The truest anime-to-figure representation of Lelouch’s personal Knightmare Frame, the Shinkiro in Robot Damashii form. Being roughly the size of a regular 1/144 Gundam kit, this figure comes at a pretty high price; don’t think you can find any on the net below $80 right now for some reason.
The Robot Damshii incarnation of the Shinkiro is pretty much as plain as you can get with this Knightmare’s design. The figure itself feels very generic; not much to make it stand out. Glossy, sturdy plastic with the basic range of movement in the limbs and torso. Not much in detail but still sports all the essentials.
The colors look rather plain, though I do like the gold and black palette. Float unit is a sort of candy coated glittery shit-brown. The little gunmetal section on the float unit right behind the head was painted by hand just because.
Forehead gem is molded in a transparent purple; you can see the peg inside that holds it to the head. The Shinkiro is literally a four-eyes; it has two sets of red eyes, though the paint apps on them aren’t the best. It’s not really noticeable, so I don’t mind so much, but the lower two eyes are very small, and thus the jobs on them are kinda messy.
Articulation is rather basic; elbows can only bend about ninety degrees, and they’re quite long and limber. Knees can bend pretty far due to the double-jointed system that’s required for transformation.
The only real gripe I have with it is the lack of waist articulation. The way Shinkiro is designed, you get a ball joint for the waist, but problem is the hips are too high to allow it to actually rotate. It can only bend about a millimeter before the upper torso twists right off.
Landspinners are there, but look rather dinky and useless…they don’t really lay on the ground flat unless you have the Shinkiro’s legs pointed straight down. Wheels are tiny plastic things…nothing quite noteworthy.
No Slash Harkens with this Knightmare. Not too sure if they ever existed on it to begin with, though the Composite Ver. Ka. claims them to be inside the knees.
Hey, an opening cockpit! The hatch opens up on a simple hinge, and the interior isn’t very deep. Painted all in a full gunmetal, there’s not much detail and no Lelouch, but it’s a nice little gimmick. Unfortunately it’s far too small to fit any conventional pilot figures inside, including the small Lelouch included with the Robot Tamashii Gawain.
Chest opens up to reveal the Zero Beam; pretty sure that’s just a nickname for the weapon given to it by the fanbase; can’t remember exactly what it’s called. You get the little prism-reflector that can be removed from the chest or kept inside. Nothing particularly special about this gimmick, though it does stay true to the anime and gets the essentials done well.
Wrist -mounted Hadron Blasters are there as well; hidden away under the wrists, they’re rather stubborn little buggars to try to get out.
The painting on them seems a bit sloppy (the red) but they’re such small and insignificant weapons I didn’t care enough to go back and fix it.
Shinkiro’s most defining feature in Code Geass was its Absolute Defense Territory Protection System, replicated surprisingly in figure form. The system is supposed to be the ultimate shield, and it seems Bandai took that definition to heart when they created a giant clear pink board to cover the Shinkiro.
The molding for the Absolute Defense Territory is nice, though it’ll look somewhat strange with a giant pink piece of clear plastic on display. One of its advantages is that it’s very sturdy; the Defense System connects to slots under the Shinkiro’s shoulders by two clear pink poles.
And then…because of the shortage of actual useable accessories for this Knightmare, and because the holding hands need to have some semblance of purpose, Bandai decided it’d be cool to give us the anti-FLEIJA javelin.
I could honestly care less for this thing; it was never even used in this form by the Shinkiro in-show, and looks totally out of place. I suppose you could have it look like it’s bludgeoning some other poor soul to death with it, but beyond that I deemed it nigh-useless. Nice that it’s there, though couldn’t really care less if it weren’t.
Shinkiro is transformable into submarine fortress mode, though it’s nothing quite special. Never cared for this feature on the Knightmare to begin with, since the alternate mode doesn’t look that impressive. Kinda looks like a flying/swimming block.
Transformation is extremely simplistic; just fold the arms back, pull out the extra joint in the legs and fold them back all the way, squash the head into the torso and then the torso into the lower torso, and you’re done! The land-spinner wheels actually serve a further purpose by pegging into the float pack and keeping the legs in place.
All in all Shinkiro is a decent figure, as the Robot Tamashii line goes. I feel like this line is pretty much dedicated to making the figure representations of the mechs as simple and anime-accurate as possible. The Shinkiro certainly looks like it jumped right off the screen; no stylizing or proportion and design changes that I can spot.
The random pegs from the manufacturing and seam lines are sort of an eyesore (especially on the knees) but you learn to ignore them after a while.
At this point, however, with how expensive this figure has become in recent years, and with the release of the Composite Ver. Ka. Shinkiro, I’d say the Robot Tamashii is worth a pass. If you’re in dire need of a figure form of the Shinkiro, the Composite Ver. Ka. gets that job done and more.
