Overview
In the wake of the girlpla boom started with Kotobukiya’s double whammy of Frame Arms Girl and Megami Device, Genei was one of the many, many would-be contenders in the ring. Genei is a company with its own interesting history that is covered in its own article.
In any case, in 2018, Genei would launch its own series of girlpla, the Genei Full Action Plastic Model Series (that’s a damn mouthful), or GFP for short. Opening with the Mary and Phina kits, Genei would eventually retreat from its many, many pursuits (among them being 3DCG modeling for franchises like Gundam, and music composition) to almost exclusively produce garage kits within GFP.
However, as those kits are not available at retail and are restricted to Japan-only events like WonFes and Hobby Round and are considered garage kits by the rules of this guide, we will only cover the Mary and Phina kits.
Construction and Engineering
The engineering for this is, to be blunt, an absolute shitshow. Firstly, the kits are non-scale in a way that makes it nearly impossible to customise this with parts from anything else, a dubious honor only shared by vLOCKER’s FIORE. While the ports on the GFP kits’ armor are, mercifully, the industry standard 3mm, everything else ranges from 4mm to 5mm. Their heights are also a whopping 18 cm, making them some of the tallest non-Grande Scale girlpla we are aware of, but also making it impossible to display or customise these things with anything else. The plastic quality isn’t great, feeling cheap, but it isn’t the worst.
However, the most egregious offense is leaving out a set of gripping hands as garage kits that need to be specially ordered from Genei themselves.
Aesthetics:
While Genei’s work in the garage kit realm has shown a marked improvement, even fielding their own Hatsune Miku garage kit based on the Phina design (in collaboration with artist Vividness, who almost exclusively puts out Genei’s products nowadays), the 2018 girls are woefully generic, closely resembling a cheaper-looking, less cat-like Innocentia or Materia with even less facial expressions.
Ease of Acquisition:
Unless you are in Japan and attend the physical events at which Genei sells their products, it is unlikely you will ever be able to acquire one of these. We only managed to get one by sheer dumb luck off AmiAmi.
Personal Verdict?
Truth be told, Genei’s continued work on the Full Action Plastic Model series is pretty good, if not up to the level Kotobukiya, their Chinese competitors or even Volks is getting up to nowadays…if only they had elected to share that with the rest of the class and not only at physical hobby events.
These kits are a historical curiosity. We can’t tell you what, if anything, motivated Genei as a studio to almost entirely retreat into working on garage kits exclusively and nothing else, and these kits (alongside the Sakura kit, which to our knowledge was never released) leave us slightly disappointed, but with more questions than answers, fittingly for a company whose name can roughly be translated as “illusion” or “mirage”.
Still, if you should be so lucky as to attend a WonFes or other event Genei (or Vividness) is at, you might like to acquire one of these and test them out yourself.
Personal Recommendations:
They’re really both the same, it depends on if you like blonde or blue-haired anime girls.
Official Site: http://www.genei.co.jp/ (in Japanese – site has not been updated since 2018)
https://x.com/genei_official (their primary social media, regularly updated, only focuses on their model kit activities)
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