WONDER WOMAN - Square Enix Play Arts Kai Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice Figure

My Play Arts Kai Dawn of Justice Wonder Woman action figure finally arrived from Japan today, and I'm going to start off right away by saying that the entire thing has been a bad experience. I've had some really bad luck with PAK figures for a while now, and have vowed not to purchase any more. But I'd had this one on pre-order since it was initially solicited and the site I ordered from tends to frown upon cancellation of orders. So, I decided to bite the bullet and hope for the best. Here's what I got:

Yeah, that's the entire inner tray melted in upon itself. We've been having a ridiculous heatwave for near on two weeks now, and apparently the temp in the PO truck was a bit too much for the packaging to handle.  It was a real bear to pry apart, and forget about future storage, but at the least the figure and accessories were undamaged. 

The figure itself is what I've come to expect from PAK: it's ok looking and incredibly frustrating to work with. She's got plenty of joints, and they are all of the clicky variety. That's the problem. I can never get them to click in the place I want the pose to hold - they are always just too far in either direction. With the wrists and ankles, I've got to use needle nose pliers to hold them in place while I rotate the hand or foot to try to get it to bend like I want it to. The hip connections seem to be placed too far forward, and the knee collections are too far back, so she never looks natural just standing straight up. She comes with her shield, sword, lasso (looped), and 4 additional hands. They are well-done enough in terms of detail, sculpt and paint, but it feels a bit sparse for what I paid (about $120) for this figure. The sword fits into a loop on her left hip, but comes up so high that the pommel is right under her armpit. The lasso fits into a notch on her right hip. The sword also fits into one of the gripping hands, with a deal of pressure and twisting, and the shield can be worn on her left arm. It's tricky to get it on there, but I finally managed, again with a good deal of swearing and sweating.

Wonder Woman looks much better posed. Outfitted with her sword and shield, she's not bad. Examining her more closely,  however, reveals some issues with PAK's quality control. There's a silver spot of paint on her left breast. The rivets on her harness are very sloppy. There's an odd spot on her back that looks like it was intentionally left unpainted. The tiara looks crooked. If these issues were on a $20 Marvel Legends figure, I might be willing to overlook them. On a Japanese import figure costing 6x that much? It's unacceptable.

What else? The hair is glued into place around the ears in a way that allows them to stick out. As a result, she looks more like an elf than an Amazonian Warrior Princess. I'm going to stop here. There's no use in beating a dead horse, as the saying goes. To sum it up: I get a great feeling of disappointment with every Play Arts Kai figure I purchase. The solicit pictures look amazing, and then the figure arrives and it's that car or home repair feeling of, "I just got ripped off," and I'm not going to do it any more. Like I said earlier, Wonder Woman is an ok figure. She's light years ahead of the garbage Mattel released, and priced at $40 to $50 she'd be totally reasonable. Unfortunately, her asking price is nearly triple that. I'm still waiting to see how the Mafex version turns out - Superman seems to have been a dud while Batman is getting good reviews, and my experience with Mafex isn't much better than with PAK. Here's hoping that Mezco adds her to their One:12 Collective line, so I can finally have a BvS Wonder Woman to be proud of.