Posted: 01.11.2026
REVIEW:
Sakuragi Kana
Bandai S.H. Figuarts
I adore Kana. She’s the main character in my favorite ongoing manga series, Magilumiere: Magical Girls Inc. (a series I talked about earlier this month in my best of 2025 manga list). There’s a Magilumiere anime as well, and I’ve watched the first 8 episodes so far. It’s… fine. The books are better. It’s not pretentious to say the books are better when they just are.
All magical girls are great, don’t get me wrong here. Whether they’re from a book, an anime, a light novel; but Kana is extra special. In addition to being a cute magical girl, she’s a hard-working corporate adult! Take that, Sakura! Jobless loser.
Bandai is the first company to crank out an articulated Magilumiere figure as part of their S.H. Figuarts line. I own a few other Figuarts toys (and even wrote a review on Chainsaw Man’s Power), and I’ve always felt so-so on their products. They’re typically good, but like, not that good.
The figure comes with (few) fun accessories and the necessary optional parts to utilize them. She looks so happy to be saving your dumb civilian ass for the 10th time this month.
Scale comparison between 3 S.H. Figuarts figures. From left to right: Ayase Momo (Dandadan), Sakuragi Kana (Magilumiere), & Kosaka Hanoka (Love Live). Scale has never been a big focus with brands like Figuarts.
Rip & Tear: let’s take a closer look at Kanachi.
Box & Packaging
I didn’t actually rip and tear the box, don’t worry.
A cute and clean design adorns the cardboard prison that keeps Kana’s powers in check. We’ve got big figure art taking up a 1/3 of the front, some pink printing directly on the window, a breakdown of the included parts on the back, & super cute poses of Kana on the sides! Really, what more could you ask for?
Rookie magical girl Kana showing dominance over broom riding.
Clearly everybody’s favorite faceplate option.
As is typical nowadays, the figure is wrapped in plastic sheets and sandwiched in a plastic clamshell with her accessories laid out around her. There are a few small plastic sheets placed among her joints, preventing paint rub during transit (not that this paint needs protecting…more on that later). If you’re familiar with S.H. Figuarts are similar lines, Kana is packaged exactly how you’d expect.
Accessories
Included alongside the main course (Kana herself) are:
Broom
4 faceplates (5 total)
5 hands (7 total)
Alternate skirt
Alternate lower body
Stand
Instruction manual
OK, so not a terrible assortment of parts and pieces. The only true accessory is the broom, with everything else being the stand or optional parts for Kana. There is one accessory clearly missing here…
Where the hell is her wand?!
Can we be for real right now? Where is Kana’s wand? Hello?! Bandai??? Are we really not giving Kana her wand? She’s a magical girl! Come on.
Kana’s wand is such a simple design; a stick. A stick with a small star keychain on the end of the handle. In the anime, Kana’s wand is a bit different (a stick with a small star on top), but neither would be difficult to produce. Utterly disappointing that one couldn’t be included. Granted, Kana relies on her broom much more than her wand throughout Magilumiere in the earlier chapters, but she does use it! Hard evidence above! Book #5! Or go watch episode #8! Y’all really forcing me to make my own wand now… cheap mfs.
Pivoting to the things that Bandai actually provides you:
Faceplates
5 faceplates in total, all conveying a different expression. The variety in styles is great and I’m a huge fan of the dumbfounded, big-pupil face. Kana makes faces just like that all the time. The print quality on these faceplates is pretty good. They’re the cleanest looking parts of this entire figure. Kana’s neutral smiling faceplate has a misprinted mouth, however. What a letdown.
Hands
7 hands! This should come as no surprise to you, but 7 is not an even number. Kana comes equipped with fists, grippers, splayeds, and a single flat-palmed left hand. Only the left hand, sorry. Being Magilumiere is just a start-up, they can’t afford 4 full sets of hands (or wands, apparently).
Legs & Skirts
Swappable legs are a decent way to give a figure extreme pose options while maintaining a good aesthetic (and we all know how much Magilumiere loves their aesthetic).
Great concept, wonky execution. The tolerance with these parts is so tight, it’s a real chore to change out Kana’s lower body, and even harder to swap out her calves. I had to apply a lot of heat to those lower legs to get them attached to the pegs on her sittin’ bits.
The ball joint at Kana’s waist is another sore spot. There is very little room in that gap to fit her blue skirt piece and the amount of pressure needed to connect her upper and lower halves is worrying. Not only did it feel like I was going to break her every time I swapped the parts, I actually did end up breaking her at some point. The star shaped buckle on the front of her blue overskirt piece — yeah, the top of that star cracked off and is now lost to the channels of Carpetdom ‘til the end of time.
On a positive note, the more open, flowing overskirt can be used in standing poses as well as sitting (it’s intended use). And, of course, she still looks great without the overskirt, too, right?
Broom & Stand
I hope the broom is your favorite part of this set, because it has better sculpt and paint than Kana herself. It’s accurate, well made, and has a removable handle to make it easier for Kana to wrap her hands around the stem.
The stand comes with three arms; 2 are made specifically for the broom, while the third has a claw attachment meant for Kana’s waist.
Bandai’s standard clear stand is a good one, as far as stands go. They have 3 different holes for your stand arms, and caps to cover the holes when not in use. Large enough to be steady, small enough to preserve shelf space; good accessory, through and through.
Articulation
To quote a good friend of mine: “it’s like nice features on a shitty car.” He may have been talking about playing Bowser in Smash Remix 2.0, and not small plastic anime women, but the core message is pertinent and applicable.
Kana is plagued by an issue I’ve seen many times before: decent articulation hindered by the figure’s own sculpt. The stars on Kana’s shoulders impede her arm movement and the skirts limit the range of her hips. Most exposed joints, like the elbows and knees, have good range to them. Even her wrists and ankles are acceptable. But her neck? Yikes!
This is the range of Kana’s neck. The left photo shows her downward ability, and the right shows just how exceptional her upward range is. Bad, bad, bad.
Thanks to Nikoyama and his impeccable coding, Magilumiere’s magical girl outfits leave the elbows and knees exposed to danger. Kana runs the risk of higher limb damage in the field, but at least she can bend them well enough. Wrists and ankles move OK, but the ankle joints don’t have much side-to-side movement.
While her knees and ankles are acceptable, Kana’s hips are severely limited by her skirt(s). Most of the movement is prevented by the smaller white and red skirt underneath. It’s made of a soft rubber, but it ain’t soft enough to give Kana mobility. She can barely spread her legs past her shoulders.
Paint & Sculpt
The sculpt on this figure gets a passing grade. It looks just like Kana in the anime adaptation of Magilumiere. There’s not much more to say in that regard. The paint, though? Man, is that part rough. Join me below as we look on in horror together.
To the surprise and shock of mankind, Bandai has found a way to make their yellow paint both too thick and too thin at the same time.
Slopcity, population: Sakuragi Kana. Any paintwork in yellow, blue, black, white, or red are all kinda dodgy. Oh, that’s all the colors in this figure… Rough job all around, especially the yellows.
We all recall the importance of “coloring within the lines” from when we were younger, yes? I ask for no specific reason.
From a distance, Kana looks just fine. Good, even! Yet up close, the facade quickly crumbles. Yellows spilled over the blues, blues spilled over the yellows, or the pink mouth tampo being misaligned with the sculpt of her mouth. Call these nitpicks but I think they’re sloppy and unacceptable, especially for a figure with an MSRP of about $70 USD.
I’ve seen better paintjobs on much cheaper figures. And those figures even came with all their expected accessories (like a wand!).
Overall
All in all, this Kana figure is pretty lackluster. I want to like this figure so bad. I really do. But I can’t recommend this one.
Hindered articulation, sloppy paint, missing crucial accessories — the trifecta of a mediocre figure. That’s the boat Kana falls into: mediocrity. She’s not really a bad figure, but good isn’t the word either.
If you’re like me, and you’re a big fan of Magilumiere, and Kanachi, and you need a Kana figure in your life: join the club, buy a sad, disappointing Kana figure.
If you’re a rational human (congrats!), and you understand that your money is probably best spent on something else, well you’d uhh.. probably be right.
I’m thinking of attempting my own repaint of this figure to try and fix some of Bandai’s slights. Combining a fresh coat of paint and a custom made wand, I may just have a Kana figure I could enjoy more.
(Apologies for the terribly unmatched lighting in the photos for this review. I was playing around with settings while taking these photos, and finally settled on a lighting style I liked. I am far too lazy to retake all of these photos with the new settings. :3 )