Fate/Stay Night EXQ Rider Medusa Review

 The Bridle of Chivalry descends like a shooting star

 With me seeing the proper conclusion of FSN Heaven's Feel Movie, i think it is the time for me to write a review for Banpresto EXQ Figure of Medusa Rider. In the Fate series, Rider might not be as popular the main heroines but her character is good enough to make appearance into many of the Fate branching series.

 In Fate/Stay Night, Medusa is the Rider Class servant of 5th Holy Grail War answering to Matou Sakura as her master. Through Fate and UBW route, Medusa serves as Shirou's enemy with Shinji appearing to be her master and ended up dying in the middle of Holy Grail War. While she jobs in those two routes, Rider played crucial role in Heaven's Feel trying to save Sakura from Grail corruption and actually manage to survive until the end for once. Having the past life as an enemy toward humanity, Rider may appear to be an emotionless servant playing the role of cold blooded killer, however she will show her caring side for the Master she find worthy just like Sakura.

In terms of combat performance Medusa fights relying on her agility and range, lacking pure brute strength of Saber/Berserker class servant. To make up for that, Medusa possess a powerful Noble Phantasm named Bellerophon, a golden bridle that allows her to ride a mystical beast Pegasus. For the offensive capability, Medusa will ride and charge through the enemy in very high speed, delivering destructive power befitting of an A+ Noble Phantasm. With her NP, Medusa would stand a chance against most of the 5th Holy Grail War servants save for Gilgamesh and Berserker.

 
 With her decent popularity, Medusa made several appearance on other Fate related works outside FSN notably Extella and FGO. In FGO, she is available as 3* Rider servant who could provide decent AOE Quick NP but doesn't play much role in the story compared to her alternate version. As for Extella series she is one of the few servants siding with Tamamo faction and her route actually got rather hilarious ending as she snatched away Hakuno from Tamamo while leaving the latter sealed with Sessho-seki.

  Banpresto figures for Fate series tend to be inconsistent in terms of quality due the nature as prize figures. But fortunately EXQ figure for Medusa Rider falls into the better category. The hair is rather heavy due to the amount of PVC used for the sculpt, but the figure will still be able to stand properly without the additional support stand provided in the package. More importantly Banpresto did quite a good job to provide good sculpt for Medusa's well endowed body.

 Comparison shots EXQ Lancer Medusa, the gap in quality between Rider Medusa and her lily counterpart is quite significant since the face Sculpt of the latter is rather lackluster. In any case i am still willing get her for the sake of completion.

 One of the prize figure main weakness is the sculpt quality for the figure's face. However EXQ mitigates this with the face mask and to be honest, the face sculpt for EXQ Medusa is still very decent.

 With the lacking available option of PVC figure for Medusa, the EXQ figure certainly stands out to be a good choice and out of several FGO EXQ figure that i owns, it is easily one of the better ones. With this review, my debt with Heaven's Feel is settled but i think i am quite motivated enough to make another FGO related Prize Figure reviews.