#double chaser

So when I ordered the Double Chasers, I had assumed that they would be like all the other Figuarts. You know,assembled. So lo and behold, New Years Eve rolls around and Amiami's quick shipping has this box on my bed, with this big ol' box, I open it to find... PARTS.

Lots and lots of goddamn PARTS.

Well, I'm always up for a good challenge (or so I tell myself), so I decided that I would battle this inability to read moonspeak and attempt to assemble it. I think I spent fifteen minutes staring at the teeny pictures before I decided I had no idea what was going on and stopped right there.

Which brings us to 1/11, around 7:30 PM CST. I figured I'd pop in a good movie, lay my parts out, and get to work. A good buddy of mine assembles figures himself, and he says it's normally not as hard as it looks. I believe him. (I was foolish.)

Okay, exaggerating a little. It isn't THAT hard, if you can follow concise instructions and work really precisely. Putting together figurines is not like slapping Lego's together - it's like messing with the most annoying, tiny parts of KNEX you can get and trying to make it look super pretty. And that in itself is harder than just matching the pieces!

I started by laying out all the pieces I needed the way the picture had them. For Barnaby's set, you had seven pieces, and the instruction booklet was actually rather clear with which bit was which. So I laid them out as such, and began to label them with paper (but then I realized that the little structures came pre-labeled! On the plastic frame, it says what it is, so all I had to do was read 'em. Convenient! Thank you! Part two was then trying to piece everything together.

So they tell you which numbered part on which section you'd need. For example, the first set of four pieces is labeled Ab1, and then the parts are labeled by number. So the directions would say something along the lines of Ab1 [2], for part #2 on the Ab1 page. This... wasn't so hard to figure out after staring at it for a few seconds. That, and the pictures on the diagram show what each part is while you're messing with it, so this was pretty great! That wasn't so bad, except when parts got super confusing and there was only Japanese writing all over the place as a "tip". SORRY, DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT LITTLE PART UNDER THE "!". Thankfully, with enough staring, I figured out most of the pieces that way.

One thing that DID bother me was that the stickers weren't labeled in any distinctive way outside of moonspeak to distinguish themselves from other stickers. There was Barnaby's set of neon pink stickers (yes, bright-ass highlighter happy pink), Kotetsu's set of neon green, and then two joint sets: one on metallic paper, with fancy stickers for details, and a smaller set with the clearer stickers. The neon stickers were easy to figure out - all of them went on the wheel, and they were numbered and fit along the grooves. However, the metallic and smaller set? "I THINK THIS LOOKS LIKE IT, YEAH I HOPE THIS IS... AW FUCK WHY ISN'T THIS THE PART" for half of them, and "OH THIS FITS HERE" for the other half. The metallic ones were numbered but half the time, I went off the shapes instead of the numbers.

One major problem I had with this: They break WAY too easily, so it took a shitton of caution to put them together. Three of the four I broke were from trying to separate them from the plastic frames they came in. The other was a freak pokémon accident. I'd recommend having superglue on hand for mistakes - it's definitely saving me from keeping Kotetsu's side wheel on, that's for sure!

Summarized Reaction:WHY DIDN'T IT JUST COME ASSEMBLED?! It was a fun project, albeit somewhat frustrating, and I don't think I want to do another one for a while. But I like the finished project a lot, so I can't complain. It looks really nice once it's all put together, and it's pretty fun to sit on places. However, I'm very disappointed that the wheels don't actually spin. WHY CAN'T THEY ROLL EVEN A LITTLE BIT? They're really just to balance the chasers, which I found very disappointing.

Things I Like About It:I love love LOVE the fact that you can change Kotetsu's chaser from a sidecar to an individual bike. I probably won't, but getting the extra instructions on how his moves around was just overwhelming with cool. It was a nice way to curb my frowning from breaking that fourth part (which was the second footpad for Kotetsu's chaser - and also completely irrelevant because I don't have those figures).

I also love the fact that they're just small but fun. Looking at the colors up close is pretty cool, and I admire the fact that they were detailed with it, from the slick shape to the fact that the odd color for stickers and sticker combinations give it that little pop. Can't help but wish it glowed, but that's pretty impossible so it's a silly little request.

Total Construction Time:~7 Hours. I finished around 2:20 AM.

Total Mistakes: 7. I ended up not putting 3 stickers on because I couldn't be assed to take part of it off to put them on. And then those four broken pieces, three of which were superglued into place and seem to hold fine.

In the end, I like it.But not love. I just don't like that it took so long to build and that I wasn't aware I had to build it myself. Perhaps that was a reading error, but I don't think Amiami's page specified that it was a building project. I also wish the instructions had an English or French translation, but they were doable with just the Japanese. Because it was a build-it-yourself, I can understand the price (I got mine for around $50 USD), since these things can get ridiculously expensive, but I also think it could have been cheaper if it was a factory-created toy.

I think I'd give it a 7 out of 10, because while the pay-off was good, the time to create it and swimming through the moonspeak was definitely frustrating.