absolutely fucks me up that 30 Minutes Sisters has far exceeded the quality of the line it spun off from

I can actually like… attach pieces to places other than the default and it *works*! the knees actually double-bend! the kit isn’t half-hollow! the Masaki Apsy chest joint curse is slain, and the hips are far more sturdy than the janky Megami Device frame!

I bought it purely to evaluate Bandai’s offering comparatively but like… this is straight up just a good kit. they did a shockingly good job here

it’s got an interesting approach to bolt-on parts. welcome to 30MS, we got:

* Frame Arms Girl style “armband with a 3mm peg” pieces
* two hardpoints per leg (on the front of shin and thigh…?)
* these very interesting chunky “bracket” pieces which convert an armband peg into a 3mm hole
* a twin-peg connector that does not work at all and falls out instantly if you so much as breathe on it (cool idea, though, maybe just tighten your part tolerances)

this shows off all four connector types: armband, bracket, twin-peg and hardpoint

some things look fairly good connected to the armbands! I think that claw piece is a really strong accessory—it’s easy to work with and looks good anywhere

I want to like the bicep armor but it being completely flat on the back really exposes how ugly the connection to the armband is and how absolutely goddamn twiglike the arms are

now let me be clear: the sculpting work on these arms is genuinely good. compare to the most recent Megami Device (the Sol Runner Low Visibility which I am ashamed to admit I purchased purely because she looks like the pilot from ZeroRanger)

The 30MS has this awkward cutout in the bicep for articulation range which is… acceptable. The MD has great panel line detail, an unobtrusive joint with high range of motion, seems like it’s gonna be the obvious winner and then

then you actually look at both of these from the front

the MD frame sculpting is just so… lumpy. the way the arm goes from like organic curve forearm to basically cylindrical bicep looks strange. and the less said about what the fuck is going on with that MD torso, the better

plus can we fuckin’ get a pogchamp in chat for the fact that genuinely, the default body of the 30MS frame is… frankly pretty androgynous? I like that. that’s good stuff

there’s also a great engineering subtlety here: the rotation axis of the wrist joints is offset 45 degrees. let me explain why this is brilliant

one of the common early complaints with the MD body was snapping the wrist joint. this is usually because (1) the hands are rubbery and do take a lot of force applied to a very small joint to get them all the way properly on, and (2) once they ARE on, it’s tricky to see which way the joint is oriented

that tiny wrist joint only rotates on one axis—rotate it on the other, because you lost track or because your hand slipped trying to push on the hand piece, and you’ve just snapped that wrist joint

offsetting it to 45 degrees does not completely solve that problem, but it does make it able to tolerate a wider range of rotations and kind of… coerce them into something valid so the joint moves, instead of snapping! really clever stuff here

the thing I’m most excited about here, though, is that a Megami Device is like $60-80 and 30MS starts at $20

now you do get a lot more mechanical addons in a MD, but like… with a 30MS, you get a bare minimum base body with a little bit of combat parts, and then you can add on whatever a la crate stuff you want on top.

the line even encourages you to go grab non-blind-boxed hair parts and face parts to build your own OC! and they’ve already released eight hairstyles! that fucking rules

(unfortunately HLJ does not sell individual hair parts by choice so my mileage is varying pretty hard right now, because if I bought one and got twin ponytails I would instantly become the joker)

hang on: make that 12 custom OC-able hairs they’ve released

…I think one of these is just Asuna Swordartonline

plus like… the entire body for most of these is just neutral greyscale with the colorful highlights all on separate parts, so you can get alternate torsos (which, yes, are substantially more horny, at least in varying ways which I suppose I must grudgingly issue a small amount of respect for), but which also provide complete packages of different colorful highlights, which is pretty cool!

there is one substantial problem so far, which is that some of these alternate torsos do provide alternate skin colors for the torso. now, that part’s great. but

unfortunately, so far, there do not appear to be *any* faces available, whatsoever, in the darker alternate skin color

so, uh, that’s… not a great look, and heavily limits the utility of actually getting that torso if you can’t make an OC with an actual face, but the line as a whole appears to be having fairly significant production issues so maybe this’ll shake out by the middle of next year or so

(especially since that torso pack appears to be selling particularly well)

update: okay you *can* get one set of faces in C Color from the Luluce

but right now everything is backordered to hell and people are selling these kits for like quadruple price on eBay which is absolutely wild to me

update 2: between when I posted this and now, HLJ posted another four hairs estimated to ship in March of next year

they really are pushing this *hard*. which is cool and all but until I can actually buy an arbitrary specific hair, this is all pointlessly theoretical-- right now the best you can do is a four-pack of exactly one wave