My Collection of Assorted Figurines (oops all miku!)

Last updated 🌘 Thu, Jul 18th, 2024

Here’s my ~~small, yet~~ growing IRL collection of figurines and other assorted cute things that I’m slowly running out of room for. Most of my collection consists of inexpensive “prize figures” of the type you could win from a Japanese “skill” claw machine, these are more modest and less ambitious in detail, character pose, and/or paintwork quality than much higher priced “scale figures,” though these days, it’s not uncommon to find prizes that rival more far more expensive figures in one or more of these categories.

I live an ocean away from the easternmost archipelago where they speak the anime girl language and physical arcades with UFO catchers dot the landscape, so I end up buying endless variations of my electric angel anywhere I spot them in the wild. All the while, a historically cheap yen has me importing¹ far more often than I used to.

I don’t feel like making an account on myfigurecollection.net to keep track of my collection, so this page piggybacks off their API, links will take you to their catalog entry on mfc².

Collection

entries, of which are abstract. Sorted by when I remember getting it, from newest to oldest.
Abstract entries like figures that have yet to ship or release are in dotted yellow, Mikus I’ll find someday are at the very end.

Key	Meaning
	Owned
	Owned (Fake/Bootleg)
	Ordered/Pre-order
	Wishlist

If you plan to buy or preorder unreleased figures from Japan

If collecting figures well ahead of their release is something that interests you, be warned that the domestic industry surrounding it is a predatory one that uses gambling mechanics, preorders, small production runs, and long lead times of 6 months or more to dull the impact of irresponsible purchases and maximize your FOMO in order to get you to impulse purchase figures you might have otherwise ignored if they weren’t in danger of selling out during the preorder stage and being immediately scalped in the secondary market!

If a figure’s concept is desirable enough, preorders can sell out before the figure has even been finalized. It might just be that the figure is overpriced and not very compelling, immediately going for half the preorder price as a barely even touched or displayed preowned figure, or it could be that the finished figure looks far better than it did in promotional shots and you stumbled upon a future classic you won’t want to part with at any price.

It’s not uncommon to see gacha-tier mechanics like exclusive accessories or face plates for ordering from specific shops. I’m fully expecting outright abusive figure gacha mechanics in the near future, which such tactics like:

preorders being done away with in favor of lottery systems, like kujis but worse!
store exclusive rare accessories or variants like face plates for every 1 in 50 paying customers!
figures limited to 3,000 sales FOREVER with no-rerelease guarantees!

Do not fall for their tricks!

If you’re a casual, low-information buyer of figures

As a more uninformed figure collector, take care not to fall for counterfeit figures of varying quality sold at abnormally low prices, usually imitating designs that are years out of production, yet being sold new in box.

In years past, only elaborate and expensive lines of figures would see bootlegging but now even inexpensive prize figures get imitations mere months after release, sometimes as quickly as ocean shipping can make its way across the Pacific. I remember when “replica” nendoroids were a fringe hobby good relegated to the depths of untrustworthy Chinese e-commerce sites, they only cost 20% what a real one would cost, including the shipping.

Do not assume that physical outlets located in shopping malls, indoor or outdoor swap meets are honest or have any clue what they are selling, they can and will play dumb if it suits them. Some are egregious enough to sell fakes at genuine prices to low-information buyers.

I highly recommend you stick to reputable online shops dedicated to hobby goods if you don’t want to be scammed. Be extremely wary of online listings on general e-commerce sites using only official promotional pictures but refuing to mention brand names, figure product line trademarks, etc. The general rule is that sites like Amazon, eBay and AliExpress are capable of selling genuine new figures, but listings that use terms such as “China ver.” or listings that don’t include the word “original” in the listing title, they are almost certainly fake. Amazon makes it easier to spot fakes, they will all have incomprehensible word soup “brand names” to avoid getting caught.

Some tell-tale signs include:

box artwork that omits manufacturer logos and brand names
faces that just look “off”, pad printed eyes that have a bizarre skew
individual parts that won’t fit together correctly or won’t stay snug
designs standing on one leg that cannot hold their own weight and bend at a steep angle³
designs that don’t actually exist, combinations of 2 or more characters at the same time⁴
paint fading quickly even in interior lights from store displays
visible molding seams (flash), ABS plastics yellowing, PVC vinyls leaking plasticizer and turning sticky
visible seams and outright separation of parts between thigh-highs, bare skin, shoes, detached sleeves, etc.
sloppy paint, gloppy paint and paint overspray, a complete disregard for quality

Quality can vary wildly with knockoffs, they consistently teeter the line between garbage and barely acceptable (from one viewing angle), with few exceptions. Even if everything else is acceptable, the face will always give it away. The best possible case is coming across “quality control rejects” from the genuine production run, but in general, they have no residual resale or collectible value if you care about that sort of thing. That being said, I won’t advise against buying them willingly and deliberately for fun and curiosity.

Bonus Gallery

This gallery is automatically generated, click images to see more user-submitted images on myfigurecollection.net!

(I keep this gallery around mostly so I can gawk at people’s gigantic miku collections, they have so much money!)

For people in the U.S., you can put a decimal point to the left of the 2nd least significant digit in JPY prices and you should have an approximation of the cost in USD after international shipping, for example ¥2,800 becomes $28.00.

This gives you insight into the markup percentage that domestic hobby good shops tend to have over Japanese ones.

This also assumes you are shipping multiple items in one order, preferably more than 3 in the case of low value items such as prize figures. Most, if not all air shipping options from Japan start at ¥4,000, single item shipments are rarely cost effective unless they exceed ¥16,000.

Consider surface shipping (a.k.a ocean freight) if you care to save several hundred dollars on shipping costs for very voluminous shipments, but note that it does add 1-4 months to your shipping speed, don’t forget the insurance. ↩
Note: mfc likes to change their API endpoints a lot, if images are broken, it’s not for a lack of trying. ↩
Figures leaning on their own isn’t limited to bootlegs, FOTS Japan is infamous for their use of hollow legs that cannot support their own weight and slowly fall over, even while standing on BOTH LEGS. ↩
A wild new frontier in bootlegs, this is a combination of this Rem and this Miku. ↩