendoroids which come with joints in their limbs (think of it as a figma in Nendoroid form) and are more commonly used for Nendoroids from series that have a lot of fighting involved, so you can better pose them in various fight scenes without the Nendoroid coming with a ridiculous number of parts for exchanges.

Personally, I'm not a fan of visible joints so I'll rather invest in the traditional type of Nendoroids, but if you aren't joint-phobic like me, why not give the Super Movable Edition a try? They are usually much lighter than traditional Nendoroids and make shipping much cheaper!

Recently, Nendoroid Co-de has also become popular, especially for idol girl characters. In Co-de, the parts which can be exchanged comes in groups -- the hair, face-plates, upper body (inclusive of arms) and lower body (inclusive of legs). Moreover, they don't really come with that many accessories as compared to traditional Nendoroids. Frankly, I was really skeptical as to whether this line would actually sell well until I saw the prototype.

They are so cute! (Image credit to Kahotan)

I really underestimated their cuteness factor! Also, the swapping of parts works so much better in reality than in my head!

You can swap their bodies around to exchange their poses.

Or swap their bodies entirely with other Nendoroid Co-de (it works equally well when swapped to other Nendoroids too! It doesn't have tobe a Co-de!)

Or simply change part of their outfits to invent a new cute outfit for your favorite idol girl!

Nendoroid Co-de are much cheaper and are targeted at a younger audience. But don't let that deter you from getting one of them! Their cuteness factor is on par with Nendoroids, and trust me, you can't really tell the two apart if you have them side by side (unless you try to change their poses).

However do note that the packaging for Nendoroid Co-de is very much different from the packaging for Nendoroids we are pretty much used to.

Going along with the increasing hype for Co-de, Good Smile Company also came up with more types of body types for Co-de: the Fundoshi set! I guess this could count as a Nendoroid more...? Or perhaps a Co-de More?

How would you like to use these for your Touken Ranbu Nendoroids?

Nendoroid More has also became an integral part of Nendoroid collectors collection nowadays, especially since they started making so many items catering to differing tastes.

The three on the left really catches my attention! I hope that I can get them at an affordable price someday since they are currently exclusives. The right three seems to be under a ballroom theme rather than a wedding, and the blue dress just screams "Cinderella" to me!

Nendoroid Playsets are also another line of products branching out from the Nendoroid line, but as they aren't exactly counted as figures, I'll refrain from covering them in this review. But here's a picture for you to consider how they look like.

(Image credit to Good Smile Company)

Lastly, for Nendoroids, I'll talk about Nendoroid Petites. They are much smaller (approximately 6 to 6.5cm in height) and affordable than full-sized Nendoroids. Similar to Nendoroids, their hair, face-plates, bodies, arms (including accessories) and legs are exchangeable among other petites as well! Some petites do come with a few extra parts of their own (for instance, an extra arm to hold an accessory) but rarely do they come with additional face-plates like full-sized Nendoroids do.

However, that helps to make collecting more affordable, and our wallets won't whimper from our purchases as Good Smile Company churns out more and more Love Live! and Idolm@ster to drown us in what fans commonly know nowadays as "idol hell".