CM’s Corps is a smaller company than big names like Max Factory or Bandai/Tamashii Nations, so they apparently compensate with the size of their boxes. Minerva’s box is *massive*; I ordered her in a lot with a couple other figures, and I suspect the somewhat exorbitant shipping charges were mostly her fault. It’s thoroughly G1-themed, with the grid, and not only sports Minerva’s name, Headmaster Jr. status, and designation number on the front, but also has her techspec numbers on the back. It’s worth noting that the Japanese and/or US postal service managed to mangle the box on mine a bit, but fortunately the figure inside was just fine.
So here’s Minerva, looking pretty spot-on to her animation model (I was actually able to check thanks to having The Ark II handy). It’s a simple, G1-Floro-Dery-plus-80’s-anime design, with lots of flat panels forming stuff like the legs and arm-armor, but it works in the context. This is a suit that looks like it could transform into part of a boxy G1 Transformer, as it should. Her face is sculpted well, with the obligatory anime eyes tampo’d on, and the lips painted in.
Looking at her back, you’ll see that she has the backpack of her Headmaster armor, the part that becomes that face of her Transtector. Her hair is sculpted to fall between the vents on this piece, and the backpack itself can move up and down on a hinge so it doesn’t get in the way too much during posing, or detach altogether.
The one weak point of the figure’s looks is the neck. For the detail of the spandex part of her suit ending and meeting her neck, there’s no molded detail at all, just a two-tone paint job of light blue and flesh tone, and the flesh color doesn’t even match the color of her face right above it. It’s not the most noticeable gaffe, since her head is seated down over this part a lot, but it’s there, and stands out amongst all the other details she’s packed in so well.
You’ll also note that Minerva’s hair appears to be two separate pieces, more on that in a bit.
Minerva’s a tall figure for something made along the same lines as other posable Japanese figures. In Transformers toy terms, she’s about Voyager height, towering over TF-human toy contemporary Microman Kicker, and she’s got quite a bit of height on Figmas as well. I hope you’re buying this toy just to have a cool figure of Minerva for display, since there aren’t a lot of other toys she’ll be able to interact with properly due to her size (though Square-Enix’s Play Arts Kai line might be in the right range, now that I think about it). However, a Ginrai from the same line is due out later, so at least she’ll eventually have someone else to hang around with/crush on/stalk.
As an action figure made to the Japanese collector’s standard, Minerva’s got plenty of posability options. Her hips have multiple joints inside of them to facilitate movement (she can do a limited version of the SH Figuarts ‘pull-down-hips’ trick) without sacrificing looks the way other action figure hip structures might; she can even rotate her legs forward and around without her pelvis/butt opening up and looking weird, impressively. She’s also got double knees, the connection points of which have a swivel above them, plus feet with limited ankle joints (due to the shape of the boots) plus posable toes! There’s a ball joint on a swivel at her waist, and a universal hinge in her torso, and a whole mess of universal joints inside her head, giving her plenty of articulation and potential for conveying personality through there.
You can see this crazy knot of joints when you pop off her hair and face to swap faces. She’s also got swappable hands, for more posing options, including the open palms she’s packed with attached, closed fists, spread-open hands, and partially-open hands for holding accessories.
If there’s one weak point to the articulation, it’s the arms. The elbows are just fine, having elbows that can bend up almost double, but the shoulders are another story. They’re attached to these ball joints on thin stalks that plug inside her torso, attached at the bottom, and the universal swivel built where this stalk connects to the shoulder itself gets blocked by the shoulder bits that go inside the body, meaning getting it to rotate is…delicate. The right shoulder on mine can rotate up, around, and above her head just fine, but the left one won’t got more than straight out before the joint just stops trying to swivel and pops out. The stalks on these parts are thin enough that I’m not anxious to try to swivel them around too much, or force them, and it doesn’t hurt the figure too much, but it’s an odd design choice that does hinder the toy in ways, nonetheless.
The wrists are also a bit problematic, though not as much. The swivel components of their universal joints are extremely tight, making it hard to rotate them for poses (popping the hands off first is advised), and the points sometimes pop apart while moving them, though given the size and stress they’re taking at this scale, that’s definitely preferable to just breaking off.
All that said, all the joints are perfectly tight and hold poses well, no problems there.
Minerva’s not a terribly accessory-intensive figure. Aside from the swappable hands, the other thing she includes is the helmet for her Headmaster armor, letting her complete the look. Pretty much the whole head has to come off to attach the helmet, since it itself is a replacement head. Minerva’s blonde head-hair-chunks separate, detaching the face as you go, and you’re left with just that second hair piece we noticed earlier.
This hair piece is held in by this little red bit, and the helmet halves connect to that and snap together, one of Minerva’s faces going inside. Be careful with this red piece; though apparently glued in, it wasn’t terribly secure on mine, coming off when I first tried to detach the helmet from around it. I gave it some insta-cure hobby glue and it feels like it’s on there solidly now, and it’s not exactly crucial to the structural integrity of the head anyway (the both the head-hair piece and the head-helmet pieces solidly clamshell around the mess of neck joints), but it’s something to be mindful of, regardless.
Minerva doesn’t take her helmet off in-armor all that much in the show, so this is the look viewers will be more familiar with. It completes that 80’s anime mecha-armor design I love so much, with the half-face visor in clear purple plastic (it’s clear enough that it doesn’t obscure her eyes too much, though her nose can get kind of lost). She’s definitely a bit more ready for more serious, ‘cooler’ poses like this.
Man, I really wish I had an appropriately sized Mega Man X toy right about now.
Minerva’s posing options are theoretically assisted by the stand she’s included with. I say theoretically because, well, the stand kind of sucks. It’s a cheap, black platic thing, with weak, pseudo-ratcheting hinges between its thin sections, and a loose slider on the bottom letting you get better center of gravity positioning (which is a nice thought, admittedly). Worse than the general flimsy feeling it has (mine had stress marks on the center of the base right out of the box) is the big stupid claw it uses to hold Minerva in place. They couldn’t even been assed to make this part out of clear plastic or something, so it sticks out like a sore thumb when you’ve got Minerva in it.
Fortunately, it’s not terribly necessary an accessory unless you’re planning on having her do tons of jump-kicks or something, as Minerva’s big, boxy boots support her in a variety of poses. Even if you want to just stabilize her more in a standing pose, you can just surreptitiously clip the clamp to her hair or backpack, and it won’t look too bad. Or you can always find other, more creative uses for this black beast of a stand.
The only other accessory Minerva comes with is a tiny little red piece, identical to the one that holds her long-hair bit in place and that her head-components connect to. I was initially baffled as to the purpose of it, originally thinking it may be there because they knew people might pop off and lose the attached bit, until I realized the intent was for you to plug it into the helmet piece when Minerva wasn’t wearing it, so it would look ‘complete’ when she was just holding it. That’s a pretty impressive commitment to detail.
But not as impressive as this one last detail. I know some people, like Shockwave, and even myself to a degree, take issue with Transformers toys that don’t transform. Well fear not, for Minerva does, in fact, transform…
…sort of. (Hey, if you ever got a giant-scaled Minerva Transtector body, you could make it work, I guess).
Minerva isn’t a perfect figure, compared to bigger-name stuff like Figma or SH Figuarts. She definitely blows most ‘regular’ action figures out of the water in terms of detail and included functionality, but little niggles like the odd shoulder articulation and crappy stand hold her back from being ‘perfect’, though it’s still the best damn Minerva figure we’re ever going to get.
Asking if such a thing is worth it…brings us to the matter of price. I got Minerva from AmiAmi for 6,600 yen, plus 1,990 yen shipping for her and a couple of other, smaller toys. This converts out to a price of about $109 USD. That’s nearly 3-4 times what you’d pay for a SH Figuarts or a Figma, keeping in mind that they aren’t as big and wouldn’t ship in so large a box. Still, it’s a hell of a price to pay for a ‘really good’ action figure of a character. I’d say it is worth it to me, since I love Masterforce, I love Minerva, and I’ve wanted good action figures like this of human TF characters for some time (I’ll definitely be ordering the upcoming Ginrai from the same line), but I can’t say how much she’ll appeal to others at this price. CM’s Corps seems to deal primarily in smaller-run figures like this, priced high to target the ‘hardcore’ fans of properties. And if you can justify dropping that kind of dosh because you want a figure like this, you definitely fall into the ‘hardcore’ category.
