GEM Series Marcille (Delicious in Dungeon)

One of the hits of last year, Delicious in Dungeon seemed to hit a collective nerve in fandom, especially those looking for something outside of isekai in the fantasy genre.

Following a group of dungeon crawling adventurers who resort to eating the creatures they kill, the series takes on a sort of Bear Grills survival style and adds to the fun by creating amazing looking dishes from the worst kind of creepy crawlies imaginable. 

Marcille, the initially reluctant participant of the party, eventually starts to discover dishes to her liking, and subsequently became a bit of a fan favourite.

Having been introduced to the G.E.M line via the With From Mercury girls Suletta and Miorine, I was impressed enough by the sharp and interesting sculpts that I returned to give our elven magic user a once over. 

As you can probably tell from the pictures, Marcille is relaxing over a meal, presumably scrounged from the dungeon, with a satisfied look on her face. I really like the relaxed pose, but one of the things that instantly grabbed me was the level of detail in the sculpt, especially in the smaller elements such as her many strands of hair, delicate two-finger pinching of her spoon with her other fingers pointing outwards, and the splay of her toes - any or all of these aspects could have been phoned in, but instead Megahouse have given her a wonderful feeling of life by making every detail seem alive.

The clothing fares well too, with lots of wrinkles, stitching and texture, granting an unusual level of fine detail to such a small figure. There are even details such as pinched leather under the studs of her book pouch, wooden grain emulated on the spoon and bowl, there are even little chunks of food in the soup - it's as if someone took a much larger figure and shrunk it down - it just looks great at any angle.

The paintwork is sharp and accurate, no missed lines as was the case with last week's Juri figure, and this is a fifth of the price! There's wash all over the place to provide a feeling of depth, so making her look good in photos is basically effortless. She fits in with real world textures, such as the bark on the tree I took my pictures on, perfectly.

If I have any gripe at all with this figure, it's possibly that face is a bit daft. It's not bad by any stretch, it just looks a little out of place and cartoony when the compared to the rest of the figure. But hey, at least she's enjoying the meal!

If there has been a theme to the last 12 months, it's the pleasant level of surprise I have with the value end of anime figures these days. For £35 this is sitting at Pop Up Parade prices, and it easily holds its own here. If you're looking for a Marcille on a budget, I can highly recommend picking her up, even if local prices are likely to be a good £15-£20 higher than import.