Godzilla (Godzilla vs Biollante) (Godzilla (Super7)) Review

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Godzilla (Godzilla vs Biollante) (Godzilla (Super7)) Review

Godzilla (Godzilla vs Biollante)
Godzilla (Super7) (Super7)We all know him, the undisputed king of the monsters. Godzilla has been around since the 1950's, and has been a global phenomenon ever since. It's no surprise that he's gotten plenty of figures, with some of the latest being Super7's Ultimates. The first wave's been out for a while now, and it's focused on the Heisei-era Godzilla vs. Biollante.

The packaging is a lot deeper than usual for Ultimates, due to the size of the character. The slip cover bears Japanese text on the front and English on the back, and the Godzilla-skin-like texture is a nice touch. The box underneath has simple but nice graphics, though I wish the bio on the back was character-specific rather than generic text I'm certain Super7 copied from somewhere. There's a few ties holding in the figure, but you can get those removed with scissors and some patience.

Sculpted by Alex Brewer over at Four Horsemen Studios, the Ultimate Godzilla is a good recreation of the suit used in the film, but with an issue I'll go over in a bit. For now, I'll talk about the head. It looks mostly good, but comparing it to shots of the original suit, the nostrils are a little too big. Open and closed mouth heads are included here, rather than doing one head with a hinged jaw, and aesthetically, it works better. As for paint, the eyes look great and there's a nice choice of colors, but the teeth and scales suffer from a bit of bleed and slop.

Fitting his status as a kaiju, Godzilla is a pretty big figure, standing around 8" tall, and is quite chunky. While it's not a proper 1:10 conversion like usual, they'd be crazy to make him that big. Much of his shelf presence is taken up by his long tail, and believe me when I say it's long. As I said, the suit is pretty accurate, but the sculpt is rather soft, and shaper detail on him would've helped a lot. The paint on the body, like the head, suffers a bit of bleed, but there's some good color blending on the larger scales. The skin is unpainted, being cast in colored plastic like usual with Super7, but there's barely any gloss to it, so that's good.

Godzilla gets some very nice articulation, though there are still a few areas that could use improvement. He has a barbell-jointed head, which is aided by a single ball-joint at the base of the neck. You can get some good range out of it, especially when looking down. The arms get swivel/hinge shoulders, elbows, and wrists, and while the elbow joints are on the upper arms meaning they turn at the forearms, the bicep swivels are there to allow side-to-side arm movement. The waist only swivels, and it doubt it's a ball-joint, but I'm not going to pop it apart to confirm. The legs get decent movement with ball-jointed hips and swivel/hinge knees and ankles, and you can get some nice, deep stances. The tail gets a lot of movement, with a ball-joint at the base along with fifteen more in the tail itself. The range on it is a little more restricted than I expected, and the tail can't go completely straight.

There's not a lot of accessories included, but it's almost enough to satisfy fans. The open-mouth head looks nice, and it swaps with the default portrait easily. Three sets of hands are also included: clawing/grapping, wide-open claws, and fists. I definitely like them, and there's little issue when swapping. Since this figure comes from Godzilla vs. Biollante, two movie-specific accessories are included; a vine piece that fits snugly over the neck, and an extra left hand with an impaled palm, coming from the climatic battle between the two monsters. There is one glaring omission here, and that's his signature atomic breath. They easily could've done a piece that fits into the open-mouth head, but I found that you can stick an effect piece from the NECA Godzilla into the mouth and it'll stay in there alright.

While there's a handful of issues, Godzilla is still a fun figure to play around with, and once we get more from this line, there'll be a lot of ways to display him.

- 8/27/23