Non-Bot Reviews: Figma Samus Aran, Metroid Prime 3 Version

Welcome to the first of an occasional review series, where I take a look at something outside of the realm of robots. See, Transformers is my big thing, collection-wise. But I have other interests, and sometimes those other interests come with figures and merchandise, so I thought I’d take some time to talk about them through the lens of a Transformers collector. For example, I’m really into Nintendo games, and the one Nintendo franchise I’m into the most is Metroid. I mainly got into it because it had a really good run of games (including the Metroid Prime trilogy) around the point in the 2000s when I had fallen out of Transformers. Plus, there’s the fact that, as far as Nintendo franchises go, it’s not a huge-sized one, so getting into it was fairly easy at the time. That, and it’s just a good mixture of Things I Like.

A lesser-known Nintendo franchise, Metroid, along with the later Castlevania entries, pioneered “Metroidvania”-style games, or “Search Action,” where you’re there to explore a big, open environment, and find upgrades that will help you explore even farther.

Story-wise, the Metroid games star intergalactic Bounty Hunter and warrior extraordinaire Samus Aran, as she defends the galaxy from the Metroids (life-draining floating jellyfish parasites), Space Pirates (insectoid warriors that are not, in fact, actually pirates), and other threats, while exploring caves, ruins, space stations, and other big, open environments as she constantly gains new weapons and abilities for her armor. Surprisingly, there’s not been much merchandise made out of the Metroid franchise in general. World of Nintendo, a line of action figures from Jakks Pacific, has done a small amount of figures, but they’ve mostly pivoted to just doing Mario stuff (and the Metroid stuff they did was of very uneven quality, the Metroids were great, the Samuses (Samii?) not so much). Meanwhile, there’s been a few high-end statues from First 4 Figures, which are too rich for my blood, and then there’s Figma.

Figma, by Good Smile and Max Factory, is one of those high-end lines of action figures that come out of Japan, like S.H. Figuarts or Revoltech. The idea is that they’re super-detailed, super-poseable, come with tons of accessories, and are basically the best-possible versions of whatever characters from video games, anime, or miscellaneous things company has the license to.

Figma has done three Samus Arans over the years: One (top right) based on her Varia Suit-wearing appearance in Metroid: Other M for the Wii (which is also the source of her current Smash Bros. design, technically), a second (top center), based on her un-armored “Zero Suit Samus” look, also from Other M, and the one I’m looking at today (top left), based on her appearance in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, also for the Wii, and also in the Varia Suit. This was an odd choice for a Figma when it was released in 2017 (and re-released in 2020), because Prime 3, wasn’t exactly a new entry in the series (it was a decade old at the time, and came out before Other M!) and there were no new Metroid titles on the horizon at the time (now there’s Metroid Dread, and there’s a Figma Samus coming from that, too). At least this Figma is based on a good entry in the series. (Metroid: Other M’s that one bad entry that nearly killed the franchise, even if it had some cool suit designs).

So, here’s the thing about Figmas (I think Figma is still the actual plural, but that doesn’t feel natural to me): They’re expensive. This was a costly figure when it came out (BBTS has a sold-out listing for $82.99 American, before the Canadian exchange rate, and shipping), and the aftermarket on it is doubtless pretty bad, so, like, you can’t get this for anything less than triple-digits. So let’s have a look, and see what comes with that high price tag.

Sculpt

Samus Aran stands about six inches tall, putting her roughly in scale with Marvel Legends, Star Wars Black Series, Power Rangers Lighting Collection, GI Joe Classified, and other Hasbro figures of that size.

Samus is supposed to be really tall in-universe (Six feet, three inches!), though, so she’s technically scaled a bit small next to most of these figures. In Transformers terms, she’s about the height of a modern Voyager, if a bit more svelte than they usually are.

Samus is decked out in her football-uniform-shouldered Varia Suit, which is the armor she wears in most promotional media (most games give her multiple suits over their runtime). Despite being fairly standardized, the exact details of the suit have varied from game to game, with this being specifically the Metroid Prime 3 design, though the small differences in proportions and helmet shape are minor enough that most people will just look and go “Yup, that’s a Samus” unless you’re a turbo-nerd like me.

This is a hyper-detailed sculpt well beyond what you’d see in most Transformers, and definitely well beyond most standard action figures. There’s tons of tiny little panel lines, sculpted details like tubes or vents, what looks like a molded rubber undersuit between the breaks in her armor, and a visor that’s slightly recessed into her helmet, among other tiny details. One thing they didn’t sculpt is her eyes beneath her visor, which were typically fairly visible in Prime 3, though that’s not always the case, and I don’t miss them here.

One big thing to note about her sculpt work is that she seems to have been specifically built out of a lot of little pieces of plastic, rather than simply molding big chunks together. There’s a really neat trick to her construction, too, when it comes to some of the green bits on her legs, and her one useful hand: Those green bits are not painted on, like on the earlier Other M Figma Samus. Instead, they’re translucent plastic glued on over the opaque plastic, for an impressive effect.

The suit design is really good at hiding the joint cuts, too, since in-universe, it has to be articulated to let her move, so most of the jointage is hidden in those black bits around the breaks of her armor. I do sometimes wish there wasn’t a big, obvious peghole in the middle of her back, breaking up an otherwise impressively clean sculpt, but it does serve an important purpose.

This is the platonic ideal of Samus, right out of the game, and you can see where the money went.

It’s neat how expressive they managed to make this sculpt, too, despite the blank face. There’s a lot of personality here.

Colors

Samus is mostly metallic bronze, with a lighter shade for the inner parts of her suit, and some dark, maroon-ish red for her helmet, plus some metallic green for her arm cannon. She’s also got bits of black, and those green glowy bits. It’s a more muted version of her colors than some depictions, which fits the specific game that she’s from. The whole figure’s also got a very slight metallic sheen to it, which really looks nice in person.

That trick that I mentioned earlier about her sculpt being made up of so many smaller parts means that it’s hard to tell what’s painted on, and what’s just different plastic, outside of some of the finer green details obviously being painted. Either way, the color-matching works so well that I can’t really tell. Two specific bits of deco that I particularly appreciate are the small bits of green between the panel lines on her shoulders, and the slight bits of yellow on her arm cannon’s exterior, and inside the barrel, which means she’s got her Power Beam equipped, her default starting weapon in most games.

Stability and Build Quality

This is a big thing that separates her from both Hasbro action figures, and Transformers. Whatever materials they made Samus out of are a lot more solid-feeling than the often soft-rubbery material 6-inchers come in. That being said, it’s more fragile-feeling than Transformers plastic, so I wouldn’t go knocking this figure around, it feels like it’ll pick up dents and scratches a bit easier.

But I do have several other Figmas, and some Figuarts, and I will say that she does feel more sturdy than any of these kinds of high-end figures usually are.

This partially comes down to her design, since there’s no thin, breakable points, or anything that feels structurally risky, but also, she’s just made out of more rigid materials than Figmas and the like usually are. So while I’m being a bit careful (mainly due to the price), I’m not afraid to take her down and mess around with her, like I am with some of the other high-end figures I own.

One thing that she is not good at is standing up unassisted on her own two feet, unfortunately. She can, but balancing her is difficult, and if you’re trying to pose her in anything but a careful straight pose, even more tough.

That being said, all Figmas come with clear figure stands, as a rule, and she’s no exception. It’s expected that you’ll plug the stand into her back, and not worry about stability, and so she seemingly wasn’t designed with it in mind, in a chicken-or-egg scenario. I do kind of wish she could stand on her own better, but it’s a bit harder to complain when the solution is right there.

Articulation

This is another thing Figmas are known for: Having crazy articulation. This is beyond a Hasbro 6-incher, beyond any Transformer, except maybe for some of the giant Masterpieces, maybe. They put every joint possible onto her. I find articulation breakdowns boring, so I’m going to say this: Yes, she has that joint. And that one. And that one. I think the only thing she lacks is articulated fingers, honestly, and that’s just down to scale.

Let me just zero in on the bits that really stick out to me: The toes of her boots can move up and down, to help her step. She has movable panels in the armor right at the top of her thighs to help her legs move outwards, without said armor blocking it, and in lieu of a joint cut for a thigh swivel, just has extremely mobile knees and hips. She has an ab crunch, and a panel right above her abs that slides up and down, again to avoid the design of her armor impeding it (it’s easy to forget to slide it back down if you un-crunch them). Most impressive, though, is the fact that they solved the problem of articulating her giant, orbed shoulders! Making them work is something no other Samus figure has really gotten right, and to be fair, it’s hard to make them articulated in 3-D space as a physical thing.

The World of Nintendo Samus figures, for example, have arms that move oddly, and just can’t be posed in many good-looking ways, thanks to only using one joint at the base of the shoulders. Meanwhile, the The Other M figma properly articulated her shoulders, but it was at the expense of the sculpt, since those shoulders would often float off of her body when moving them.

These shoulders, though, somehow manage to be even more articulated than the previous Varia Suit Figma, and look good in most poses. Finally, her ball-jointed head has a super-far range of motion, and makes her very expressive. Basically, she can do anything pose-wise, and emotes very well. It combines with the excellent sculpt to make this into a figure that looks good doing almost anything.

Accessories and Features

Some Figmas come with a gigantic pile of accessories (and an actual Ziploc-style bag to keep them in). Sometimes, Figmas basically have an entire second action figure’s worth of extra hands, faces, weapons, and option parts, which can really jack the price up, and often leads to multiple releases of the same Figma, in simple and Deluxe versions, with more accessories coming with the latter. The previous Samuses certainly came with their fair share of extra parts. This Samus, comparatively, is sparse in the accessory department.

And honestly, I think that’s a good thing. Most Figmas that I own, I just don’t use most of those parts. It’s just enough of a pain to dig them out of storage and swap things around that I typically find some neutral-looking items, and proceed to never use the rest of what’s in that set. So, here’s what this particular Samus does have:

First, as I already mentioned, there’s the figure stand. It’s clear, and it’s extremely bendy thanks to having three separate joints along the arm. It’s got the kind of standardized connection point that means you can give it to other figures with figure stand ports, too, including some Transformers. Importantly, the arm of this stand is strong enough to support Samus hovering in midair. Samus may be bound to it thanks to how hard she is to stand on her own, but at least it’s super sturdy and useful at doing what it’s supposed to.

Next up, she comes with four different left hands, which are pretty easy to swap, coming off her wrist joint without too much force, while still being tight enough to not be in any danger of falling off. She has a fist, a thumbs up (she did this a couple times in the Prime games), and two open hands. One is doing a sort of half-wave (again, it’s a reference to something she did in Prime 2), the other is splayed open, so she can grasp her arm cannon (holding it for support is another visual quirk of hers). Check them out:

All of the hands are expressive enough you can use them for plenty of poses unrelated to their intended purpose, too, like so:

Next, her arm cannon’s got two ends you can swap out fairly easily. One’s her standard beam-firing cannon, the other is a transformed tip for when she fires missiles, which introduces more paint (black highlights and a yellow end again) and more nice, sculpted detail. While her standard beam cannon has a tiny hole in it, it’s surprisingly not compatible with any effect parts I have, Transformers or otherwise. Other M Samus came with beam-firing parts, but they don’t fit into this arm cannon, either.

One thing that does fit from a previous figure, though, is Zero Suit Samus’s head, though this is an undocumented feature.

This Samus’s head can be popped off of the joint (watch out for the cowling around her neck, it’ll fall out), and her suitless face can be placed right on the joint.

While it’s not as visually perfect as her standard head (due to the neck joint being visible), it looks really nice as a helmetless Samus.

While undocumented, this feels like a deliberate bit of engineering, especially since the Other M Varia Suit Samus actually couldn’t do this, due to differing joint sizes.

Samus’s last accessory is the Morph Ball, a small, rolling form that Samus can change into in every game, to sneak around, and move through tunnels.

Rather than try and figure out how that transformation would work (it’s a “shrink into energy, materialize into the other form” kind of transformation in the Prime games), they just included it separately.

And it’s just as nicely sculpted and painted as she is, with details like tiny patterns inside the ridges along its surface. It’s also colored just as nicely as her main body, in the same metallic bronze, green and black. I’m pretty sure it’s hollow, given its lightness, and while it can sort of stay still on a table, it’s in danger of rolling away with a mild jostling. But, you can avoid that, because it also has a hole that’s compatible with the main Figma stand.

Overall

Yes, this costs a lot of money, before the aftermarket even kicks in. But, to be honest, you can see where that budget went, in terms of the detail, construction, colors, and poseability.

Pound for pound, it’s not hyperbole to say that this is basically the best physical representation of Samus Aran in existence. It’s hyper-detailed, hyper-colored, and hyper-poseable. Despite being an expressionless suit of armor, it communicates her character really well.

It’s also not hyperbole to say this is the only Samus you’ll ever need, if you want just one, especially since the Varia Suit is her most common, default, franchise-wide design. So, if you’re looking for a Samus Aran, this is your first and only stop, if you can find this one for a price you can swallow. Well, unless you’re a specific fan of Metroid Dread, the most recent entry in the series. There’s a new Figma coming out at some point based on her redesigned look from that game, and I’ll be eagerly snapping it up, too, both out of love of the character and game, but also based on the pedigree of this previous release.