Last year Jada Toys came out of left field with their new line of Ultra Street Fighter II figures and blew a lot of people away. This is a company known for making cars and metal miniatures, so I don’t think anyone expected them to toss out such exceptional figures with so little experience. And yet Ryu turned out to be one of the better 6-inch scale figures I reviewed here last year, doing a lot of things better than veterans like Hasbro and Mattel. After playing around with him, I quickly decided I was going to be collecting this line, although I probably won’t be all in on the variants. I picked up two additional figures last year, but they didn’t get the spotlight here, so let’s start remedying that today with a look at Chun Li.

The packaging here goes a long way to show how much passion Jada is putting into this line, as you get a window box recreating an arcade coin-op machine with some character art at the bottom left hand corner. The window shows off the figure from the knees up, as well as most of the accessories you’re getting. The illustrated backdrop has some pixel art from one of the stages in the game, although it’s rather obscured by all the stuff. I love the health bars up top and you get a recreation of the character select screen on the back. Best of all, these boxes are totally collector friendly, and you can bet that I’m keeping them all.

While I tend to play Street Fighter III: Third Strike on my Dreamcast more than any other game in the franchise, this look for Chun Li is still about as iconic as things get for me. And boy, Jada did a great job rendering it in plastic! Chun Li’s qipao is cast in a vibrant electric blue plastic with some very fine texturing. All the trim is sculpted as well as painted in some very nice gold leaf paint with some pretty sharp lines. The lower part of the dress is cast in soft plastic and hangs down the front and back, with wide cuts in the sides so as not to try to contain those magnificent thighs. As if anything ever could! The poufy shoulders include short sleeves, which are sculpted separately from the biceps, there’s some great sculpting in the lacings of her white boots, and her spiked bracelets are separate pieces, so keep an eye on them when you swap hands! From the coloring to the sculpt, this figure just looks absolutely superb!

You get two heads to display on the figure: One serious and one shouty-serious! Both of these look great and follow the stylized game art fairly well. Punching in with the camera doesn’t do them a lot of favors as some of the paint quality breaks down the closer in you get. That’s to be expected with most figures, and it’s not something that I notice at all with the figure in hand. I think the biggest problem with paint on my figure is slop around the yellow fringe against the white covering on her oxtails. Again, not that big a deal when viewed with the naked eye, but it looks pretty bad when zoomed in. I do have a dark spot on my shouty face’s right cheek, but most of that has managed to come off with a little wiping. Yes, I would have really liked a happy victory head too, but at this price point, I think two heads is reasonable. Also, I’m pretty sure I saw somewhere that a recolored variant will include that head and if that’s true, then I’m on board!

One of the things that impressed me most about Ryu was how great the figure felt in hand and how much fun he was to pose. Well, all that is definitely the case for Chun Li as well. All the joints on this figure are solid and easy to work with, and there was nothing stuck or problematic as she came out of the box. It’s sad to have to point that out, but I’ve had a lot of issues with stuck joints on figures these days, it’s great to see Jada getting it right. They’ve done an excellent job of balancing sculpt and aesthetics with lots of useful articulation. You need only go back and look at the SOTA Chun Li to see how far we’ve come!

Chun-Li includes two sets of hands: Fists and tight-fingered chopping hands. The pegs are pretty robust and these are easy to swap out without fear of anything snapping.

The final accessories are the effect part for Chun-Li’s Hundred Lightning Kicks, which comes with its own dedicated stand. The stand is hinged at two places and plugs into the bottom of the effect piece to support it. The effect piece itself is cast in soft translucent blue plastic and you just insert Chun-Li’s foot into on of the slots and it works really well. The stand can also be repurposed to support the figure for other action poses, even though it wasn’t really intended for that purpose.

Boy do I love this line! The retail on these figures remains about $25 each, which is great for people who don’t want to sink $100 a pop into Storm Collectible’s far more premium line. I’m not about to tell you the two are in the same league, as Storm’s figures are scaled bigger and tend to have a lot more accessories. But as someone who does collect several of Storm’s series, proportionally speaking, I think the value is far better on Jada’s figures. These are incredibly fun toys that pitch perfectly capture the spirit of the game characters and are tough to put down. The amount of extras feels just right and when it comes to sculpt and coloring and overall quality, Jada is absolutely eating Hasbro’s lunch when it comes to figures in this scale. The next time I pop a quarter into this machine, we’ll check out Fei Long!