How Gundam, mecha musume and Konami colossally screwing up gave birth to the modern girlpla scene.
Credit to u/Eliwod_81192 and u/Remusnjh over on r/Megami Device, without whose research and support we would not have been able to write this article.
Let me preface this by saying that this is not a girlpla line in any sense.
However, many of the girlpla lines mentioned above owe their existence either to direct or indirect influences by the designers behind this line, and so we felt it was appropriate to discuss this toyline because of the gigantic part it played in sculpting the modern girlpla landscape.
This is part of a duo of essays on the development of the modern girlpla scene, with the other being an essay on the development of the Phantasy Star Online 2 model kits, linked here.
Part 1: Groundwork
Busou Shinki was a multimedia franchise produced by Konami in 2006. Revolving around the titular Shinki, who were combat gynoids, the franchise encompassed several video games, light novels, manga, and an OVA that was eventually followed by a 13-episode anime series in 2012. The line was quietly discontinued afterwards, dropped unceremoniously by Konami.
The core of the line was the line of action figures based on the Shinki, with interchangeable parts and EX sets that could be used to upgrade a Shinki and customize them. If this sounds familiar, this is because this design philosophy is also similar to the Little Armory, MSG and Option Parts sets sold by various girlpla manufacturers today.
That sounds all well and good. Mind if I tell you the names of some of the people behind this line?
Toriwo Toriyama. Masaki Asai. Fumikane Shimada. BLADE.
Do they sound familiar to you? They should. Without these men, modern girlpla history does not exist. These men (along with Nidy -2D-) were some of the driving creative forces behind Megami Device, which is really only second to 30 Minutes Sisters as one of the most successful girlpla toylines, and certainly is held over Sisters as an example of what girlpla can be.
So you might be sitting here asking that if you basically had those people sitting in a room printing action figure designs for you, how the hell did Konami lose this? What the hell happened?
Well, if you want the short answer, Konami were assholes.
If you want the LONG answer, we’ve got a long road to follow.
Part 2: Ancient History
We won’t linger here too long; Eliwod_81192, whose essay we link here and who was a great help in developing this article, has a far more comprehensive understanding of this part of history.
Let’s be clear here, girlpla history doesn’t begin in 2015 with Frame Arms Girl and Megami Device. It doesn’t begin in 2009 with the Valsione. It doesn’t even begin in 2003, when Apsy’s RAcaseal garage kit breaches 5000 copies sold, forcing him to light the beacons and call for Kotobukiya’s aid.
It begins in 1983.
Let’s set the scene here a little. In 1983, you didn’t have model kits like we understand them now. Model kits for people in the segment of the hobby people this guide was made for are basically toys. Back in 1983, the model kits you had were either traditional model kits which are usually vehicles coming out of the Shizuoka outfits like Tamiya and Fujimi, or garage kits made, well, in someone’s garage. The first Gundam model kits would come to exist in the 80s, but these would still be closer to traditional kits, requiring glue, and would lack any articulation. There would not be snap-fit model kits until 1987, and the traditional HG kits would not come until the 90s.
Suffice to say, if you’re looking for a character kit, you’re looking at garage kits.
Garage kits, unlike the model kits of today, are usually cast in resin, usually quite literally made in someone’s garage, and were usually made by hobbyists. While in the preceding decade these were made in small amateur circles, maybe quite literally meeting in a garage, this would change by the 1980s.
In the 1980s, garage kits were all the rage – you couldn’t go to a fan event without them. Bandai had a whole label called B-Club just for making garage kits. Companies like Volks and Kaiyodo would make their names on these – Volks in particular would also end up diversifying into dolls. Later, they’d end up being one of the first companies to start making plastic kits, doing so for Five Star Stories.
However, these weren’t anything like the kits you see today. For one, they’re huge – usually built at 1:6 scale, so usually about 30 cm tall – and they take absolute tons of work. You’d have to do all the painting and detailing yourself; color separation, which is a common feature of today’s model kits, just isn’t a thing yet.
More importantly, they don’t move. They’re not like the action figure-model kit hybrids today that you can get from nearly any hobby store that isn’t devoted to traditional kits. You put them on your shelf and that’s it. These were display pieces, not toys. Some companies, like Volks, still build model kits to this philosophy – whether it’s to their detriment or to their benefit is something for you to decide.
Interestingly enough, however, option parts customization, a commonplace option now, was already around back then. Neko Mimi, a garage kit toyline around the period developed by Mono Craft and designed by Kenichi Sonoda (Gunsmith Cats, Bubblegum Crash) could already swap out clothing and helmet designs.
Neko Mimi, however, is from 1984. So what the hell happened in 1983 that kicked this all off?
Kunio Okawara saw something he really, really liked.
At this time, Kunio Okawara (known for designs for not just Gundam but Fang of the Sun Dougram and VOTOMS) is sitting around, trying to make mecha designs and casually does garage kits in his free time. He was one of the first people to make a garage kit that we can identify as girlpla, Lady Gouf.
Lady Gouf did not resemble anything we have today. Like we mentioned was the usual trend of garage kits, Lady Gouf was 33cm tall, hand crafted, and static rather than articulated. Lady Gouf was something more akin to the modern PLAMAX static figures than the articulated model kits we know and love today. Still, she was probably the first girlpla, in the sense of being a female mecha musume model kit in history, and certainly one of the few we know of from prior to the 2000s.
Why did he do it? He saw an illustration of Lady Gouf done by Takayuki Masuo in the MSV Handbook and really, really wanted one for himself and hey, it’s the 80s, so anyone and their mother can get a garage kit done. Okawara got it done in two days with the help of two model shops; Domu and Lark.
The latter, by the way, was the predecessor to today’s Wave Corporation; the Kichijoji shop’s casting department spun off and is now responsible for a variety of kits ranging from Five Star Stories to distributing kits made by Orange Cat Industry. Domu? They may still exist, but they stayed out of the history books, except for one more last gasp, making Space Eve Galaxina, basically Lady Zaku, with Lark.
As one final aside regarding Lark, Lark produced one famous name in model kit history, Max Watanabe, who made a name at that shop making VOTOMS garage kits.
We don’t discuss him very often, but we should; Max Watanabe is the founder of Max Factory, which he founded in 1987, and is responsible for a lot of the model kits you see on this guide. He is absolutely legendary in model kit circles, and honestly, it seems a bit of a crime that we can’t talk about him too much here – but then again, Watanabe is primarily known for robot models, which isn’t really part of what this guide is about. In a move that must’ve felt like it came full circle, Watanabe eventually became president of Wave, the corporation that arose from Lark, in 2024.
In a 2026 interview with Forbes, Watanabe talked a lot about his childhood; how he would build plastic model kits with his dad and how basically, the mecha kits we know, stuff like HGs and EGs do not exist yet. The only way to get those kinds of articulated kits in his day was to kitbash them from stuff like Microman toys. Fittingly for what we’ve just talked about, Watanabe first made his name building a 1/60 model of the Gouf out of a pair of Zaku kits, showing it off in Hobby Japan’s seminal model-making book How to Build Gundam in 1981. It would have a sequel in 1982, also with Watanabe contributing to it, albeit now as a professional rather than a hobbyist.
As a robot or as a girl, the Gouf made history.
After Lady Gouf basically rewrote people’s brains, it didn’t take long for similar garage kits to run the convention circuit, and similar garage kits would become popular, based on series like L-Gaim, Vifam, Macross and the like. Bandai, perhaps not wanting to miss out, even did their own short-lived Armored Lady series.
It didn’t do great.
Bandai never tried girlpla again until the 2010s, and even then, they had an absolute rough time of it with the absolute monstrosities that were Loheng-Rinko, Hyper Gyanko and Super Fumina. It took them until the 2020s to finally get it right with their later Figure-rise Standard and 30 Minutes Sisters line. For now, however, they’re out of the game.
There is one more figure to discuss that arises from this point in history. Mika Akitaka, a prominent mechanical designer, got in on the business in 1986, making MS Girl after MS Girl design in magazines of the period. Akitaka is largely known for his work on Zeta Gundam Stardust Memory and for his non-Gundam work, City Hunter, but in this context, Akitaka is the father of girlpla. If Okawara was the first one to make a girlpla, Akitaka was the first one to truly codify what that meant – the aesthetic that ends up eventually getting carried on through Busou Shinki, Frame Arms Girl, Megami Device and everything that happens afterwards.
However, it wasn’t to be yet. The technology wasn’t there, the companies didn’t want to do it, and investors didn’t want to throw money at something that they didn’t think would succeed. Regardless, as the world entered the 90s, garage kits were the only girlpla you could find. Akitaka’s dream of commercialized MS Girls dies out for now.
To give you a bit of a spoiler, Akitaka eventually gets his happy ending. Together with Hajime Katoki, another mechanical designer on Gundam, he would later go on in 2012 to design for the Armor Girls Project, an action figure series Bandai would put out based on MS Girl. Fittingly, two of the MS Girls are the GP03S Stamen from Stardust Memory and the Gundam Mk-II from Zeta Gundam, the shows Akitaka was most associated with.
Before then, however, Akitaka would get to design for one toyline that, while it wasn’t quite MS Girls, it would be the spiritual descendant of his work. But first we need to assemble the heroes who would make that toyline real.
Part 3: Every Hero Needs An Origin Story
Cut to the 90s. Akitaka got an offer from Red Company (now known as Red Entertainment) and Hudson Soft asking him to make a game based on the MS Girls. Not long after, Galaxy Fraulein Yuna is released on the PC Engine in 1992, with multiple OVAs releasing throughout the 1995-1997 period and an absolute glut of games that get released even into the 2000s, with the last game to date having been a port of the first two games for the PlayStation Portable. Akitaka later took the original concept and developed Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire, a shoot-em-up and legendarily one of the best PC Engine games to have ever been made for the system.
As an aside, the director of the OVA series Galaxy Fraulein Yuna Returns was none other than Akiyuki Shinbo. If you’re coming here from the anime fandom, you know him better as the legendary director of the Monogatari series, Puella Magi Madoka Magica and the March Comes In like a Lion adaptation – at this point, he’d already made a name for himself working on Yu Yu Hakusho and had just come fresh off directing Metal Fighter Miku.
Yuna rapidly became popular, especially with the rise of the Internet. Moefied military machines – of the sort you see in Azur Lane or KanColle – become popular on various BBS boards. Around this time, we see the rise of two very important figures.
Somewhere, a bored young man uploaded random doodles onto various sites. He wasn’t yet the legendary illustrator he’d become in future years; at this time, all he’d doing is working for his family’s company and drawing for fun. However, he grew up on the MS Girls the likes of Masuo and Akitaka drew, and this informed the rest of his work.
Around 2003, Konami offered this man the brass ring; they offered him an anime and a merchandise line. But he was new to the whole thing, so he turned it down with a compromise; Konami started working upward from nothing with some standalone statues and figures, and then the full works. Needless to say, his designs absolutely killed it and made Konami boatloads of cash.
His name is Humikane Shimada (or Fumikane, depending on romanization, though Shimada prefers Humikane for personal use), and I think you know him by now if you’re this far in to the guide.
Konami, trying to double dip, came out with AM Driver in 2004. AM Driver (known in Japan as Get Ride! AmDriver) was produced by Studio Deen, TV Tokyo and Nihon Ad Systems. Its director, the late Yuji Yamaguchi, was also known for directing the Deen Fate adaptations, and doing some episode work for Smile Precure, GaoGaiGar and Hajime no Ippo. Unfortunately for Yamaguchi (or fortunately), AM Driver was NOT the work he was remembered for.
At this time, the traditional philosophy of only making female toys be dolls or PVC figures is still in ascendance, and AM Driver is what Konami thought will sell to guys. After all, it’s just like Ultraman, Kamen Rider and Super Sentai, right? Young men are suckers for that.
Spoiler: they weren’t complete suckers, and it didn’t sell.
AM Driver faded into obscurity and didn’t make them the money they hoped for. Konami now needed a new plan to get that cash back – but there’s the rub.
They’re a game company. They’re the guys who make Castlevania, Metal Gear Solid and terrible pachinko machines, the rotting bastards. And Shimada, genius illustrator that he is, wasn’t going to make them that money, not without toys to make those designs. Konami needed a mastermind who work with Shimada and make toys out of his designs.
To talk about the second, we must first discuss Kaiyodo.
Kaiyodo is yet another model kit company based out of Osaka. They started in a small shop in 1964, but rapidly grew. This company isn’t one you normally see in discussions of articulate girlpla. They’re more well-known for action figures and garage kits, in particular the Revoltech line and Katsuhisa Yamaguchi’s work on it. Aside from anime like Rinne no Lagrange, Kaiyodo’s Revoltech line also produces figures for DC and Marvel properties.
Around this time, Kaiyodo is making garage kits of Yuna. You may already know where this leads if you’ve read the article above on Phantasy Star Online 2 model kits. The circle F-Face was working on Yuna garage kits and one singular talent was the bee’s knees. His name was making it everywhere as an expert in all kinds of model kits; creature, human, mechanical, combined. Name it, and he could probably figure something out.
This rising star’s name was Masaki Asai.
In 2003, he made waves for his Phantasy Star Online garage kit of RAcaseal selling over 5000 copies, getting him the attention of Kotobukiya when he came to ask them for parts. Konami, however, had already met Apsy; they interviewed him before for Zone of the Enders, where he impressed them with the absolutely beautiful Orbital Frame Anubis garage kit he created. For more information on that side of affairs, look for that essay here.
This time, Konami wanted him for more than his garage kits. No, they wanted him for his action figures. You see, garage kits aren’t really poseable, but Apsy metaphorically pulled it off in a cave with a bunch of scraps. That is exactly the kind of genius that Konami needed to recoup the losses and maybe, finally, get Shimada’s illustrations from paper to plastic.
Part 4: Actually, Girl Toys Are Cool Too
In 2005, Konami pulled the trigger. Toriwo Toriyama, another familiar face by this point, met with Apsy at this point to recruit him to Konami with, allegedly, a ton of AM Driver toys. The meeting didn’t immediately go in Toriyama’s favor; Apsy wasn’t initially interested, but eventually he said yes, taking along his design notes for his Machineca architecture to develop it into the Multi-Movable System to satisfy the demands of Konami’s staff.
You would think at this point, you had everything you need for Busou Shinki, right? No. You need Shimada, and at this point, he was busy getting famous for Sky Girls, which is why Apsy got to work on making the MMS system.
While waiting for Shimada to be available again, Toriyama and Apsy got to work making the MMS system as useful as humanly possible at scale. The girls they wanted to produce need to be flexible, yet capable of excellent articulation. They couldn’t just use exposed hinges, however, because these girls were meant to look human, not fully robotic. Eventually, Shimada got back on board and the three of them get to work, with Shimada’s designs getting pared down to practicality by Apsy and Apsy’s designs leaving openings for Shimada to improve upon.
Toriyama, on the other hand, wanted to attract more artists to the line, making the whole thing a showcase of different illustrators. In a way, this was a predecessor to Megami Device and its rotating cast of artists designing its lines, and the various artist-driven plamo lines in the 2020s like chitocerium and Guilty Princess. In what has to be the funniest possible coincidence, Toriyama literally Google searched random artists and found BLADE, future designer of the PUNI☆MOFU line, but for now, just a random guy. He said “Yes” almost immediately and came on board.
(As an aside, he was apparently good friends with CHOCO, designer of KOS-MOS, a model kit of whom would later help Kotobukiya’s own rise to model kit dominance; he’d later introduce CHOCO to the rest of the Shinki team.)
Konami announced Busou Shinki in July 2006. At first, nobody really cared and slated Konami for being crap at translating drawings into actual figures. After all, how good could a 1:12 mecha musume action figure really be, right?
People almost immediately shut up when the figures actually dropped and they sold out within a week on the first run, and then hours upon the second run. It’s hard to stress how insanely fast they sold out; this is akin to today’s sales of Bandai pre-orders selling out in an instant.
Times were very good after that.
At this point, the course of history was changed regardless of what happens. Mecha musume was no longer a niche aesthetic being shared by nerds in a forum, but now flooded the streets of Akihabara and Den Den Town. The people have spoken; they want mecha musume and they want it bad. Akitaka’s wish for MS Girls was a lot closer to coming true than it was by the end of the 80s.
Busou Shinki’s first wave sold like hotcakes. Waves 2-5 were the same, releasing in various batches from 2006 to mid-2007. In a small miracle, America got some of them a year later than the Japanese release, though Wave 3 only dropped with Benio; Wave 3 was, however, infamously cursed with poor sales, getting dubbed the Red and Blue Cliffs after how many of them remained unsold.
Like Toriyama envisioned, many different artists got involved. Some you might know already; CHOCO who got brought in by BLADE, Takayuki Yanase who got brought in by Shimada, and in a twist that probably made him real happy, Mika Akitaka all got to design shinkis.
Other names, you might know for different work; Yoshitsune Izuna for instance got to design Wave 13 – you may know him from FLCL and Diebuster. Kenjiro Hata, mangaka for Hayate the Combat Butler, designed his own Nagi shinki in 2009 as part of a collaboration event for a spinoff game of his manga. Taraku Uon designed Wave 11 with Yanase; his name is all over the Onegai franchise of anime and Read or Die. The point is that you could probably throw a dart at the artists who worked on Busou Shinki and hit someone with a reasonable body of work.
Apsy’s MMS, meanwhile, because he developed it at Konami, stays with Konami. This will be important later. For now, know that Konami used it to create action figures for other series like Gurren Lagann, Sky Girls and a bunch of Konami properties. At the absolute peak of Shinkimania, you had games for it too; like Battle Rondo, which was a raising sim you could play online back in 2007, or Battle Masters, a PSP fighting game in 2010.
Everything was going swimmingly for Konami. They had an anime, they had games everywhere and their action figures were selling like hotcakes. They even figured out a cool gimmick of letting people scan their shinkis into their MMO to let you play your collection out, almost a decade before stuff like Skylanders. Konami was at the top of the toy world in the late 2000s, and Busou Shinki has just expanded their empire from games to toys.
Yet less than a decade later, Busou Shinki was dead.
Apsy, Shimada, Toriyama and BLADE have all gone to Kotobukiya, cap in hand to start a new toyline with blackjack and hookers. Fans of the Shinkis practically raided Akihabara to rescue their favorite girls from the dumpsters before Konami could sentence them to obscurity. People are swearing blood feuds against Konami for their sheer apathy and stupidity in handling the property.
You probably have one question in your head.
What the hell happened?
Remember that I called Konami assholes at the beginning of this essay, and rotting bastards sometime earlier. Overall, this article isn’t too kind to Konami. While I would prefer to be neutral, Konami, as you’re about to find out, doesn’t do very much to deserve a neutral treatment.
This isn’t just the story of Busou Shinki.
This is also a tragedy of a company with its head stuck up its own ass, with genius and potential all lost to corporate greed.
Part 5: The Demon Within The Pachinko Machine
You may notice that I haven’t talked much about Konami like I do most companies that come up in my articles. I like to give a bit of background as to what companies or people might have done in the past to put the idea in people’s heads as to why a company or a person might do something.
I wanted to save this part for later to give you some background as to why Busou Shinki’s death was basically inevitable even from the moment Konami conceived of it, even before Shimada turned down their first offer.
Konami started as a jukebox rental and repair business in Osaka in 1969, before seeing the writing on the wall in 1973 to switch into arcade games, which were all the rage. Their first game was developed in 1977 under contract with Leijac Corporation, before exports began to the US in 1979. Their first real successes were games like Frogger, Super Cobra and Track & Field.
However, it was developing games for the MSX that really shot Konami’s stock into the stratosphere, with games like Gradius, Castlevania and Metal Gear increasing their profits exponentially. By 1991, they were out of Osaka and into Tokyo, where they continued to expand, building franchises like Silent Hill and Yu-Gi-Oh’s TCG, as well as absorbing the dying Hudson Soft and getting their library, most notably Bomberman in 2012.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Konami was at the top of the world. They had talents like Koji Igarashi, creator of Castlevania and Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear’s auteur and resident crackhead at their disposal, even giving him an entire studio to himself called Kojima Productions. Their name is almost synonymous with video games; everyone knows the Konami code, everyone knows the Belmonts, Solid Snake and everything else they’ve got.
By the mid-2010s, their reputation was in tatters; Kojima, Igarashi and just about anyone worth a damn at Konami had left, and whoever was still there were slipping in insults aimed at Konami for how they treated Kojima into whatever they could do. Just what the hell happened to Konami in the intervening 30 years for their star to go so low?
Very simply, Konami were assholes.
From the very beginning, Konami already had somewhat of a stink for creatives to get involved with them. Treasure, known for games like Gunstar Heroes and Radiant Silvergun, fled because Konami insisted on making sequels instead of original games. A good portion of Team Silent, the creative team that created the better received Silent Hill games, fled between 1996 to 2007; some come to work under Kojima Productions, perhaps feeling that Kojima was worth putting up with some indirect oversight from Konami with. Others fled to smaller game studios also formed by Konami refugees, like Good –Feel, formed in 2005 and known for largely putting out Mario spinoffs.
2015 was not a good year for Konami.
Kojima Productions, once a subsidiary, slowly disappeared from Konami’s branding before Konami banned Kojima from collecting his award for MGSV at the Game Awards to massive controversy as news of Konami and Kojima’s relationship made the rounds, telling stories of constant interference and abuse during the development of MGSV.
By this point, Kojima wanted out; he thought he’d made a fitting end to Metal Gear with Guns of the Patriots. Konami, however, couldn’t resist milking it more, and when Kojima didn’t play ball, Konami retaliated.
By the end of 2015, Kojima would take his staff and leave Konami forever, working with Sony on what would become Death Stranding. Metal Gear wasn’t the only casualty; Silent Hills, one of the first new Silent Hill games in a long time, was cancelled in early 2015 during the feud.
The fallout was immediate and long-lasting; Metal Gear Survive, the only new Metal Gear game to emerge after Kojima took his ball and went home, had messages hidden in the trailer calling the director and producer of the game bastards and traitors for betraying Kojima, and the Metal Gear franchise to this day is dead outside of pachinko and remakes.
Also in 2015, the Nikkei, the largest financial newspaper in the world and one of Japan’s premier newspapers, dropped an exposé on Konami’s unethical practices; bullying Kojima’s staff and Kojima himself, sabotaging ex-employees (either by stopping them from finding new work or suing the hell out of their new ventures), bullying current employees and banning ex-employees from saying anything about Konami. Essentially, they became known publicly as a black company – a company that abuses its workers, is hell to work at, and no sane person would work at unless they wanted to die a long, slow and painful death.
Also in the same year, Digital Entertainment CEO Hideaki Hayakawa, in the wake of heavily-anticipated Silent Hills’ cancellation, stated that Konami would no longer be making console games and instead focusing on mobage, something which the Konami UK subsidiary tries and fails to cover up.
Hilariously, even the Silent Hills cancellation managed to spread Konami’s creator curse; Guillermo del Toro, famed director behind films like The Shape of Water, Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth, and one of the creative minds behind the game, has to this date shown no interest in making any more games after two previous attempts went sideways and Silent Hills blew up. He did, however, get his collaboration with Kojima, starring in Kojima’s Death Stranding as Deadman.
I think we’ve labored the point; Konami as a company has a history of messing with their employees, squeezing everything they can out of them and leaving them out to dry.
To bring this back to Busou Shinki, to put it simply, Konami treated it the same way it treated its game franchises. It tried to milk it for everything it was worth and when it couldn’t be milked the exact way Konami wanted it to be, Konami killed it.
We went on that tangent about Metal Gear because in a way, Busou Shinki’s treatment was a warning sign for what Konami would do to Kojima and Metal Gear. After both franchises would make Konami lots and lots of money, Konami would squeeze them dry with ill-advised ideas, get annoyed when those wouldn’t work, mess around with their creators, and when they died as a result of their practices – as you’ll see in a bit – they’d try to keep them going anyway.
If Kojima, golden child of Konami and legendary video game auteur, wasn’t safe, no shot that Busou Shinki would be, either.
After the peak of Shinkimania, I can’t tell you what Konami’s higher-ups were thinking. Maybe they thought that the Shinkis were too expensive. Maybe, as some angry bloggers suspect, they were dominated by oldheads who applied outdated ideas to Busou Shinki and blamed Shinki and the minds behind it for its failure. Maybe they just thought it’d be funny.
I can tell you that Konami was never that good at manufacturing toys. AM Driver failed in part because Konami was simply too married to the concept of boy and girl toys being matching genders to those who played them. Even while releasing Shinki actively, releases did get shafted, canceled or moved. Their anime and OVA came out the same year that Shinki was discontinued.
The design philosophy appeared to have focused on pushing the online games as the main selling point, with the shinkis as bonuses, which is absolutely ludicrous, to be clear. It wouldn’t be surprising, however; Hayakawa’s comments in 2015 about switching to the mobage market smacks of a company chasing trends rather than making them.
Battle Rondo was the first victim of Konami’s mercurial temperament as a company. In October 2011, the game was discontinued completely, despite Battle Masters having received a sequel just a month prior. A game that had just come out for Shinki, Battle Communication, was canceled the next year. Konami at least tried to make it look like they cared; they dropped the anime and OVA in 2011 and 2012, but the signs were there. Planned Shinkis were never produced, updates were slowed down, the American site was shut down and just as quickly as it started, it ended.
In 2012, Busou Shinki was no more. Despite demand still existing for Busou Shinki to the point that a limited edition run in 2016 was popular enough to force multiple reprints, to this day, the toyline lies dead in a ditch.
The minds behind Shinki were stunned at this cancellation. We will probably never know if Konami ever treated BLADE, Apsy, Shimada or Toriyama with the same level of vitriol that they did Kojima. What we do know is that Apsy didn’t want it to end, not like that, not there. Still, Konami had said “enough is enough”, pulled the plug, and he and the rest of the Shinki crew were free men.
Perhaps it’s a small blessing that they got let go so quickly. Keep in mind this was in 2012. 3 years later, Konami would absolutely lose it all over the Kojima Productions controversy and the Nikkei article.
I can’t tell you what the Busou Shinki team might’ve been thinking as they saw all of that go down. Perhaps they might’ve been relieved, knowing they dodged a bullet; maybe vindicated, as we might never know how Konami treated them, but it can’t have been good. Maybe they might’ve been a little sad over what could’ve been. Perhaps they didn’t care; after all, by 2015, they had bigger things to worry about.
The rest of the story from here, you know.
Kotobukiya, looking for a big hit, comes to Apsy while he looks for someone to manufacture his ideas. He grabs Toriyama, Shimada, BLADE and Yanase and gives us Megami Device in 2015; as a nod to the line upon which he and his colleagues cut their teeth, Kotobukiya even released adapters to allow Shinkis and Megamis to be kitbashed. Working on Megami Device, Apsy improves upon his initial Machineca design, making it leagues better than the MMS system he can no longer use ever was. If you want the story from there, go check the articles on Megami Device and Phantasy Star Online 2.
Before the past could be put behind them, however, Konami had one last nasty surprise.
Part 6: Stranger than (girlpla) Heaven
We mentioned before that Konami loves sequels and milking things endlessly. Treasure’s staff fled because they got tired of pumping them out and Konami to this day is still trying to keep Metal Gear going even without Kojima behind it.
It’s fitting then that the last gasp of Busou Shinki wasn’t anything new, but Konami trying to spin some of its greatest hits out to squeeze out cash from a corpse. This time, the corpse was Busou Shinki’s. For five long years, the franchise had lain in a ditch, its creators having abandoned it and its creatives having long since moved on to greener pastures at Kotobukiya.
Which, of course, to the hungry ghouls at Konami, might as well have been fresh meat.
Konami teased a revival of Busou Shinki in December 2017. However, as early as 2015, model kits of Arnval and Strarf had already been confirmed, so most likely, Konami and Kotobukiya were already planning these kits. Surprisingly – or perhaps unsurprisingly, given their history – Konami tapped Apsy to work on their kits, and he and the Megami Device creatives – most or all who had been involved with Shinki, mind – had made the Strarf and Arnval designs.
In what in hindsight seems like a small blessing, we even got a new Shinki, Edelweiss, in Megami form, with her kit releasing in 2019 as a tie-in to the new Shinki project. That would be the only thing that went right with this collaboration. Konami hadn’t really changed their ways, and while I cannot confirm or deny this suspicion, I suspect that the Megami Device team having already been put through hell once weren’t biting.
The only other kits to release from the collaboration were Strarf and Arnval, who dropped in 2022 and 2023 respectively. BLADE’s concept art for Taonyao, intended to be part of the collaboration, was repurposed for what became PUNI☆MOFU’s Mao and Tu while the prototype body was repurposed for the Alice Gear Aegis kits Aika Aikawa and Ayaka Ichijou; Mao and Tu would instead get new Block 2 bodies developed for the line.
Apsy, for his part, did the closest thing to chewing the bastards out in public by making a statement on his personal blog stating that he no longer considered himself involved with the collaboration, which was prompted by the fact that Konami hadn’t even told him about any further developments on their “revival” project, confirmed to be a smartphone game titled Busou Shinki R, or that they had released an arcade game called Armored Princess Battle Conductor in which Edelweiss was appearing and being treated as a crossover character.
I cannot conclude for certain, but maybe Apsy simply did not want his new brainchild to be weighed down by a ghost out of the past.
To this day (May 27 2026), Busou Shinki R has not been released and the Megami Device collaboration died a quiet death. There have been no plans to release any further Shinkis, only variants of the already released Shinki kits. Despite occasional clamour for new Shinki content, that is where things stand.
The only other legacy Shinki left was Alice Gear Aegis, mentioned in the Megami Device section. Something I didn’t mention in there is that the company that developed it, Pyramid, also did development for Battle Masters, and their character designs are done by none other than Shimada and Yanase. In a way, this may be the closest we actually get to Busou Shinki R. For more information, check this article about it.
As one last aside about Konami, remember when we brought up Yu-Gi-Oh? Sometime in 2018, Konami would release a new archetype called Sky Striker, based around mecha pilots. A lot of the Ace card designs resemble mecha musume, almost like an YGO version of the Shinkis. It’s worth noting that the Sky Strikers were so popular that Konami decided to adapt the lore multiple times; first in the OCG Stories manga, then in a Master Duel event, and finally in their CARD GAME THE CHRONICLES web anime. The demand for mecha musume never died, and it still keeps going even in media that has nothing to do with toys or model kits.
Given that the OCG Stories adaptation wasn’t received too well, however, and the CHRONICLES adaptation is not much better, we hope that the Strikers don’t end up going the same way their spiritual ancestors went. Maybe, hopefully, Konami will treat them better than they ever did Busou Shinki.
Part 7: Honoring the Fallen
Now for a moment of personal heart-to-heart. I truthfully wasn’t around for the Shinki craze. I only got into the model kit hobby in early 2023, and I didn’t get into girlpla until 2024. I didn’t even know that Apsy was anything aside from a random dude who worked with Kotobukiya until 2025, and I didn’t know he was involved with Busou Shinki until doing the research for this very website. When the Shinkis were ruining people’s wallets, mine was getting ruined by Dinosaur King and Mushiking as a young kid in elementary school.
However, once I got interested in writing this guide about girlpla, I realized I would need to write about Busou Shinki eventually, and so, to at least have some of that history within reach, I bought three Shinkis; Xiphos, Benio and Bright Feather. They’re janky and old and Benio and Xiphos in particular look so ridiculously silly on my shelf next to the likes of AUV Ame-no-uzume or Nuke Matrix Yefuna Malkina.
But looking at them and having played around a bit with them, I can understand why people loved them so much. They were way better than any toy I’d ever had as a kid. They had the articulation of kits manufactured almost decades later, and had such cool designs that I’d probably have been trying to hunt these down if they’d been among the toys I had to give up when I moved out of my home country.
Even looking so janky and funny, I can’t help but like them. They’re a part of history that I can hold on to in a hobby that I’ve fallen in love with. I recognise that I could only ever feel a fraction of what their true devoted fans felt when Konami let them down; or what Apsy and his colleagues must’ve felt when Konami told them that the ride was over.
I’ll most likely never meet him or anyone involved with this in person, but I hope they’re all proud of their work.
Anyway, the reason I wanted to write at all about Busou Shinki was because of just how important it is to girlpla history. It brought some of the most important minds in toy design in the same room and gave them a working relationship. It let Apsy cut his teeth on action figure design and gave him experience that he could take with himself to perfect Machineca and steer the course of history.
Nearly everyone who was involved in Shinki’s development steered girlpla history across multiple companies, directly or indirectly; you might think that Bandai, who we haven’t even mentioned for a while, wasn’t involved, but Shimada’s designs are all over the Sisters; almost every single one of the Sisters from Rishetta until Neverlia, including their variants was designed by Shimada, Yanase and Kanetake Ebikawa, who, surprise, ALSO did work on Megami Device.
It is impossible to know what would have happened if Konami had treated Busou Shinki and the people behind it better. Maybe Apsy and the others might still have left, having done all they saw fit to do. Maybe it becomes a big multimedia franchise, right up there with Uma Musume, Fate and all the others.
All I can say is that had it not died, the girlpla world as we know it doesn’t exist; Apsy doesn’t get free from Konami’s bonds looking for a manufacturer, and Kotobukiya never partners with him to make Megami Device. For certain, we know that everything Machineca caused never happens.
If Busou Shinki never died, Megami Device and everything we know today might not have existed.
It is ultimately useless to ruminate too long on the past. Ultimately, this essay is meant to do one thing; detail the story of the honored ancestors, the Shinkis who walked such that the Megamis, the Sisters, the VFGs, the FA Girls – all of them could fly.
EDIT: 7/7/2026: Edits for clarification and tense correction, as well as adding some links to different articles and some information.
Official Site: http://www.busou.konami.jp/ (archived, in Japanese)
https://www.kotobukiya.co.jp/en/title/megamidevice/busou-shinki/ (for the modern Shinki kits)
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