Figure Piece: Dragon Ball X One Piece Kai DX Roronoa Zoro

I'm pretty new to One Piece fandom, I've really only gotten into it in the past year, and I'm about 60 episodes into the anime, and only up to about volume 10 in the manga. Catching up to the massive backlog of episodes and chapters is very daunting, but so far I'm enjoying it.

That said, my favorite character is Roronoa Zoro, the pirate hunter. Once I knew that I would be attending A-kon, it was only natural that I would be on the lookout for a good Zoro figure to start my One Piece/Zoro collection. Figure collecting is something that I've only started around 4-5 years ago, and most of my collection is simply gashapons - small boxes that hold small random figures that you put together. In the past year, I've moved up to collecting the bigger PVC figures as well. At A-kon 21 this year, I ended up buying Dragon Ball X One Piece Kai DX Roronoa Zoro by Banpresto.


This figure has all the attitude you'd expect from Zoro. He looks grouchy, and ready to kick some butt! There's nice creasing on his pants and his sash.


I love that his shirt flares out behind him, very heroic-like. The pattern on the shirt is also painted in nicely, with a mininum of wavy lines and messiness. I'm always pretty impressed to see any kind of pattern in the clothing of a figure, because it's then that much harder to paint and keep looking nice.


The swords are nicely done also, with all their little details done well. My only real complaint with this figure is that the swords tend to fall off pretty much every time I pick the figure up to move it. They stay just fine on the figure when it's standing though.


The hilts on Zoro's swords show evidence of some impressive molding, they look realistically wrapped in the Japanese style, wrinkles and all. There's no cheating out here.


Although he's wearing a shirt and crossing his arms, you can still see the scar Zoro earned facing Mihawk, which is another impressive bit of detailing. On the whole this is a very impressive mold and painting job. This figure is well worth the price I ended up paying for it, which was $30 at convention. It's part of that odd One Piece/Dragonball Z promotion that Shonen Jump had going on a few years ago, to celebrate One Piece's 10th anniversary plus the release of Dragonball Kai. The companion figure to Zoro is Piccolo standing in the exact same pose. While I'm sure they'd look good together, I'm not enough of a Dragonball fan to also buy the Piccolo figure. I'm very happy with the start of my Zoro collection though, and will definitely be.