Did you think this week’s F4F Q&A would be dull just because we’re in Week 2 of the Berserk Guts Exclusive pre-order? You thought wrong! Not only is there a new Dark Souls pre-order this week, but we also get the answer to some burning questions like:

WHO will be the first Cowboy Bebop statue up for PO?
WHAT might the price be on Rider Link compared to Link on Epona?
WHEN would F4F seriously consider Yooka-Laylee?
WHERE might we see the Mario on Yoshi statue revealed and put up for order?
HOW many failed PVCs would it take to sink F4F?
WHY are Alex & Chock staring at that Mario Question Block?

All this and more in this week’s F4F Q&A #66 Recap!

The Week in Review:

• Guts pre-orders still open until at least next Friday (April 20th)
• Pre-orders for Guts will remain open past April 20th unless Guts hits 1000 orders before then
• Crash Resin Last Chance Weekend is next weekend (April 20th-23rd)
• Alex went to check on Artorias SD production this week; production wasn’t where Alex wanted it to be yet, so he’ll revisit next week
• Alex visited the 25th Anniversary Sonic factory this week and gave it the thumbs up, so the packaging stage can start soon
• Guts’ launch on Tuesday could have gone smoother
• Had a discussion today about what to bring to Gamescom; majority of stuff brought will be statues that have been shown before but not seen
• Alex was knackered Wednesday evening from being up so early Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday
• Got some news on Wednesday that totally threw off the plans for the next pre-order that F4F was ready to announce
• Thursday had a meeting with Animegami (a UK retailer) where Alex was given some tips on digital marketing
• Animegami will have a little secret to show at MGM London
• Inner edge added to Alucard’s jacket this week
• Alex stomped at Sonic 25th good during the drop test
• Worked on Modern Amy Rose pose this week
• Hopefully for some good news for those on the Sonic Boom8 Wait List toward the end of the month
• Katamari: There were more initial orders for Dipp than for Prince, but also more cancellations; ultimately more pieces of Prince were shipped than Dipp
• A couple of things were approved this week at the 3D and physical stage; Alex and Chock have fun looking at the screen together and teasing us about what they see
• True Form Midna is getting closer
• Mario on Yoshi is pretty much approved in 3D now

On TTs:

• Splatoon TT: Still neck-and-neck between ‘Yes’ and ‘No’
• Steins;Gate TT: 68 ‘Yes’ Votes, 58 ‘No’ Votes
• SMT TT Next Week: Shin Megami Tensei
• Attack on Titan TT in 2 Weeks

The Q&A!:

• Yooka-Laylee: Alex is always interested, but needs to see 600+ ‘Yes’ Votes in Support for Yooka-Laylee; Alex really wants to be all over YL
• Local collectors can’t just pick up their statues from the warehouses to cut out shipping costs since there’s a cost of traveling to and through the warehouses to be considered; also there could be problems with collectors trying to open up their statues and bring up any potential quality issues with the warehouse workers
• Tom Nook would be the first
• Bloody Exclusive and Non-Bloody Exclusive Guts will share the same edition number pool, as will the regular editions
• Alex would love to do another Katamari Cousin as a repaint, but can’t see the sales being enough to convince him to move forward on something like that
• Conker is looking really good–will hopefully go up for pre-order 4 months after whenever the Banjo-Kazooie pre-order is
• The prospective title for Chock’s eventual biography: “Life with Red Bull One to Play, One For Display, One For a Rainy Day”
• More masks for the Zelda line: on the agenda to discuss with Nintendo
• Zero is still coming
• Guts has met the expectation that it would do well in comparison to the other anime lines so far, but could always do better
• Varia Suit Samus is getting there
• Alex doesn’t really see movie lines happening
• Originally Jet was going to go up for order before Spike, but Jet has been leapfrogged by Spike because of the revisions to Jet’s head; F4F hasn’t forgotten the cigarette for Spike
• The F4F website literally goes and shits itself when people buy multiple different items in one order; the website may be overhauled to restrict different items being placed on the same order together
• No pre-order/Reservation Friday next week–F4F thought their would be, but life threw them a curveball
• Alex hasn’t had a chance to read all the feedback on Guts yet and finalize what revisions might be made to the statue
• Kamina has been submitted to Kanako, and then will go to the licensor
• Next statue up for pre-order will be announced next week (but won’t go up for order next week)
• Dark Souls Mimic statue pre-order planned for June/July tentatively; people may be sleeping on Mimic now, but will be blown away when they see it
• Mario on Yoshi PO probably won’t be until September-ish time, maybe the prototype can be debuted at GamesCom and pre-orders can open there? It could be the main star of the show? [Dabid Note: Gamescom?! GAH!! Can I justify going to Germany just to take a bunch of photos of Mario on Yoshi in person and report on it? Can I?!]
• Alucard Edition Size? Mario Question Block says “Tough Luck”. Maybe next week?
• Still working on Dracula head
• Skull Knight and Berserker Armor are still the next Berserk statues going up for order
• The entire pre-order calendar on the F4F site is completely wrong right now
• Mugen will go into production as soon as Tekken Jin finishes up at that factory, followed by Snake
• Nothing to say about Nier license
• If everything goes according to plan, True Form Midna PO in Q2 2018
• Alex has considered and needs to revisit considering a group of the Okami children together
• Have to check on Ms. Aesland’s size (Morrigan from Darkstalkers)
• Phoenix Wright prototype is done, may still need some tweaking to the eyes
• Bowser’s pose isn’t supposed to be like a perfect mirror–it’s to give the pose more fluidity
• If F4F could make something from a Blizzard game… maybe it would be 1:1 life-size busts or figures? Something Blizzard wouldn’t make themselves.
• Alex made something for Hearthstone, but then stopped playing the game after being denied the license and putting the piece in the Vault
• No response from Darksiders licensor yet
• Rider Link is going to be 3-D Printed next week
• Looking like True Form Midna will be up for pre-order before Sheikah Slate
• No chance of reissuing older statues for new collectors–F4F would be mashed if they did so
• F4F has loads of licenses that they’d love to do more for if there was support
• Licenses usually last 2-3 years; going into years 10, 11, 12 with Nintendo
• BOTW Rider Link resin may be $600-$700; need to see how the factories price it. Definitely won’t have the same price as Link on Epona did ($450) many years ago (Link on Epona went up for pre-order in September 2011).
• Rider Link’s horse is much bigger than Epona, and the design is more complicated and has a lot more details–no chance of being priced the same as Link on Epona
• The size of Rider Link is 100% accurate to the game in comparison to his horse–horse is chunkier than Epona was
• Is it actually 1/6 scale? “What is 1/6th scale on elf? I guess you could say it’s 1/6. It’s kind of hard to say.” The Links on the Rider Link statue and on Epona are the same size as each other, however–only the BOTW horse is bigger.
• Darksiders scale could be a little smaller since Alex isn’t locked into the same scale the way he is with Link on Epona/Rider Link, but $550 is probably way too low of an estimate for the cost of Darksiders characters on horses
• Artorias SD did well and F4F was really happy with his sales
• Isaac from Golden Sun TT is doing significantly worse than Isaac Clark from Dead Space TT
• Banjo and Crystal Dragon pre-orders will be close-ish to each other; Alex doesn’t think they’re close to each other
• No changes to Guts’ sword (yet)
• No update on Genos (One Punch Man)
• My Hero Academia: “It’s complicated. This is the kind of conversation that really gets fleshed out in Vegas during the Licensing Expo.”
• Spike will definitely be before Jet now in Alex’s mind
• F4F will be in Gamescom for the entire show
• Metal Gear Solid was without a doubt the hardest license for F4F to get so far
• Earthworm Jim license is being sold–and not to Alex Davis
• Rusev Day: “He’s beastly.”
• F4F isn’t going anywhere–can revisit Hellsing is a few years if no one else is making statues for it then
• Chock and Alex got to know each other on Facebook after Alex opened the F4F OCC; Chocks was so friendly and helpful and then the two found out that they only lived 5 minutes away by car; Chock came in just to say hello and one thing led to another and two years later there are pictures on Facebook of Chockles looking at “cocks”
• Alex and Chock both lived in the UK before Hong Kong
• Alex got into figure-making because of his cousin; WWE led to Hasbro and Magic the Gathering, which led to Nintendo and the rest is history
• Alex chose to get into resin statues instead of PVC because the barrier for getting into PVCs is huge–it’s far far far far cheaper to get into making resin statues; you need to sell tens of thousands of PVCs to make it viable: “PVCs will kill you”
• F4F couldn’t survive three PVCs doing poorly in a row, but is very fortunate to be in a situation where if one PVC figure flopped, they would be okay
• The first figures that Alex Davis worked on–directing sculptors on WWE, Magic the Gathering and Tales of Midnight
• Alex and Chock like to keep things “profesh” (professional)
• Alex never expected the F4F OCC to get so lewd (#BlameChocks)
• Too early to say what the next Zelda piece after Rider Link could be
• Nothing to report on the Persona 5 license
• The majority of cancellations happen right before statues are ready to ship, which is the difficulty in converting Wait Lists before statues are in-stock at the warehouses
• Alex will sort out his plans to see if there’s anything that can done with Aika this next week
• The first concept for Modern Metal Sonic was completely scrapped
• No chance of Guts EX coming with a forward-facing head sculpt as if he was leaping past the Blood Spirits
• There’s no “timesheet” for when F4F OCC admins are online to know who to tag or message [Just tag me 24/7, guys. Just my name being typed in the OCC is enough to summon me. 😉 ]
• Will see if they can do anything with Nier Automata, but “it’s complicated”–will try
• Future Berserk statues will not all have a plain black base and also a more elaborate base like Guts
• You paint translucent resin using translucent colors
• No plans for signature cards to be available for an additional fee past Day One
• Feeding Frenzy has been limited and not time-based so that F4F doesn’t become very, very poor
• Alex likes Dead Space and wants to see a line made, but there’s some behind-the-scenes stuff complicating it; Dead Space is in the Top 5 Ranked TT Polls
• True Form Midna is months away and not weeks–but not too many months
• Working through some minor tweaks on Midna
• No JoJo TT in the near future–F4F was denied the license before and would like to be more established with anime before trying again
• Pre-order calendar needs to be updated and will be looked into, as it’s completely wrong right now
• F4F can have a conversation with Nintendo about Twilight Princess Link 1/4 [at Las Vegas Licensing Expo]
• No plans for more WWE, but F4F would love to un-Vault their statues of The Rock and Ric Flair, and their Jake the Snake and Hulk Hogan busts
• Alex will be getting all four versions of Guts
• Bayonetta’s pose will be a secret; unknown if PO will be this year–“gonna be tough”
• Alex has a certain idea in his mind for how to execute Shadow Fighter Kirby that he wants to test out and see how it goes
• Bring your statue bases to Gamescom and Alex & Chock will be happy to sign them!
• Wouldn’t be opposed to doing Gundam, but F4F was denied for the Gundam license back in the day
• Bowser Jr.? “RTF.” (Rally the Fans.)
• Sound effect for Banjo-Kazooie statue? [No comment–Alex drinks water.]
• More Skyward Sword Zelda statues possible
• Were all ready to announce the next PO, but then a spanner was thrown in the works
• No information right now on variants/bundles for Alphonse Elric
• Base for Alphonse is big and cool
• Alex has been thinking about adding a metal band with edition size to the front of statue bases
• Alex drinks Oolong tea during the Q&A
• Alex has done sneak peeks with licensor approval in the past and gotten his ass slapped down, which is why we don’t even know what’s going on with Kamina and other statues now
• Meta-Ridley is at the paint stage right now
• The Dark Souls Ring of Favor will go up for order after the stream–30% deposit due at time of ordering with an estimated Q3 2018 release date; price is $176 USD; comes in same packaging/case as previous Torch Torch Dark Souls rings

…And that’s it for this week! Learn anything you liked, #F4Fans?

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