Comic books and fighting games are two of the seven great loves of my life, so when Capcom started making arcade games featuring the X-Men and various Marvel Superheroes a few decades back, I was hooked for life. And when a $200 Marvel vs Capcom Infinite Collector’s Edition went up for sale earlier this year with four statues and a set of Infinity Gems included, well… cue that “Take my Money” meme. The big day came this week and the box set arrived… but not everything is quite as advertised…

The Right:

Okay, to begin, some bookkeeping: If you’re looking for a review of the Marvel vs Capcom Infinite video game, you won’t find that here. I’ve been sick all week and haven’t even installed it (and that’s totally not just because I completely suck at this series).

Those Capcom Mega Man X & Chun Li statues? Nope, those won’t be reviewed here either. I’ll cover those later this weekend on Gamer Toy News.

What you will find here is a review of the Collector’s Edition Iron Man and Captain Marvel statues, as well as the box of Infinity Eggs (err, I mean “Gems”). Let’s dig in…

The whole set comes in a huge box (as far as video game special edition go), equivocally sized to the Sideshow Michelangelo statue I got in the mail today (highly recommended, BTW).

Under the nicely-designed Steelbook containing the game (which features a suitably badass Ultron cover and takes up roughly 3% of the box), there’s a large foam insert containing the four statues and box of Infinity Stones.

The two statues included with the set are Captain Marvel and Iron Man. While I’ve got enough Iron Man figures to fill a room already, it’s hard arguing that he’s Marvel’s headliner character as far as full-Disney movie rights go. And as Carol Danvers is arguably Marvel’s biggest female character and has her own movie coming up, she’s also a natural. Good choices.

I was prepared to find out that the quality on these statues was awful and then crap all over them, but to my surprise… they’re actually quite nice. The PVC figures are in the same neighborhood of scale as the 1/10th scale Kotobukiya ARTX+ series, and feel far more solid and hefty than many of Koto’s.

The paint apps on both these Marvel vs Capcom Infinte statues were exceptional, and easily at the standard I’d expect from a bigger company like Kotobukiya.

Because he’s just armor with no human features to capture, Iron Man is easier than your typical character to produce in toy form, but I think Project Triforce did an excellent job sculpting this figure nonetheless.

This looks and feels like a hybrid movie/comic book Iron Man, and has the perfect glossy metallic paint on it. Looks gorgeous.

At a glance, I didn’t feel as positive about the Captain Marvel statue. I felt like Carol’s chest proportions looked bizarre and her anime face was an instant turn-off. But then I examined screenshots of Carol from the game, and discovered that this was a spot-on depiction of Captain Marvel as she appears in the game.

Better still, this long-haired Captain Marvel is actually an iteration I can’t recall seeing produced yet by any toy company (prove me wrong with your esoteric knowledge, dear readers). I’m familiar with this look for Carol from her three-star iteration in Marvel Puzzle Quest, so I think finally having a figure of her is pretty rockin’.

The Wrong:

While I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I’m impressed with both the figures, I don’t really love the orange and red bars across their bases. The rocky terrain bases themselves are nice and simple, and I like how the bases can interlock in a variety of positions, but the brightly-colored bars are really jarring (particularly when displayed alongside the blue and green bars of the Capcom statues’ bases).

I understand what Capcom was going for with the colors and why they did them that way, but I feel like they’re ultimately distracting away from the figures themselves.

The Ridiculous:

At this point, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a little something that I haven’t talked about in this review. Or, rather… six somethings. Yep, I am of course refering to the set of Infinity Gems included with this set.

Capcom made a major error when they showed off a box of beautiful, transparent resin gemstones with LED lighting in them in the advertising for this Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite Collector’s Edition set (shown above).

The trouble with what Capcom showed in the ads is that the Infinity Stones don’t look that way in the comics… and they sure as heck don’t look like that here in the final product either! Instead, we get cheap, clear plastic, bumpy half-ovals that are permanently affixed inside of their box and flash on and off with a weird strobe function.

Regardless of whether or not these are more similarly-shaped to the ones in the video game and comic books, these “Infinity Gems” look worse than something that came out of the Easter Egg section at a Dollar General, and are frankly downright insulting. Capcom should be ashamed of this inclusion in the set. Awful.

Overall: While I feared I was going to have to Hulk Smash both the statues and the Infinity Gems in this review, the Captain Marvel and Iron Man statues far exceeded my expectations and are all-around solid releases–especially for being pack-ins with a video game.These would easily be $60-$70 each statues from someone like Kotobukiya, and they’re a super value in this Collector’s Edition set. These are being parted out on ebay for about $35 each, and are well worth it if you like how these look (I do).

On the flipside, the box of Infinity Gems is basically an atrocity, and I can see plenty of accusations of false advertising being directed at Capcom as a result of this release. I almost never split my grades into two (in fact, I’m not sure I ever have), but the quality disparity between the items in this set is just too large to not do so.

STATUES GRADE: A-

INFINITY GEMS GRADE: F