E-2046 1/8 Gotou Matabe

KIT #:	FG 7036
PRICE:	$58.81 when new
DECALS:	Eyes
REVIEWER:	Scott Van Aken
NOTES:	Resin kit.

The series 'Samurai Girls' takes place in an alternate version of Japan called Great Japan (大日本国, Dai Nippon-koku), in an alternate timeline where the Tokugawa shogunate remained active and has remained semi isolated from the rest of the world after their defeat by American forces in World War II, and the Americans have bases on Okinawa and southern great Japan. The story takes place at Buou Academic School (武應学園塾, Buō Gakuen-juku), an academy located at the base of Mount Fuji where children of military families train to become samurai warriors. The academy is in the middle of a power struggle between Yukimura Sanada and Matabei Goto of the Toyotomi faction and the powerful student council that rules the school, and Muneakira Yagyu, the owner of the Yagyu Dojo, and the mysterious Jubei Yagyu are dragged in the middle of the conflict.

The series features the female warriors descended from the famous historical figures from Japan's Sengoku period and early Edo period. The character Charles d'Artagnan also comes from the same age in Europe.

Matabe is the bodyguard of one of the series characters and loyal samurai. She wears a fundoshi and a green top that leaves her stomach bare. Her favored weapon is a yari but she also uses a small tantō that she wears as a hair accessory. She seems to have a weakness for hot baths, as seen when she eagerly attempted to enter one as "punishment" from Hanzo. She possess a superhuman sense of smell. She later becomes Muneakira's sixth Master Samurai. In master samurai mode her weapon becomes a giant brush with a retractable spear head. Jubei's nickname for Matabei is "Beta-san" (べーたさん).

Typical of E-2046 figure kits, there is but a sliver of the resin casting blocks. They even go so far as to sand away most of the mold seams on large pieces. This really speeds up the building process. The engineering is such that the pieces fit very well and often in such a way that you can prepaint pieces prior to assembly. To top it off the pieces are packaged separately and E-2046 packages their kits in such a way that they arrive from their trip from Hong Kong in perfect condition.

If there is a downside to these figures it is that shipping can be quite expensive for the large ones. In addition, there is no assembly guide for most of these; simply a photograph of the completed model. In addition, no painting guide is given, but then again, this is not all that unusual even for military figures.

The figure is your standard over-developed anime figure that provides 59 pieces, one of which is a large base. This makes it one of the more complex figure kits that E-2046 produces. Since this is a later tooling, the kit does include a decal for the eyes, which many like as they find painting eyes to be difficult. In reality, they are not difficult to do once one has built a few of these kits. Unlike several of their other offerings, this one is not clothing optional for the top. Even though the join areas are fairly well defined, pinning some of the larger bits would be a good idea.

Those of us who have built figure kits from E-2046 have liked them and find that the fit is such that the kit can go together fairly quickly. Some of them are quite complex both in the number of parts and the painting requirements. This one is fairly simple, but has a few tricky bits such as the hair parts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyakka_Ry%C5%8Dran

June 2026

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