Banpresto has been on a roll in the past couple of years with its many affordable Gundam-themed prize item figures. We've had newtype characters, a large gallery from Witch of Mercury and lately also old characters brought back to life in SEED Freedom. The Glitter and Glamours figure range however is not a strict Gundam-themed figure series, but rather a claw machine type range featuring personalities from other IPs such as Dragonball and One Piece. These figures are interesting not only because of the overall artistic expression but also due to their affordability. There seems to be no upper limit on Gundam characters released through the sister MegaHouse brand for example, where the range currently sits around 20 000-30 000 yen. This new Lacus Clyne figure is currently trading for around ¥2000 on the secondary market which is a bit of a steal.
The flowery design used for the box art in the GxG series is really winning me over, it is vibrant and colourful. The marketing department did their best to ruin it with a slightly bewildering and amusing exclamation that the figure is sporting thoroughly feminine features. Man, that's a rabbit hole you don't want to climb into in the political climate of 2024, let's move on...
Geeze... could you make a bigger box next time, please? At first I thought I might be missing a large round base that these types of figures usually come with but no. This time they are using one of those snap-to-your-leg supports that were common on palm-size Gashapon in the early 2000s. Haven't seen those used on such large figures for a very long time... come to think of it I can't remember it being used at all. Anyway, I imagine the small feet were considered unsuitable for having a peg or hole drilled inside them. This support looks a bit flimsy though, will it really carry her weight? (sorry Lacus...)
I wasn't very impressed by the likeness of the previous GxG Gundam figure - Gigi Andalucia from Hathaway's Flash - but this time the sculptor really nailed it. This figure is absolutely spot on. Perhaps not the sort of outfit or pose I would expect from Lacus but Bandai is not about to leave money on the table and have milked the swimsuit theme before. Whenever I see these beautiful character sculpts I wonder why we can't have the small pre-painted Gundam figures back. Right now there is only Gundam Converge holding down the fort together with the two larger brothers Gundam Universe and Robot Spirits. We don't even have any SD figures these days.
Lacus stands about 21.5 centimetres tall and weighs almost 150 grams, that's a tall order for the support block to carry. I found that if the surface she is standing on isn't absolutely flat it won't take much to topple the figure. The designers could have come up with a better base solution for the figure, perhaps a little miniature sand-diorama or even placed the support on top of a larger base. I also would have preferred if the block had a different colour, clear transparent would have looked better in my opinion. This is the only drawback to this figure however, I'd definitely recommend picking it up if you are at all interested.
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