How Phantasy Star Online and its sequel created the modern girlpla scene
Credit to u/Eliwod_81192 and u/Remusnjh over on r/MegamiDevice, without whose research and support we would not have been able to write this article.
If you’re here for some history, get hydrated, get some snacks, and take some breaks if you have to. This is one of a duo of historical essays we wrote on the development of girlpla history, the second being on Busou Shinki which takes place adjacent to and at the same time as this and is linked here.
Overview – Part 1: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Seen
Phantasy Star is a very long-running RPG series developed by SEGA, debuting in 1987 on the Master System and cemented itself as one of the classics alongside Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and Breath of Fire. It has (fortunately or unfortunately, you be the judge) since left its JRPG roots behind to enter the world of MMORPGs; Phantasy Star Online, the series’ first MMO, launched in 2000 before being having its official servers shut down in 2010 while Phantasy Star Universe, released in 2006, had MMORPG elements, with its third and final expansion’s Episode 3 being only playable in the game’s online mode.
Finally, Phantasy Star Online 2, the current MMORPG, was built on lessons SEGA learned from Online and Universe, launching in 2012 with persistent updates since with various ports being released in the years hence and a gigantic update/sequel, New Genesis, releasing in 2021 that has effectively acted as a PSO2 2 of sorts, deprecating the original game.
PSO2 has launched an entire universe of its own surrounding it, including spinoff games, theatre plays, TCGs, webcomics and an anime. It is also infamous for its absolutely monstrous localization history, with a North American localization announced in 2013 and released only in 2019, whole fan projects dedicated to allowing foreign players to access the Japanese servers, and a failed version for Taiwan and Southeast Asia that quietly shut down in 2017 after massive controversy.
We provide this context to get across to our (presumably non-Japanese) audience that Phantasy Star and especially PSO2 is a very big deal. It is probably one of the biggest MMORPGs you’ve never played, with entire flotillas of adaptations and a huge fanbase. Chances are, if your favorite Japanese celebrity or influencer is into MMORPGs, they’re either talking about this or Final Fantasy XIV.
Which, in hindsight, probably explains why or how a much younger Masaki Asai sold out of Phantasy Star Online garage kits so fast, and so hard, he begged Kotobukiya for parts and they gave him a job.
Overview – Part 2: How I Met Your Model Kit Designer
It should come as no surprise then that Kotobukiya, having stuck their nose in everything under the sun that Bandai doesn’t have a death grip on the licenses for, was tasked with making merch for PSO and PSO2.
If you’re familiar with Megami Device, you know Masaki Asai. You may know him as Apsy, Masaki Apsy, or God if you’re so inclined. I know I am. It wouldn’t be MUCH of an exaggeration to state that Apsy is the reason why modern girlpla is the way it is today – and only because that would be ignoring the effects of other players, such as Kotobukiya’s own staff and Revoltech’s Katsuhisa Yamaguchi had on the modern toy scene in general.
That’s not to say that Apsy hadn’t already made a name for himself. He’d already done so making Galaxy Fraulein Yuna garage kits for Kaiyodo in the 90s, so he wasn’t some unknown – he was already known for having a gift.
In 2003, Kotobukiya’s office got what was probably at the time a weird request – to get parts. You see, Apsy had made himself a garage kit of RAcaseal Elenor from PSO. Being the talent he is, the damn thing sold like hotcakes – over 5000 copies, to be exact. Given the usual logistics behind making garage kits, this is absolutely bonkers, and it rapidly ate away his resources.
As such, Apsy was desperately trying to source the materials from Kotobukiya, first going to stores and then needing to get his cap in hand and go to the mountain himself. Thus, a working relationship between Kotobukiya and Apsy was born, with Apsy working on prototypes for the company.
It was around 2005 when Apsy released that many of his customers weren’t actually into PSO. We told you a little fib back there. PSO wasn’t nearly the phenomenon PSO2 would end up being. How could it have been? SEGA hadn’t learned the lessons from PSU yet. It ended up being sort of the Final Fantasy XI to PSO2’s Final Fantasy XIV – a testing ground for SEGA to truly pull off something legendary.
So why then did Apsy’s RAcaseal Elenor sell like hotcakes 2 years ago, if not for people being gigantically into clankers? Apsy was filling a niche that nobody else was touching – poseable female action figures.
People might also have just really been into clankers, but calling people out like that tends to not get you invited to parties, so we won’t.
Bishoujo figures were already common – and still are, but people wanted something poseable. It was in his (metaphorical) garage – for all we know, he and his buddies drew it up on a napkin in an izakaya – that Apsy laid the groundwork for what would be his greatest contribution to the world of toys. This thing would become the engineering of a universal base for making female action figures.
He named it Machineca. That name, you already know.
In any case, this is where Toriwo Toriyama makes his first appearance – you may remember him from our overview of Megami Device. At this time, he was working at Konami, and Toriyama came to Apsy, himself just fresh off his work on the Megahouse Evangelion figures, and offered for him to work at Konami. While he didn’t initially accept, eventually, Apsy did, and his work became what we now know as Busou Shinki
Hidehiko Nouchi, project manager at Kotobukiya at the time, had already asked for Apsy to make his RAcaseal design into a plastic model kit, but he missed his shot – Apsy was already working for Konami and was as busy as hell making Shinkis.
He wouldn’t miss his shot the second time.
Fast forward to 2010. Kotobukiya, looking for something to swell their coffers in the vein of HoiHoi-san! and the Valsione – all prototyped by Apsy -, was looking to get further into plamo, so Nouchi, perhaps sensing the time was right and probably not willing to miss a second go at getting Apsy to work with them, commissioned him to turn RAcaseal into a plamo. At this moment, Nouchi suggested an illustrator that Asai hadn’t met before, but we’ll come back to; Nidy -2D-. Coincidentally, he used to work for SEGA; funnily enough, he even worked a little bit on the TCG for PSO2. More on him later.
The RAcaseal Elenor Ver.APSY was released in early 2011, followed not long after by Akaonihime and Aoonihime, Apsy’s OCs. Kotobukiya was no stranger to working with SEGA, having already produced Virtual-ON model kits for them since 2008. Furthermore, Kotobukiya decided to use some of the lessons they’d learned from Apsy and used the work to create a model kit of KOS-MOS from Xenosaga, which dropped in late 2012. This, in turn, was used as the basis for Frame Arms Girl’s Gourai, a project Nouchi had wanted to make real since 2009.
We can’t stress this enough. Following the money, following the ancestry of Gourai <- KOS-MOS <- Apsy, you can draw a clear line of ancestry from Apsy’s work. This means Apsy indirectly created the entire basis of modern Kotobukiya in-house architecture. Everything – Megalomaria, Sousai Shoujo Teien, Frame Arms Girl, Arcanadea – it all started with Kotobukiya looking at Apsy to teach them his tricks.
And we haven’t even gotten to the best part yet.
After all, Busou Shinki was the Titanic, and it had already broken apart. Apsy and his buddies might’ve been in the icy water, but not for long, for a suspiciously Kotobukiya-shaped Carpathia was coming.
Overview – Part 3: “A spectre is haunting the plamo community – the spectre of Busou Shinki.”
As Busou Shinki did its best Hindenberg impression at Konami, Apsy and the rest of the Shinki creatives were now free men. Picking up Machineca where he’d left off – and holding that license tight now that MMS was out of his reach – he wanted his own project with blackjack and hookers. He needed a manufacturer to get him it. However, as he detailed in an interview in Girls Plamo Style circa 2023, Apsy realised that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again. Seeking a second voice to help him make something new, he hunted down his old buddy Toriyama.
As if the gods were smiling upon the world, while Apsy was trying to figure out exactly how he could poach Toriyama from Konami, Toriyama went independent, leaving Apsy the opening to meet up with him at the 2014 All Japan Model & Hobby Show, whereupon they struck up a working partnership. By this point, Kotobukiya had already launched Frame Arms Girl, with Gourai dropping. In addition, RAcaseal was still selling like hotcakes.
And yet, almost like an inverse of Apsy coming to the mountain in 2003, the mountain came to Muhammad. Kotobukiya came to Apsy and Toriyama and said “would you like to do taxes and make model kits with us”?.
Well, maybe not quite like that, but something to that effect.
We’re not sure about one thing – why WOULD Kotobukiya risk launching a new plamo project to compete with their homegrown Frame Arms Girl, especially knowing the talent who they were going after? Kotobukiya, for their part, claimed they wanted insurance. Maybe Nouchi wanted to thank him for launching Kotobukiya’s renaissance. Maybe someone really liked Apsy at the office and wanted to see him around some more. Who can really say? All we know is that Kotobukiya was down to back him, and Apsy, remembering all the fun he’d had working with them the first time, accepted the offer.
With his old buddy Toriyama at his side, Kotobukiya giving him free reign to start planning, and the world absolutely begging for more of Apsy’s work, he and his contacts got to work. They even got some of their old designer buddies from Konami to come join them, names you already know– Humikane Shimada and BLADE. Even Nidy came along for the ride, while Masatoshi Aoki of Kotobukiya – known for his work with the Valsione – worked on helping turn Apsy’s prototypes into molds.
Now that you effectively have the Justice League of model kit design in a room altogether, what is a man to do? Make something nobody else can. (No, really. Kotobukiya was probably the only company on Earth that can pull off what they’re about to do.) Apsy worked on Machineca, refining it and making it work for plamo – after all, action figures need screws and caulk, but model kits don’t.
Remember that Gourai we mentioned earlier? Around that time, Apsy and this team had just finished work on their new project, and realised that Kotobukiya’s homegrown projects were selling like hotcakes. However, undaunted, they pushed onto production regardless.
You may at this point have worked out WHAT project these men were working on, but give me the satisfaction of telling you.
In December 2016, the first Women’s Imperial Space Marines, or WISM kits were sold. After months of anticipation at toy festivals, the public was finally going to get its hands on the first ever Megami Device kits.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Apsy would later license Machineca out to Skytube for DarkAdvent (using it as a testbed for AUV and his later work) and Good Smile for chitocerium. By the beginning of the 20s, countless Chinese companies would, to put it delicately, make their own riffs on Machineca which would give birth to Nuke Matrix and ATK Girl as mainstays of the 2020s girlpla scene, probably because Kotobukiya had just established itself as someone to imitate, not just someone to compete with. Kotobukiya itself would enter into a verifiable renaissance of girlpla, launching new lines like Sousai Shoujo Teien and Arcanadea throughout the late 2010s and 2020s, all while announcing new Megami Device and Frame Arms Girl kits, all the while countless girlpla lines fill the market from both established manufacturers and smaller outfits.
After it all, Megami Device rules sovereign as the Queen of Girlpla, looking from above.
Overview – Part 4: Kotobukiya: New Genesis
In all this, you might say we forgot about PSO2. No. And neither did Kotobukiya. You see, Kotobukiya never stopped printing those kits completely. After all, they were insanely popular, even if by now, a good portion of them were a little outdated due to not employing Apsy’s Machineca.
Kotobukiya, whatever one may think of them, never forgot who made them who they were. A Gene/Jeanne model kit was released in 2019 – probably because Gene is one of the single most popular characters in the entire PSO2 subfranchise , and being a half-naked busty blonde woman I can’t imagine why she would be so popular– with several variants of her dropping throughout the early 2020s, including bishoujo figures as well as model kits.
Furthermore, the kit that would start this whole thing would come back to haunt us. Elenor got a reissue with some extra-touch up work by Apsy in late 2025 – coincidentally, when we got our own hands on her and when we started working on this guide in earnest. When Kotobukiya started its GRANDE SCALE gimmick, Gene was one of the kits that benefitted, with her Stellainnocent version receiving one in 2025 and her Stellatears version receiving one in late 2026.
So, to sum up, Kotobukiya’s Phantasy Star Online model kits are very special in the history of plastic model kits, especially to those of you interested in girlpla, because they represent a sort of “missing link” between Valsione and WISM, and they represent the reason why Kotobukiya is now quite possibly the best model kit company in the business – certainly, a reasonable rival to Bandai in quality, if not quantity.
They are but one piece of the whole puzzle – after all, Busou Shinki was an entire separate mess – but a significant one nonetheless. It might not be hyperbole to say that had Nouchi decided that he didn’t need that RAcaseal plamo after all or didn’t take his second shot, we probably don’t have the modern girlpla scene as we know it, and certainly not in 2016.
Keep that in mind the next time you buy a Gene model kit; you have her to thank for that topless Dragondress Sophia we know you have on your shelf.
Read more about the Phantasy Star Online kits here.
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