Tohno Minagi by soft garage

A figure of mai waifu~

Let me just start by saying, that the image above, is the only image of this figure (other then the ones I've taken) that I've ever seen online anywhere, and trust me what I say I've done a lot of searching, and this one single small image is from the manufacturer's page.
( http://www.softgarage.com/goods/contents/ani_game/air/chibikko_figure/index.html )
This figure is also supposed to be based on the image bellow, at least that's a safe bet.

I got this figure off Yahoo.jp two months ago, showed up just before Christmas.
The msrp on it was 1980 yen, the action sold for 1000 yen, but commission of the proxy bidder and other little things made the final price almost 3000 yen, before shipping, small price to pay for a hard to find waifu figure right?

 Anyway..
Here we have the package, normal there's not much to say about packages, but with this one I'd like to ask something. Have any of you ever bought a figure that didn't have an image of the figure anywhere on the box?
Even cheep trading figures that reuse the same box for all the figs in the line will have images of what fig you might get, and vending machine trading figures usually come with a small insert showing the figs in the line, but this doesn't, it only shows the images the figures in this line are based on on the back, and the sides just have almost random key art.
but one other thing that should be kept in mind is, this box did have one of those holographic seal stickers on it, just had to point that out.

Whelp, here's the figure.

I must say, the happiness of getting a new figure of Minagi soon was replaced with disappointment as I looked upon the quality of it.

One thing you might notice among many other things here is that, it doesn't look exactly the same as the first pic I posted, the image from the home page.
This is why I wanted to point out that the image up at the top there is the only image I've seen for this fig, because I couldn't believe the quality of this, I thought this had to be a counterfeit.
But this does explain why there are no images of the figure on the box, and like I pointed out before, the box did have a holo seal on it.
This isn't even a popular character/fig, so I don't know why anyone would want to counterfeit it.
It wasn't until I realized they made another figure of Minagi that I have (which is also of low quality, but I'll save that for another post) and I checked the other figures they made that I realized something, softgarage is just a very very crappy manufacture, and this is why you've probably never heard of them, and why they don't seem to make figs anymore.

The model itself seems rather sloppy and as if it was molded mostly by hand out of some sort of clay.
unlike normal pvc figures, this doesn't seem as if it was assembled, this seems as if it was made out of a solid block, and I'm not sure what it is, but I don't think it's a normal plastic, not pvc anyway.

The paint application looks almost as if it was done all by brush, lots of sloppy lines, paint on areas there shouldn't be and so on.

But the thing that makes the paint really look bad, was that for whatever reason, they used a gloss finish over the whole thing, this is something I think I might try fixing latter, by giving it a clear normal matt finish.

One nice thing I will say about this figure is that the stand is made of real wood.

It's not a high quality hard wood, but it's not a crappy soft wood like pine ether.

Even with it's bad quality, it's still nice to have around.