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From the Game: Gradius’ Vic Viper Model

Japan gets cooler video game toys than us. It's just a sad truth of the world. The land of the rising sun is chock full of replicas, trading figures, action figures, and various knick-knacks based on video games. Usually, it's very hard to get these items in the United States unless you import them online. Fortunately, there's a neat little import toy shop in the East Village that carries many of these awesome Japanese video game toys. This is one of them.

This is the Vic Viper from Gradius, one of several trading figures in Yujin's Shooting Game Historica Collection. The collection includes models of the ships from several famous shoot-em-ups, including Gradius, R-Type, Darius, and even Fantasy Zone. They come in blind boxes, meaning it's a crapshoot whenever you pick up a box (unless you get the entire case). I got lucky on my first try, and found the easily recognizable fighter from the very first Gradius.

The model is quite small, not more than four inches long alone or five inches mounted on the clear base and equipped with an Option orb. Still, it's surprisingly detailed, and even more surprisingly difficult to assemble.

Yes, assemble. These figures come in a series of small plastic bubbles, and must be fit together before they can be displayed. Fortunately, a short round of insert-tab-into-slot is all that's necessary; they stay intact without glue, and come fully painted.

If you'd like to get your own Vic Viper figure, you'll have to hunt eBay. However, if you're interested in the other Shooting Historica figures, you can pick up full collections of them from Amazon. The original series with the Vic Viper is out of production, but the second and third series can be purchased for $23-28. Series 2 includes the ships from R-Type III, Raystorm, Star Luster, Fantasy Zone, Geo Sword, and Aleste, and Series 3 includes the ships from Raiden, In the Hunt, Wolf Fang, Terra Diver, and Granada.