Greetings Anime Fans and Toy Hounds and welcome to another Anime Saturday! I’m back to Kantai Collection this week and checking out another prize figure from Taito, the secret weapon of the Fleet Girls, the mighty battleship Yamato. Just don’t call her Hotel Yamato. Seriously, don’t. She doesn’t like that.

We’ve seen plenty of Taito’s prize figure packaging on these lazy Saturdays and this one is more of the same. The figure comes in an enclosed box with perforations on the side to make some handles. You get some nice artwork showing off the figure and just enough English on the package to let you know what’s inside. Everything is collector friendly and the figure comes baggied and in need of just a little simple assembly. As always these figures land right about in the 9-inch scale, give or take a bit.

Yamato is one of my favorite designs of all the Fleet Girls. She’s just so regal and lovely. The set up here is pretty simple. The figure’s feet tab into the base as does a holder for the umbrella. This is another one of Taito’s “Day Off” figures, which show the girls during their down time, which is especially appropriate for Yamato because she spent so much of her time on the series at the Truk Lagoon base waiting to be put into action.

The outfit here is more sophisticated than the regular Fleet Girls’ uniforms. She has a white top with a burgundy skirt. The collar features a gold chrysanthemum crest, the seal of Imperial Japan, and she has a gold neckerchief as well. Her skirt features cut outs at her hips to frame the anchors hanging there. On her legs she has one thigh high stocking, with the other ending just below the knee, and rudder boots on her feet.

Yamato is holding aloft a plate of food in her right hand and clasping a menu in her left. These could be references to the hospitality that she extended toward the Fleet Girls when they arrived at Truk Lagoon. They could also reflect that even after the simplest of maneuvers, Yamato required huge amounts of food to sustain her energy because she was such a powerful battleship. Even a simple training exercise with Fubuki required a vast meal afterwards.

The portrait is excellent. Yamato’s face is dwarfed by the copious amount of hair that sweeps out behind her and also flows off of her shoulders. Her eyes are perfectly printed and her mouth is open with delight, because… FOOD! She features her radar apparatus on head and her ponytail is bound with a ring of pink chrysanthemums. The skin tones on the figure are warm and even. I’ve been pretty impressed with Taito’s work on these figures in the past and Yamato is no exception. The character design offers a lot of opportunities to show off with the sculpt and the paint is especially well done. I love the bright gold used for the neckerchief and collar crest, and there’s a little more on the tiny tassels that hang down from her radar array.

The base is just as large as it needs to be and features a sculpted brick floor pattern. Yamato’s trademark umbrella is set atop a structure made to look like the battleship’s mast.

And so, Taito has done it again, delivering another superb addition to my ever expanding collection of Fleet Girls. I’ve found that Amazon has been a great source for these figures and Yamato here set me back a whopping $18 shipped from within the US. There aren’t a lot of aspects of figure collecting that make me feel like I’m getting a great value these days, but I’ll buy figures like this for under twenty bucks all day long! That probably explains why my KanColle shelves are starting to get so congested.