AKIRA YUKI

One of my favorite fighting games is Virtua Fighter, while the game design is really retro and totally lacks any sign of narrative, the gameplay has been fantastic on all its entrys. It even saw its pincale at begining of the century with VF4 on the PS2, and back then it was called to be the best fighting game overall, and after that it was pretty much totally forggoten, even SEGA forgot it...

Sadly, theres not a whiole lot of merchadise of the serires, aside of some really weird looking Figma´s, the only figures related to Virtua Fighter came out back with the release of the 4th game, developed by Joyride and Gamepro. It is weird that a gaming magazine was doing action figures, but it seems they focused only on Sega games and for that time standars they were very good.

Not a long time ago i was able to get two of the 3 figures in mint condition, inside of theyr blister. The very first one is Akira Yuki, the main character and one of my favorite and poster boy of the series, "Sega´s Ryu" soo to speak...and he is big, bigger than the etandar action fgures now day soo i guess back in 2002 he would be stuning!

Akira can stand on his own perfectly (i like this detail) and is not very articulated at all, ony his head, waist, shoulders, wrists, knees and an articulation on one of his legs, he is mostly a statue in a prefixed pose. With the help of the articulations you can change his look a little bit but is imposible to change the way hes body leans.

This may seem very static or lame, but it was the way they did it back then; NECA, McFarlane, Epoc, Kotobukiya, pretty much most figures had this useless articulations or were a total statue. The sculpt is good, very close to the Akira model in game tough some details are a little too soft, like his hair. Both his belt and bandana are made with softish plastic.

The paint is good and brigth and even his eyes are nicelly detailed, but the overall paint is quiet....plain and simple. Theres no shading at all  and the plastic have no texture either soo the paint looks kinda boring, unnatural, more like painted plastic than anything.

This is not a surprise since most figures were like this as well back then since the production wasnt as complex as now day, except for McFarlane, who added a lot of washes and shades to his figures fiving it a very realistic look. I never own a Joyride figure before soo my guess is the production of this figures was very standar.

Akira has no accesorys aside of his base - a very ugly base - with a plain and cheap rock texture and a sticker with his name. The base is useless since he can stand on his own and is totally ugly, soo is pretty much the worst part of the package. He also comes with a special card with artwork of the game on one side and tis and tricks in the other.

Just by looking at the card art is pretty evident how good the sculpting is but is a shame the boring paint (and maybe the plastic) didnt do justice to the character. But still, is good to have a figure of Akira finally, a better looking one than the Figma and i love how good he fits with my older figures of Tekken and Street Fighter.