Our first GK figure! Levi Ackerman from LC studios
Over the years we’ve amassed quite an amount of collectables and figures of characters from shows we liked is top among our collection — which, mind you, is still growing. It is nowhere near to being called a “serious collection” but we’re slowly getting there!
In the world of figures, as with many art products, there are several mediums that the figures are made of. Some examples of materials include PVC (Polyvinyl chloride), ABS (Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), Vinyl, Resin, Cold cast, Polystone, etc. To our understanding, most of the figures that we owned in the past (those by Goodsmile, Aniplex, Kotobukiya, etc.) are mostly made out of PVC.
But there’s always one type of figure materials that we’ve always had our eyes on: the Garage Kit resins! They are usually referring as assembly of scale model kit using Polyurethane Resin. Polyurethane is commonly used to produce rigid, durable, and high-resilience products. For some reason we felt that GK figures have amazing level of details and can show depth of character that is not always present in other figures we have. And of course who best to start our resin collection if not Captain Levi!
Isn’t he just super dashing!?
Let us add a mid-article preface here by acknowledging that resin figures are in no way cheap. We pre-ordered the figure from around April 2022 and it came in August 2022 — the pre-order price was around SGD 550 and if you look for one now post release it’ll be around SGD 650-700 (so kinda like an investment :p). This is why you should be picky on which statues you get. Do your research — make sure the prototypes are good, the sculpt is accurate, do a DD on the studio — do they have a good rep? Return policy? etc. We did all this and when it came. When we unboxed the monstrosity. We were simply MIND BLOWN.
So let’s start with the specs. This Levi is more or less in 1/6 scale so not too shabby. The company that produced it is LC Studios. Full dimensions of the figure is 24.5cm (L) x 22.5cm (W) x 48cm (H) — not exactly small. Make sure you have the space for it. It is a limited run of only 188 units worldwide and it comes with two cool head sculpts (one with bandages as you see above, and the other with scars and stitches — both VERY COOL).
One of the immediate things that we noticed from the figure out of the box (besides the size and heft!) was the details and the textures. Some of the PVC figures we had, as lovely as they are tend to feel a bit brittle. The Mikasa Ackerman figure that we’ve had for years always felt quite vulnerable — that her sword could snap anytime and the cables from the 3D manoeuvre kit could break easily. Not with the resin kit. Everything felt heavy duty. Levi’s cables felt quite solid and thick. The general sense of the kit was solid. That was an immediate realization.
The other amazing thing was the textures. His cape, the stone statues of Erwin and Hange feels and looks like the real thing. The blood flowing from Zeke’s decapitated head is glistening. Levi’s cape has clot texture. Everything just adds some depth — and this is something that’s missing in our other figures. Between their heads and clothes and shoes it all feels that same. This is quite amazing and we’re obviously mesmerised especially as this is our first resin kit.
Another thing we liked about the statue is the way they sculpted and painted his head. That is indeed Levi through and through. Some figures are at times quite off from the character art in the manga or anime and that’s quite off-putting. The reason we purchase these are to immortalise our connection with the character — hard to do if they look like someone else is cosplaying. Happy to report that LC Studios this time nailed it (which is a relief because we saw some of their prototypes of Makima from Chainsaw Man and it couldn’t be any more inaccurate!).
All in all this was a very hefty but satisfactory purchase. These characters meant a lot to us and to have a representation of that character in our house and collection is so awesome. Not sure what our next resin kit will be but whoever it is we’re definitely looking forward to it! Actually around the same time we also acquired a Tintin resin figure so we’ll review that one as well!
