Yujin Shooting Historica Vol. 3

I really love shooting games, unfortunately shooting games don't love me. Ever since I was little I've loved games like Gradius, Darius Twin, In the Hunt, Life Force (Salamander), Parodius, etc etc. I've never been especially great at them, but I love the ship designs. So last year whenever Yujin came out with their own trademark brand of really inexpensive capsule toys featuring ships from various STG games from the past, I was pleased. When they released 2 more sets of these toys, I was thrilled!

This week (after receiving set #2 instead of 3 by accident) I got the entirety of Shooting Historica 3 in the mail. The first set included a lot of ships from games even people who aren't shoot-em-up fans would know. This set is a little bit more obscure, having ships from games that even I don't know.

The sub from In the Hunt has 'Option Parts' to transform it with.

The Raiden fighter can be configured to regular or Power-Up mode.

The two highlights for me were the fighter from the game Raiden, and the submarine from the 1993 arcade (and later PS1 & Sega Saturn) game In the Hunt. Interesting side note: I always thought that this game resembled the Metal Slug series, and it turns out that after making In the Hunt, the same team went on to make the Metal Slug games. Neo Geo ftw. ^^

Wolf Fang MechaTank from Granada (the game, not the nation)

There's a mech in this set from the game Wolf Fang, in the last set there was a mech as well. Hopefully if they make another set more mecha will be forthcoming, as I appreciate variety. There was a semi-generic looking ship from the game Sokyuu Gurentai, which I'd never heard of before and had to look up. A tank unit from the game Granada, and finally the CEASER ship from Star Soldier.

Ship from Star Soldier

Ship from Sokyuu Gurentai (Roughly means: Azure Sky Crimson Corps)

The first set of Shooting Historica had the gimmick of a few of the ships having options and parts to attach to the ships. The second set really had no gimmick. This set has a "transforming" gimmick with every ship having the ability to "power up" in some way (at least that's what the instructions say). All in all I love this series of Gashapon toys, they're aesthetically pleasing, accurately resemble what they're supposed to be and have gimmicks to boot! If you'd like a set of these, I bought them at Mugen Toys, and amazingly they had some full sets left (they don't make you buy 'random' ones even though they can see through the capsule!).