Aranea Highwind Play Arts Kai

Today I picked up a figure that I’ve been super excited about! It’s a Play Arts Kai figure of Aranea Highwind from Final Fantasy XV! She is my absolute favorite character in the game, so I was really happy when they announced a figure of her and of course I had to pre-order~

Aranea arrived at a perfect time, since yesterday was the one-year anniversary for Final Fantasy XV! ♥ I was really surprised how fast the Air Small Packet shipping was - it took less than a week to arrive, so pretty much EMS speed D: The actual EMS shipping would've been double the amount I paid, lol.

Anyway, let's move on!

Here's the box from front!

And from back

The front of the box actually opens like a book, on the other side there is some information on Aranea's character and a bad ass photo of her >:3 ♥

The figure and all its accessories are packed really nicely. If someone prefers to collect figures leaving them inside their boxes for display, this is one of those figures that looks pretty neat in a box!

Love this art! ♥

I tried to get a close-up of her face through the plastic, sorry about the light reflections... :'D

The stand

Some instructions on how to change the parts

Aaand instructions on assembling the stand... This kinda reminds me of Ikea furniture XDD And let me tell you, assembling it really felt like putting together an Ikea furniture, hahah! I'm still not sure if I did everything 100% correctly...

Removed the plastic cover! I didn't realize it until later, but as you can see from the photo, her helmet is missing from the package ;___; There's just an empty space on upper right where it should be. I double checked the outer box and everything, but there's no sign of it anywhere. I've already contacted Amiami customer service about it and hopefully they'll send me the missing piece... *fingers crossed* I hope that they won't ask me to send back the whole figure and then send a new one to me... That would be much more complicated and end up costing them a lot more too, since shipping from Finland to Japan is quite expensive. But yeah, we'll see what they answer!

Ms. Aranea is out of the box! I absolutely love her, she's looks lovely and has so many nice details ♥ Her armor looks really nice too. The paint job isn't 100% perfect and there are some slight imperfections here and there, but overall I'm very happy with the quality!

From side

From back

Posing with her lance! *o* You definitely don't wanna make this gal angry... The lance came in two parts that were attached together, but I forgot to take a photo.

Face close-up! The paint job doesn't look the most flattering if you look closely, but I'd say that it's understandable for such a tiny face. But I don't think it's too bad! She even has eyelashes, that's so cute! :D

Details on her... skirt? Or whatever that's called :D

I loooove her boots! ♥ I think they were painted to look worn out on purpose.

The "tail" for her helmet that doesn't exist... :'D It can be bent from multiple places, I can imagine that being useful for action poses.

I realized that she can make a heart with one pair of the extra hands! ♥

I need to take some proper photos of this girl at some point! I don't have any photo ideas for her yet, but maybe something will come to my mind later, at least once I get the helmet (if I ever get it XD). I also plan to buy the Ignis figure to accompany Aranea, because I totally ship them!! ♥ That might have to wait for a while though, since I have some expensive figures on pre-order and my Japan trip is getting closer too...

The time has gone SO fast, it's hard to believe that it's December already! Are you ready for the Christmas season? :3 I've usually bought a Christmas chocolate calendar every year, but this time I'm skipping since I couldn't find a Hello Kitty calendar, hahah. Me and Sarg made the first Christmas tarts of the year yesterday and maybe during the weekend we'll put some Christmas decorations around the house \o/

Sugar Dream Koron arrival

If you know me at all, you know that I love pastel colors and everything cute, so these super pastel collaboration Neemos that have been announced/released recently are very deadly to my wallet ^^; Of course I had to pre-order this Sugar Dream Koron! ♥

I was originally not a big fan of the shirt, since I generally don't like bunny things that much and the cat print on Chiika's shirt seemed much cuter. At some point I thought about buying her as well, just to get her outfit (or swap the shirts), but in the end I started to like the bunny shirt and didn't feel the need to buy Chiika anymore X'D

The package screams cuteness ;3;

Do you guys know the heart-shaped candy with cute words on them? I looove how Azone has used them for this box design ♥ After starting my media studies I've started to pay a lot more attention to different kinds of packaging designs, typography, etc. It'd be a dream job to create cute doll box designs :D

Cover of the leaflet

The outfit piece by piece

On this page Koron is pictured together with Chiika, which was the other collaboration doll announced at the same time (though her pre-orders started a month later than Koron's).

Hello there! Her bangs were quite messy and too long for my taste, so I cut them a bit...

Here she is with her shortened bangs :3 

This girl is my new Momo! Previously Momo was Rose Quartz Sahra, but I ended up not bonding with her so I sold her. My original plan was to have three different Sahra releases as sisters Miki, Misa and Momo, but they all are going to have different faces and only one of them (Miki) is still a Sahra ^^; Still haven't found a new Misa, but I must say that I'm very tempted to hunt down Sugar Dream Miu...

Close-up of the bunny print

And a close-up of the bag. It would've been nice if there had been an animal illustration on the bag as well, but this works too :)

The doll is really cute, but there's quite a noticeable color difference between the head and body. I don't know why it doesn't really bother me when it comes to Pureneemos, if this was a BJD, the difference would drive me insane X'D I still don't think that Azone should sell the brand new dolls looking like this, though... If there's no color difference in the promo photos, there shouldn't be color difference in the products they send out either =.= But I guess people don't really care about such things, especially in Japan where most doll collectors probably just buy these dolls to put them on display.

Three of my pink-haired Neemos ♥ Love how they all have pink hair, but the shades are different :3 I think this Koron has the most beautiful shade of pink so far, it's like bubblegum or cotton candy~

I just had to take a picture of Momo with Bulla, this round super soft cat plushie that I got from the latest anime convention :D If only this exact plushie also existed in a tiny size...

I'm excited to see if there will be more dolls in this Sugar Dream series (besides Koron, Chiika and Miu), would love to see some pastel purple hair *o* Although at the same time I'm also hoping that there won't be any new Neemos that I need to get, since I really need to save up for next year's travelling plans XD

***

I'm currently at my parents and we'll leave to our summer cottage tomorrow. Gonna stay there for a week and hopefully get some nice photos, as I have 2 Dollfie Dreams and 3 Pureneemos with me :) The weather forecast for the week seems quite promising so far! 

Meow x Meow Lycee box opening

I haven't posted any Pureneemo box openings after February, even though I've received a few dolls after that... IRL stuff kept me so busy that I had to open the dolls in a hurry and didn't really have the time for taking any BO pictures :/ It's a shame, since I'd love to document all of my doll arrivals to have a nice memory for later. But at least now that I have more time during the summer, I can post box openings of the dolls that arrive before my summer break ends!

Anyway, this is the box opening of my Meow x Meow a la Mode Lycee ! She is the standard version :) Because I'm stupid and forgot to set up my alarm, I missed the pre-orders pretty much everywhere, but luckily managed to find her from CDJapan - they still had ONE available :'D I got so lucky there, I know many people missed on her and have been having a hard time trying to find her afterwards...

I really love this cat-themed series from Azone - the outfits are so adorable and most of them feature cute pastel colors! ♥ Each of the dolls comes with a set of cat ear hairband and tail too~ With this Lycee, I fell in love with the combination of pastel purple and black, the cute cat print on the dress and the adorable hoodie with cat ears! ♥ I also have Sahra and Maya from the Meow x Meow series, and I'd love to get my hands on the Direct Store version of Alisa as well (mainly for the clothes though) ;3; I have a feeling that Azone knows what's my (and many other people's) weak spot, lol...

Now let's move on to the photos!

The cutie in the box!

I love how her mouth can look like ":I" from far, but when you get a closer look you see that it's actually ":3"

Side of the box

And the other side

Back

Cover of the leaflet, featuring both standard and Direct Store version of Lycee

An overview of all the outfit pieces and accessories she comes with 

Instructions on how to put on the cat tail. I love the idea of a little "pocket" on back of the panties, it's really easy to slip the magnet inside and the tail stays on its place very well! This way you can also easily use the tail on some other doll, it just needs to wear the panties :3

The pictures on right show some alternative dress-up ideas, those outfits really show how different the same doll can look just by changing the outfit!

I must admit that I'm quite tempted to try to find the pink-haired Lycee as well... I don't need the doll itself though, but I'd really like to get the outfit and it's so hard to find the default outfits for sale separately :/ The only ones that I've been have cost pretty much the same as the whole doll, so...

Out of the box! Now we just need to take that plastic thing off...

Kirari says hello! ♥ I previously had Kirari as Maya, but I didn't bond with her so well. I'm liking this doll a lot more already and think that she's a better fit for Kirari's character :3

Her hair looks black in most photos, but it's actually a very, very dark brown. It's so close to black that you wouldn't be able to tell, unless you compared it with a doll that has raven black hair :D

Here you can see the length of her hair a bit better :3

Put on the cat hairband, so adorable~ *w* ♥

Nyan nyan~ ♥♥

I didn't take any photos with the hoodie... As much as I love it, I think it would actually work better with some other outfit because of the puffy sleeves on this dress ^^;

I'm really happy with this doll, but it was a bit disappointing to see how poorly the bows on the socks had been sewed on... Basically one of them was already half loose when I took the doll out of the package >.< After these photos I ended up removing the bows completely and threw them to trash, lol XD The socks actually look even cuter without the bows, I think!