SHIVA

 It was when Final Fantasy reached its full potential at the Playstation one when it was also born as an action figure brand. It wasnt the Play Arts line but Bandai and Kotobukiya the ones responsible of the Final Fantasy VIII action figures, main characters and monsters. I sell most of them sadly, but i keep a few and one of them was Shiva.

For some reason Shiva was extremelly difficult to find, she was rare along side Diabolus and Gilgamesh and my mother found her at one of her trips to USA, tough not the original version, but the clear version. Since then i been triying to get her original painted version but with no luck. Back then repaints of clear version of figures were pretty common, now day would be unthinkable.

And in Shiva´s scenario, the clear version fits her nicelly since she is the Guardian Force of ice. She is in the same scale as Siren, but unlike her, Shiva have a lot more articulations: her head, shoulders, elbows, wrists, legs, knes and ankles. All of them cut joints soo they can only move on one direction soo she is still not as posable as modern figures at all.

Also, articuations play against her since che cant stand on her own. To fix this they give her a kind of ice pedestal for she to be on top of it but of course...her ankles and knes articulations make her fall even with the base soo i had to use another one with an arm and a clamp to stand her. This is a very serious isse and i always wondered f the painted version had this problem.

The sculpt of Shiva is as close as it can be to Nomura art, her body is lean and pretty simple and aerodynamic and both the crest on the back of her head and the tentacles at the side are made with soft plastic, but still they get in the way pretty often and are very anoying.

She is of grey ransluscent plastic, with the back of her head, hands and feet un soft blue and the ice base in darker blue, wich looks really beautifull with the rigth light, is like an ice sculpture. She also have blue paint on her beasr and pointy sections as well as metalic pink on her tentacles soo she is nt completelly clear.

Tough her face have no paint so her face features arent too clear since they only depend on the sculpt. This is the detail i dont like, if her face was painted then this figure would have been totally perfect.

She has no accesory like Siren togh i guess the ice base count, but she have two companions: two extra Guardian Force creatures, Carbuncle and Moguri. Both are tiny, nicely sculpted and have some minor paint jobs on Carbuncles diamond and eyes as well as Mogu eyes and nose. Aside of that they are completelly transluscent, one cast in green and the other in red.

After 20 years i am still looking for the original version of Shiva, she is one of my favorite Guardian Force from Final Fantasy and she looks beautifull fully painted, tough for now this clear ice version is enough i guess, specially considering how difficult to find she is.