Look, Magikarp is pretty great. It’s an amazingly well-designed Pokemon– after all, it’s a fish, no pretenses about it. The Pokemon is associated with cringe-ass motivational posters, cool easter eggs in Pokemon Snap as well as my favorite stage in Pokken Tournament, the best Pokemon game.

With the Pokemon Plamo BIG Magikarp, our favorite Piscine Pokemon gets a nice chunky kit dedicated to its likeness. How does it stack up? Read on and find out.

Construction

The Pokemon Plamo BIG Magikarp is actually a really simple build, since, you know. It’s aimed at children. The pieces are really big, and many of them are pretty recognizable in terms of where they’re supposed to be. I’m not sure if this uses the same “you don’t need cutters” system that the Mega Size Gundam kits use, but as someone who has a dedicated hand drill for sanding down sloppy nub marks I was pretty surprised by how clean the parts came off the runner.

Considering the kit was aimed at children, I half expected it to be a sticker-palooza. Surprisingly enough the kit’s sticker sheet is so small that I almost dropped it while building it, since it only comes with the pupils for Magikarp’s eyes.

I’m really pleased with how the mouth is constructed, being three separate pieces for the mouth, the interior and then the tongue. I could easily have seen the kit having this as one solid piece and just stickering on the different colors, so the fact that they’re three separate pieces is a really interesting choice.

The Look Of It

The main thing I’m really pleased with when it comes to the Pokemon Plamo BIG Magikarp is the color. It’s really vibrant, looking straight out a cartoon. This works well with the size of it- it’s about 20cm long, making it look great since the bright body catches light really well.

One really cool thing the figure does is that it comes with two separate torsos for Magikarp. One of these is in a more neutral position, recreating Magikarp in most of its iconic appearances such as “basic water trash mob” in Pokemon Red and Blue or “Background character to show that this scene takes place underwater” in any of the Pokemon shots that take place underwater.

My favorite is the second torso option though, that comes molded in a dynamic pose, recreating Magikarp’s iconic Splash attack. This attack was so popular that it spawned its own mobile game, where players compete in heated battles using only the move Splash. You can even still mount this on the stand, which makes Magikarp look like its actually swimming, giving it a really dynamic look. Unfortunately the stand doesn’t come with any effect pieces, so you’ll need a bit of elbow grease to make your own Poke-aquarium.

Posability wise, it’s unfortunately kind of lacking. The whiskers, fins and tails are all on ball joints, though outside of the fins flapping outwards don’t expect to move them around too much. The tail’s ball joint is also more for unplugging it when you want to change the torsos, since you’ll have to remove the whole back half to swap them out.

Final Thoughts

I really like the Pokemon Plamo BIG Magikarp. It’s an adorable figure you could easily put together over a lunch break, and it being a Magikarp gives it room for a lot more silly poses, even if they’re just putting it in its splash position everywhere.

I can see the posability being a turn-off for some, but that’s more a matter of taste. In my opinion the fact that the mostly static pose looks incredibly dynamic vastly outweighs any benefit we could have gotten from a triple-jointed Magikarp figure, just on the grounds of Magikarp isn’t all that posable to begin with. Seriously, it’s got as many unique poses as it does moves.

At RM128, it’s not too bad a price, especially when you consider how big it is. In essence you’re really paying for the finishing and size of the model, since it’s constructed with some really high-quality parts. The more I think about it the size really is a huge part of the kit’s appeal, since I probably wouldn’t have been so impressed if this was just a tiny palm-fitting Magikarp. You can purchase your own over at Impulse Gaming, or any other local model kit suppliers that might carry stock of it.