Stash away those pricey idol statues and your thirty amiibos, because we’re about to get cheap and nasty. Gacha! is your fortnightly (or thereabouts) look at the weird world of Japanese capsule toys. In this instalment, we hit the Shinjuku streets (read: the Shinjuku branch of Yodabashi Camera) and actually buy some stuff! 

If you insist on enjoying flashy and expensive figures, you should check out All Your Monies. 

For the next few instalments we’ll be bringing you the experience of actually throwing your hard-earned cash at stupid plastic toys, so to accommodate for that we’ve shaken the format up a little. We’ve also got a guest joining us! Adam decided, for better or worse, to join in on this nonsense with myself and colons. Anyway, let’s get on with it!

These cats keep shitting in my stuff
Bandai, 6 to collect, ¥300

This is basically two gachapon. The ball was also larger than the others, which is totally cheating.

colons: oH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS THING AAAAAAAHHHHHH!

Adam got the best Neko Atsume character, Snorlax.

Adam: I ended with up with Tubbs. I have a friend who likes Neko Atsume and apparently this guy comes along occasionally and eats your supply of fish, so he seems to have this love/hate thing going on. On the one hand, he’s probably one of the most recognisable cats from the game. On the other, he seems to be detested by everyone who actually plays it. Bit of an odd one.

Euri got robbed.

Euri: A real cat poking out of a sock would be pretty adorable. I’d try to do that with my own cat, but I doubt he’d be very pleased about it. As happy as this cat seems to be about its situation, I have to pass on this one. It’s nice enough as part of a larger set, but you have to bend that post into place every so often due to the flimsy plastic and I’m far too lazy to deal with that.

Are there even enough glass cups in the world for these figures: One Piece edition
Bandai, 5 to collect, ¥300

Adam and colons both got Doflamingo, a character well known for his cup-clinging.

colons: I don’t really know anything about One Piece, but this guy looks like kind of a cute hedgehog and has pretty cool shades, and I can relate to their fear of liquid. Pretty difficult to get the balance on the glass right, though.

Adam: For the benefit of colons, Doflamingo is one of the main antagonists. He’s very manipulative (in a pretty literal sense) and is generally a nasty piece of work. However, it seems like being stuck to the side of a mug is too much for him. If Luffy knew that, he could have dealt with him a lot sooner. Then again, it would have also resulted in the Dressrosa arc being very short, so I’m not complaining.

Euri got Chopper, who is a cup-clinging reindeer with a weird face.

Euri: Chopper is a talking reindeer and isn’t part of a cheaply strung together Christmas movie, so we’re already off to a good start. I do generally dislike these cup-clinging figures, but I do find these ones particularly entertaining due to them all being devil fruit users (which, for those of you who aren’t following One Piece, means they can’t swim). Chopper tends to be limited to two specific types of figure: adorable, and scared but still adorable. It’s pretty safe to say that I’d have been happy with either.

The ‘Did we seriously cover this in the first Gacha!’ Vocaloid Collection
Bandai, 5 to collect, ¥300

Len has to be imprisoned while shopping as he keeps doing weird stuff with mirrors.

colons: This Len is adorable as heck, and the fact that he fits into this shopping trolley (also from a gacha) is fantastic because it somehow makes him even more adorable. It’s good to see manufacturers embracing the resolution constraints that such cheap and small figures come with to deliver low-detail designs that still look shark as heck. I am greatly looking forward to including this little guy in future figure dioramas.

Twins! Wait…

Euri: Len is a pretty cool Vocaloid, and I think this chibi style kinda suits him. I’ve probably got far too much Miku figures anyway, but if they were selling her and the rest of the vocaloids in this style and pose, I’d probably snap them up. I think he’ll be sitting on one of my speakers, staring at me as I procrastinate over the next Gacha!

Oh, here she is.

Adam: Much like the Neko Atsume gachapon, I ended up with the arguably the best one you could get. It appears to be Rin fused with a parsnip (or another root vegetable), and it seems to be questioning its own existence. I’m sure it would creep the heck out of some people, but I’m largely immune to that kind of stuff. I don’t know where the idea for this thing came along, though. Maybe it’s a spin-off based on that Miku head with legs? Either way, I gave it to Euri, as I’m not particularly bothered about it.