5 Tips You Should Know for Collecting Anime Figures!

hey guys haley here so in today's video i thought it's about time that i shared with you guys some of my best tips or general advice on how to go about starting an anime figure collection or just buying anime figures in general obviously if you watch my channel i have a pretty big anime figure collection of all different shapes sizes brands different values and so i've been collecting for a few years now so i just wanted to collect a few tips that i think would be good for probably beginner collectors and share them with you today i also get a lot of questions in my comments about a few of these things so hopefully this will address those too so without further ado i present uh five tips for collecting anime figures tip number one is to establish your army so if you've decided to get into figure collecting you've just signed your wallet up for a war boy so to build your army you need to know what options you have in terms of recruitment so first off you've got your prize figures these are generally mass produced figures that are created for japanese crane machine games the pros they are generally quite cheap maybe 20 to 40 us dollars they're quite durable and they're quite easy to find both obviously in japan but overseas as well the cons here is that the quality is what you'd expect for the price and also variety wise they're fairly limited to popular series they're good if you don't want to spend too much money on anime figures and if you want to get a lot for less and they're good if you like miku or rem there's like a gazillion prize figures then you've got your nendoroids so these are aligned by good smell company and they're essentially chibi versions of like every single anime character and and some others they come with different faces and props and you can kind of swap them out the pros here is that the quality is amazing these are not your typical funko pops and also they are very very collectible there's so many and they look so good in a collection and your chances are you'll find whatever character you're looking for cons is that they can be relatively expensive they could set you back 40 to sixty dollars uh retail um they could be a pain to assemble and not everyone's really into the chibi style then you've got your figmas and other articulated figures so figmas are another line by good smell company um so these are super articulated figures that tend to look very true to their original character the pros here is that these are really fun to pose and you can kind of set up your own scenarios or scenes and they're also always amazingly detailed the cons here again is that they're not cheap they could set you back maybe 70 to 90 us dollars and not everyone likes the look of the joints and i think some of these could be on the smaller side as well so then you've got your scale figures so these could be a 1 8 a 1 7 or even a 1 4 scale this just means that it's like that scale to the anime character if they existed irl which they don't um but it can also just be a catch-all term for essentially a higher quality figure so the pros here obviously is that you've got a higher quality you're going to get a higher quality sculpt more intricate details a better paint job better base um and i think you get more variety as well with the characters that you see and the cons here is the price oh my god the price um and i guess some scale figures can get pretty rare which means you're looking at pretty high aftermarket prices most of the time as well so to recap let's say you like miku and you want to start a miku collection you could get one quarter scale miku for 27 000 yen or these two miku scales for the same price or these four miku figmas for the same price or these six veku nendoroids for the same price or you could get these like eight miku prize figures obviously that showed that with the same amount of money spent everyone's collection can look very different so you want to work out your game plan you want to work out how much you want to spend on this hobby and then how do you want to expand your army do you want to have two or three beautiful scale figures or a mass of 18 nendoroids it's up to you get a feel for what you like tip number two prepare to pre-order now if we think about video games we've probably all been burnt by pre-order a game that turned out to be pretty shitty and so we might have been trained that pre-ordering bad but not for figures so pre-ordering anime figures is actually very very common companies will use the pre-ordering amount to determine how many to manufacture and they'll tend to manufacture a bit of a surplus amount on top of that but it does mean that if you didn't pre-order your chances of getting one on release might be low because you're kind of just targeting that they did make a surplus so if you're trying to get your hands on a new figure that was fairly popular you might be looking at paying more than the people who pre-ordered did to get it and if you miss out entirely then you're gonna have to look at buying it secondhand so this whole pre-ordering thing does have its downsides first up you're committing really early sometimes over a year for something that you might not even want when it comes out secondly the whole pre-ordering thing introduces a hype that you don't want to miss out and so you might end up spending more money on things that you probably shouldn't be dropping your money on it's definitely rarer than video games but sometimes you might get a figure that didn't look like it did in the prototype images this could be when the company has a bit of a bad reputation and also the bases on the prototype generally aren't the ones you get so you never really know what kind of base you're getting until you get it on the day so if you see a figure up for pre-order that you really really like you should pre-order it because chances are that is how you get your figure at the best price and you're guaranteed to pick it up however you shouldn't be too trigger-happy with pre-ordering figures because that can get dangerous especially for newcomers that are just falling into the figure collecting rabbit hole so it is definitely a balancing act it's not easy but maybe in a future video i'll talk more about how i make those kind of decisions tip three where you should buy your figures i always get this question and nine times out of ten if it's for a new figure my answer is army there are some reasons behind this first off shipping stuff internationally is expensive it doesn't matter where you buy from ultimately your chunk of plastic is gonna have to get from japan or china to where you live and this is going to be reflected in the price somehow so army army does tend to be closest to the recommended retail price of a figure but you've got to pay the shipping yourself also amiami's pre-ordering system works by you paying for your figure when it ships so by pre-ordering something this does give you more time to budget and prepare for the head to your wallet to make a point let's compare prices for this one seven figure of mega me by chara annie coming out september 2021 so the army army price is 17 000 yen which is about 163 us dollars let's assume shipping is pretty expensive and let's round up to 200 us dollars all up now looking at some us stores crunchyroll is 230 big bad toy store is 235 with a four dollar flat rate shipping tokyo otaku mode is 202 before shipping i'm not sure if you'd get free shipping solaris is 231 us dollars right stuff 222 without shipping good smart us is 185 with a 18 flat rate shipping so that makes it 203 dollars ship so i'm not saying that amiyami will always be cheaper you'll always find a ton of variants for figure prices between retailers but in my experience i have found amiami to be the cheapest this is also because i tend to ship multiple things from army army so i split the shipping across all of those things so it does depend on your buying habits but ultimately you're gonna have to pay for that thing to be shipped to you whether it's paying more for the item or paying for the item and more for shipping i do think with more high volume items like nendoroids pop-up parades and figmas this isn't always necessarily the case so i do recommend checking your local retailers for the prices there i will say though if there is a figure that you desperately want and money is no object for you and you want it right now uh that stellaris japan does tend to have a lot of rare and expensive figures in stock although in my opinion their prices have always been ridiculously overpriced but they do tend to have the things that i want in stock just throwing that out there tip number four is that one man's trash is another man's waifu i'm now going to contradict my point from earlier and tell you that if you didn't pre-order your figure it's fine you just buy that pre-owned over half of my collection i picked up pre-owned so again buying second hand is very very common in the hobby and that's a good thing because that helps your figures retain their value and don't just shop for the new stuff because your favorite figure of the character you like might have already come and gone um so whenever there's a new character i like i go to my figure collection um this is just a website it's amazing it's just a huge database of basically every figure ever i search for my character i sort by popularity and i just boom i want them all so it's dangerous so there are two main ways to buy figures pre-owned you either buy them through a store or you buy them directly from the person selling it store wise i've only ever purchased from japanese stores i find that they are so strict with any of their wear and tear rules that i've never had any issues with the quality of the secondhand figure i've received so if they grade a figure as a then to me it's basically brand new so store wise we have amiami again they tend to rotate their pre-owned stock pretty quickly uh almost every day they will drop like 100 to 150 new pre-owned figures at the same time so a lot of people like me as well i will pretty religiously check for any good pre-owned deals they do get stashed up pretty quickly you'll see if they don't have a price on it that means it's already been sold um but i highly recommend army i've never had any issues and i've found some great deals on there then we have mandarake this is a huge chain in japan and they basically sell second hand anime nerdy geeky goods frankly mandarake is a bit confusing to use i'll put some other video resources on how to use it there but mandarake is great for rare figures their pricing is great and you can also get a bunch of other super niche merch if you know how to search for it so things like shikishi boards or dojins can badges acrylic charms like all of that kind of stuff great on mandarake so the other route here is to buy directly from the people who are selling it so this will be through things like facebook marketplace uh dedicated facebook buy and sell groups my figured collection forums as well so this is another great way especially if you don't want to play for international shipping so the bigger danger here though is you might get ripped off which leads me to my next tip my next tip is don't get ripped off so there are two parts to not getting ripped off first fair pricing and secondly avoiding bootlegs so with fair pricing you need to know how much your figure you're buying is actually worth you don't want to drop 60 on a prize figure that you could have bought from army army for 600 yen so always always check what other people are selling that figure for on my figure collection you can check amiami pre-owned listings and you can check them on mandarake and see what the last sold price was obviously if you're taking a japanese price you should consider that you would have to pay for that to be shipped to you so you have to put a bit of shipping padding on the pricing if you're buying it locally and this will help you set a fair price when negotiating not all figures are made equal so make sure you're not getting ripped off if you're buying through things like facebook marketplace like i always see rare anime figures and it's like a thousand yen on harmony and they're trying to sell it for like 10 times that price it's crazy the second part is not getting ripped off is bootlegs this is the reason i wouldn't recommend ebay for buying figures unless the person is a genuine person and they're willing to kind of send you photos of the item they're selling and it's not just stock photos that's probably just going to be a bootleg so if they're not from sites that i trust or facebook group specifically for figure collecting um or my figure collection forums then i generally wouldn't buy second hand from them i have been burnt before a couple of times maybe i'll mention them in another video but the trick with not buying bootlegs is to always always ask for more photos um i find the box is a great way to tell if you're buying a bootleg or not so you can go to my figure collection see what the actual box looks like and usually see oh there's a missing logo or a missing holographic sticker then you know it's a bootleg so you could ask for pictures of what you're buying as well and try to cross-check that with the actual figure you bought but ultimately if the price seems too good to be true then it probably is so just a few more lightning round tips my first one is keep the figure boxes try and find maybe under your bed in the garage somewhere to store your figure boxes this will always help when you sell them second hand or if you ever need to move secondly you can use sites like buyfriend.moe to check the stock levels of all of the items on amiami and you can set price alerts that will send you an email when something you want is in stock this is great if you've missed a pre-order for a figure and you're hoping that someone else cancels their pre-order so that you can jump in and take their place so there you have it those are my tips this is definitely not a definitive guide by any means i didn't touch on the different manufacturers figure maintenance the general mindset of whether to buy or not buy something um but i hope this is a good starting point especially for people that are new to anime figure collecting um if you guys have any other thoughts or tips please check them in the comments down below i hope that if you are new to this that you feel a little bit more informed and are looking forward to starting your collection also apologies to your wallet in advance though but anyway um thanks for watching everyone and i'll catch you in the next one bye

Channel: Daijoububu

Views: 49,404

Rating: 4.983582 out of 5

Keywords: anime figures, anime figure collecting, anime figures 2021, anime figure, figure collecting, figures, figure, where to buy anime figures, mandarake, amiami, anime, collection, nendoroid, otaku, japan, manga, weeb, figma, miku, preorders, tips, merch, haul, fate, preowned, daijoubu, Daijoububu, anime collection, good smile company, prize figures, anime figure collecting guide, anime figures unboxing, Anime figures collection, anime figures from wish, anime figures amazon, Anime figures from aliexpress

Id: paqLhq0b6YA

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021