CAMMY

S.H. FIGUARTS (BANDAI)

I don’t talk video games incredibly often on this site, but there’s enough cross-over between them and action figures that I do at least dabble in discussing them from time to time.  As a kid, I wasn’t much into the whole video game thing, but I did get to play the occasional game at an arcade here or there, which gave me a taste of some of the more popular arcade fighting games.  My favorite franchise out of these was definitely Street Fighter, whose colorful cast of diverse characters also happens to lend itself quite nicely to the action figure treatment.  Today, I’m taking a look at my favorite character from the games in figure form.  Let’s take a look at Cammy!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Cammy was released in 2017 as part of Bandai’s S.H. Figuarts line.  She followed up the releases of Ryu and Chun-Li earlier that same year, and like them served as a tie-in with the release of Street Fighter V.  She’s officially based on her character model from that game, of course, but that also makes her a more than serviceable stand-in for Cammy from Street Fighter II, which works well for me.  The figure stands about 6 inches tall and she has 39 points of articulation.  Her articulation scheme is a bit more conventional than the usual Figuarts release, with less floating pieces and just a generally tighter set of joints.  It means she’s also just a touch more restricted than the average Figuarts offering, but that’s not the end of the world.  She can still get a lot of really solid poses.  And they even articulated her hair.  How about that?  I really have only two notable complaints regarding the articulation.  The first is the movement on the neck, which I wish had some more up and down.  The second is to do with how the sculpt and the articulation interact in a very key area of the figure.  Cammy’s posterior is a rather notable part of the character, at least from a pop culture stand point.  It’s also rather prominently shown off in her win animation.  So, the fact that this figure opts to put the break for the hip joints in a rather obvious spot in such a way that it never really sits flush ends up hurting the figure’s appearance a bit.  That being said, in the grand scheme of the whole figure, it’s a more minor point, and the rest of the sculpt and articulation work quite well together.  I was actually quite impressed by the way the joints in the torso work, and the sculpt does a strong job of capturing Cammy’s design from the games.  The construction on the figure also just has a nice solid feel to hit, which gives her a little more weight than the usual Figuart, and I think that really helps her when it comes to posing and playability.  Cammy’s paintwork is clean, bright, and colorful, which are really all the things I would want out of paintwork on a Cammy figure.  There’s not a ton of work going on there, but what is there works well.  Cammy’s accessory selection is pretty decent, no surprise, given that she’s a Figuart.  She gets three different faceplates, three pairs of hands, and a three-piece effect part.  There’s a lot of threes going on here, is what I’m getting at, I guess.  The faces provide standard expression, screaming, and side-eye options, which are fun.  The sideways glance is definitely my favorite of the three, even if it’s just a minor difference.  The hands come in fists, flat, and open gesture, and are great for all sorts of poses.  The effects piece is a little bit difficult to get in place at first, but it makes for an impressive kicking effect.  It’s too bad the stands don’t come standard.  She also included two small cardboard backdrops, allowing you to build a small stage for your fighters.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

My first introduction to the Street Fighter characters was not through the games themselves, but rather through Toy Biz’s X-Men Vs Street Fighter toy line.  I was obviously just in it for the X-Men component, but it did give me a taste of a few of the characters.  Cammy was the second of them I got, and I always rather liked that figure.  When I finally got around to playing one of the games, she was the character I latched onto, and I’ve been hoping to get a figure of her for a while.  I always kicked myself for missing the SOTA one back in the day, and I couldn’t pull the trigger on this one when she was new.  However, she ended up getting traded into All Time, and it was hard to pass at that point.  She’s a really fun figure, and almost makes me want to track down some more of the Figuarts Street Fighter stuff.  For now, though, she’s an awesome stand alone piece.