Guilty Gear Isuka was not a very good game. It was a fumbling experiment enjoyable only in the vaguest, crudest sense, and if I ever get around to reviewing it, two years after the fact, expect me to have some words for it, as they say. For now, I'll settle for reviewing a pleasant by-product of Isuka's existence: Yamato Toys' Millia Rage figure.
I'll admit up front that Millia is my favorite Guilty Gear character. In creator Daisuke Ishiwatari's original ugly, computer-rendered vision of Guilty Gear, she was a smiling, knife-throwing assassin, but when that vision was dismantled and rebuilt into a hand-drawn fighting game, Millia re-emerged as an icy Russian ex-thief who uses her own hair as a weapon while being subtly sarcastic toward all she encounters. That alone was enough to endear her to me, and it helped that she was probably the cheapest character in Guilty Gear X. Ishiwatari and Arc System Works have since downgraded her battle prowess, but she's still the same bitter, ridiculously long-haired warrior that I know and like enough to buy in statue form.
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At a glance, it's an excellent piece, nicely detailed and sculpted with care by Kazunori Omoto, who's apparently known for models based on mecha-filled anime like The Five Star Stories and Aura Battler Dunbine. True to her Guilty Gear image, Millia's a bit on the waifish side, and her expression's ostensibly neutral with just a hint of casual disdain. It's really the pose that sells the figure. Throughout Guilty Gear, Millia fashions that hair into blades, wings, moon-faced circles and more, so it's amusing to see her tresses used for something so practical.
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Yet closer inspection reveals that this isn't a high-end model. The seams on Millia's pieces are obvious, and though she's painted fairly well, I noticed a speck or two where specks should not be. The packaging is also standard; there's no explanation of who Millia is, and no trivia about Meliah Rage, the metal band from which Ishiwatari took Millia's name. Her base isn't flat-bottomed, either, so she wobbles a bit. That's where you might have to make a few additions.
For example, you can add a power-up mushroom and pretend she's appearing in some unheralded crossover between Arc System Works and Nintendo.
Yamato's Millia figure isn't as elaborate as the high-priced figures for which Japanese connoisseurs pay in blood and rent funds, but it's not as stupidly expensive, either. She runs about twenty bucks, only slightly more than the price of a smaller, snap-together “gashapon” figure. And for that, there's no reason for Guilty Gear fans to be disappointed with Omoto's take on Millia, no matter how much they hate Isuka.
(Yamato's Millia Rage statuette is still available online from numerous sources, though the figures appear to be cheapest on eBay.)
