Unbiased Review of Insight (AKA B'full/FOTS) Figures [With lots of pic…
As anyone who's been in this sub or in the figure collecting community would know, FOTS Japan, then later rebranded B'full and Insight (for the lewd figures) make 3D printed figures out of PMMA instead of normal PVC, ABS, or resin that you see being sold everywhere else, and because of that, these guys' figures all come broken in pieces, so much so that its retailers like Solaris or Nin-Nin puts up a disclosure that they'd most likely come broken and there are no returns. Amiami straight up stopped doing business with this company.
But... despite that, the company is still going strong and they get amazing designs and churn out new batch of figures every month, so much so that I've seen multiple times people in this sub saying "the design is amazing... but oh it's FOTS..."
So are they really as bad as everyone makes them out to be? Are they worth buying?
Here's my review as someone who went into this hobby solo and not hearing about stuff from others online and bought a shit load of these figures during my figure collecting journey without being in the community and knowing just how bad of a rep these figures got.
An unbiased review:
TLDR: They're definitely not as bad as people make them out to be, and I'll continue buying them.... but they're an obvious step down in quality and size compared to other figures. However, for me, they're still worth it for the comparatively more outstanding design, lower pricing, and the "nikkan" aspect. Whether that's worth it or not to you will be up to the individual.
So let's get this out of the way - the negatives that everyone already knows and I can confirm.
First, all these figures here are 1/6 scale. even standing up, you can see the Insight figures being significantly smaller than Alleyne (tall elf on the left), or even compared to Eve and Elle (from Pink Charm).
Then let's talk about the obvious: Some of these figures came broken as there is no blisters with the packaging, it's literally just a bunch of bubble wrap inside a small box.
For example, both of Nina's (red hair) twin tails came broken off. Though some super glue made it seamless because they are still slotted in instead of just glued on, but still, it came broken and I had to use superglue.
The other problem with quality is the private sculp. Given her pose, it's a huge interest point, yet it's nothing more than just a small dent without any coloring.
In Ranya's case (one of my favorite of of all Insight figures), she has an amazing private sculpt, has an interesting hand-sunk-in-butt effect (that's a make or break for some people, I personally love it), but her tail comes separate, is able to be installed correctly.... but is not sized correctly. In other words... I still had to use super glue to affix the tail onto the back...
Not to mention... Insight's machines don't always do a good job of painting. As you can see, her "nipple" coloring was straight up just sprayed onto her arm.
You can see Insight's machine printing calculation problem with Nikkan Shoujo R. She's supposed to be holding one of the bunny ears, but whether it's a QC issue or simply miscalculated on the printing, she ends up just holding up her hand.
Then there's the problem with PMMA, 3D printing figures, and/or simple Insight cheapness. The quality of the figures vary drastically from each figure, especially with earlier models. Some are hefty, some are ridiculously light, some have cheaply sculpted/painted privates, some have extremely detailed molded and painted bits.
But here's the problem with the lighter figures... they're obviously going to be... less dense.
Julis is an extremely well detailed figure... but it came extremely light, with weird, monochrome shiny paint for the hair, and when placed near light, it lacks so much density, the light just goes through the figure making the it appear translucent . Given, this is the worse example of all the figures, it's still extremely jarring and just bad production.
The marketing for these figures is pretty shitty too. The promo pics are all CG so they don't resemble the final product unlike pretty much every other scaled figure out there nowadays. Also, due to the "censoring out the bits" nature of promotional images, you don't actually know what the bits' sculpts/paintjob actually looks like until you open the box...
But to give them credit, these problems seem to have declined as time went on. In my case, the above figures were the only figures out of all the ones I have that have had imperfections, and most were released about 3 years ago, and all figures within the last year seemed to have had more stable quality that matches the marketed CGs.
Now with the bad stuff out of the way that has been posted countless times on this sub already, here's the reason why despite all the flaws, I still enjoy collecting them.
Basically just the design and the "Nikkan"-ness of it all lol....
Insight's line for these figures is called "Nikkan Shoujo" (肉感少女), meaning "flesh-like girls."
While it's problems are undeniable, over the past year or so the quality has definitely gone up and stabilized. It still ships in a tiny box with an ungodly amount of bubble wrap, but because the figures are better made now, it doesn't matter it doesn't have blisters as I haven't gotten a defective or broken Insight figure for the past 2 years or so now.
To give an example, they remade Nina (the one I complained earlier about coming with broken twin tails) with other... details. You can clearly see here that the details and make is much better than the original made 2 years prior, and yes it came fully intact:
The sculpt, despite being machine-made, is very detailed, which is the selling point of these figures. Compared to Eve and Elle (which I both love), the Insight figures are much more detailed in muscles and fat which makes the figure all the more colorful and detailed under lighting. Eve and Elle, and many other lewd figures I have, like Skytube figures, I feel like hugely lack these type of muscular minute details, and under lighting, has its coloring looking very flat.
Despite my criticism on the bits on the Insight figures, I have similar complaints with the bits of my other "high quality" lewd figures as well. Eve, Elle, Mordina, Daiyu, or even Chika and MeiMei by Rocket Boy/Native that came out slightly more recnetly, have issues with underpainted bits or just a simple boring line for the privates. Compared to a lot of the other lewd figures I have, these cheap Insight figures are actually a step up in terms of sculpt detail.
Some of the hair coloring on these figures are pretty amazing as well. Obviously you have the Julis ones where it just looks like a splatter of paint, but there are ones like Alice (blueish gradient hair) that I bought purely because I loved the hair.
The other thing that's crucial to collectability in addition to design, is it's storability. For me, unlike other scales where the base design is just as important as the figure itself, for lewd figures, imo, the design of the lewd figure itself is the main appeal, and unnecessary bases could just end up wasting space.
As you can see, out of all the Insight figures I have, only two actually required bases to stand, and their bases are extremely tiny which really lets you place a lot of them very close together.
Then the last bit of collecting is pricing. A lot of lewd figures, especially detailed ones, go for $170-230+ USD pre-orders. Understandably so due to higher quality and the option of cast-off and cast-on. However, if you're only going to display them in one way anyways like me (cast-off), it feels unnecessarily overpriced and hard to pull the trigger to collect. Meanwhile, all of these Insight figures go for only $110-$150 each. In other words, when budgeting for figures, instead of getting 2 "name brand" figures, you could get 3 Insight figures. This is especially true since the packaging is tiny and don't have blisters, their boxes cost about half as much as other figures and their boxes to ship.
So here's my verdict:
If you can ignore some of the QC issues (non-existent personally in recent years) and quality of PMMA figures in general (they look similar to ABS but less... solid when looking up close), I would argue Insight has some of the best designed and sculpted lewd figures out there.
Obviously, to a lot of collectors, those "negligible" things to me could easily be deal breakers for them, so at the end of the day it's still up to the individual. Though for me who have been collecting these before I even knew about all the hate towards the company and these figures in general, the art design, the stability in the quality now, and ease of fitting into my displays, the pricing, and just the detailed sculpts, will definitely keep me buying these figures, especially since they churn out like 3-5 designs every month and out of those, they often get designs from popular illustrations or H doujins too.
I felt like the sub had too many people who swore loyalty/hate towards Insight but was severely lacking pictures and detailed discussions on them so this is what I set out to contribute with this post.
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