With Wonder Festival celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, there was a lot to see and a surprising amount of figures from Armored Trooper VOTOMS.
As with prior Wonder Festivals, the event is split across three halls in Makuhari Messe. The first part is for all the new and upcoming commercial releases in one hall, with the other two halls covering items made and sold by fans.
On the commercial side, Good Smile Company had a strong showing, with many Nintendo-related figures from Metroid and Splatoon. However, their mecha releases were at a separate event, so they were pretty light on that front at Wonder Festival.
Following that, we had some interesting additions from Kaiyodo, which is updating its excellent Revoltech line of figures. These new figures will feature characters from Street Fighter and Ninja Gaiden, among other things.
Arcadia also rolled out a re-release of their transforming SDF-1 Macross toy designed by T-Rex. This version of the SDF-1 is also from Macross: Do You Remember Love?, which ties in nicely with the new 4K remaster recently shown in theaters and given a new Blu-ray release.
The other major standout was CCS Toys, which continues to deliver impressive diecast mecha figures. Their upcoming Ultimate Dancouga figure from Super Robot Wars 30 also looks particularly epic.
As for the fan-made side of things, like I said previously, there were a lot of VOTOMS kits on show. This is somewhat curious, as we don’t have any major anniversaries for the series looming and no new anime on the way either. There was at least one conversion kit for the Super Robot Wars 30 Scopedog, which makes some sense, but the rest were pretty standard designs.
There were a few Grantly Dogs, the mass-produced version of the Bloodsucker from The Last Red Shoulder OVA, but apart from that, VOTOMS had a solid and consistent showing.
One other piece of interesting paraphernalia was an Armored Core-themed HUD lamp, which I happily purchased (shown above). This was based on the HUD used in Armored Core Nexus, Ninebreaker, and Last Raven, as it features the CR-WR93RL linear rifle from those games. The LED base also allows you to change the HUD’s color, and I opted for green as that was what the classic Armored Core games used.
All in all, though Wonder Festival 2025 Winter had a lot on show, and while the likes of Takara Tomy were absent, as well as a few other companies, there is always an enormous amount of stuff to look at from the fans.
Wonder Festival 2025 Winter Gallery
Date: 9th February 2025
Entry: 4,000 yen
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