DISCLAIMER: We have not built any kits from this line, and we have no intention of doing so at this moment. We have drawn our information from other reviews and so cannot provide a personal verdict. This article is purely informative.
Overview
There are some times you just have to admire the audacity of some people, the sheer chutzpah to attempt something you really, really shouldn’t be doing. Yubo Cultural Creative may be lacking in originality, but they certainly aren’t lacking in chutzpah.
After all, it takes some serious chutzpah to be ripping off Kamen Rider so blatantly you can almost hear the veins popping in Toei’s lawyers’ heads.
Kamen Rider is, for anyone who has somehow lived under a rock for the past ten years, a gigantically popular tokusatsu franchise penned by Shotaro Ishinomori (also known for Cyborg 009 and for other toku nerds, Kikaider, Inazuman and Himitsu Sentai Gorenger) that has been running since 1971, starting with the legendary 98-episode series led by legendary samurai actor and Segata Sanshiro himself, Hiroshi Fujioka (Takeshi Hongo/Kamen Rider 1) and only slightly less legendary but unfortunately tragedy-laden actor Takeshi Sasaki (Hayato Ichimonji/Kamen Rider 2).
The series revolves around the eponymous Riders, who used to be cyborgs, but are now usually random dudes who transform into superpowered Kamen Riders to fight the forces of evil with motorcycles, martial arts and occasionally, unresolved sexual tension with their fellow Riders. (Not a soul on this Earth is ever going to believe Shotaro1 isn’t at LEAST bi.)
Yubo Cultural Creative, a new Chinese company with a history no older than early 2025, must really have been giant fans of the franchise because they began working on their Warrior Goddess line almost as soon as they started existing. The toyline revolves around genderflipped Definitely Not Kamen Riders, with the first one being Definitely Not Faiz, Shako, released in late 2025. Definitely Not Kuuga, or Lia, is due to follow in mid-2026. Girls based on Kamen Riders Orga, Geats (specifically Geats IX) and Kabuto are planned for sometime in the future.
Once again, we have to admire the audacity. While it’s not exactly the first Kamen Rider rip-off we’ve ever seen – Nuke Matrix would also arrive with its own riff on Takeshi Hongo with Cyclone Hopper – nobody would ever have expected that they’d run with just sticking breasts on Faiz and Kuuga and calling it a day.
Construction and Engineering
Unfortunately for the people who’ve thought “the suit stays on” before, for the Warrior Goddess kits, the jury is in and the quality is terrible. Whoever Yubo got for photoshoots must’ve been doing an excellent job concealing the proportion issues, terrible plastic quality and questionable seams, to say nothing of the wonky tolerances.
Quality can absolutely determine whether or not a kit’s difficulty is artificially inflated and Yubo has some serious work to do to get good quality kits, no matter how much they promise to fix things prior to first release. Needless to say, don’t get these if you’re not prepared for a real struggle.
Aesthetics:
While the appeal of these kits as gender-flipped Kamen Riders is definitely a huge draw – after all, Toei themselves would benefit from putting chemicals in the Drivers to make the Riders hot in the unfortunately discontinued Ride Kamens – the sadly poor quality of these kits takes away from their aesthetic.
There is only so much even excellent design work can do if your output is low quality. Not helped by this is the fact that their prototypes are well-known and generally agreed to be significantly superior to the kits that dropped, leading to overall lamentation as to what could have been.
Ease of Acquisition:
While certainly available for cheaper, these kits usually have a price averaging around £40($54) with prices liable to be higher than listed here. For obvious reasons (namely probably avoiding Toei’s lawyers like the plague), these kits are largely only available in non-Japanese storefronts.
Official Site: https://weibo.com/u/7951923072?tabtype=feed (Weibo, in Chinese)
- For clarity, we mean Shotaro Hidari from Kamen Rider W, not Shotaro Ishinomori, the guy who made the franchise. It may have slipped our minds at the time of writing that our favorite half-boiled detective was, in fact, named after the creator of the franchise. ↩︎
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