VeryCool

VeryCool told you its specialty in its catalogue numbers. The company's SKUs begin with VCF, VeryCool Female, and that prefix covers two-thirds of everything it has ever placed in this Archive: female soldiers, assassins, fashion killers and goddesses, built years before the wider hobby caught up to the demand. A VCM prefix for male figures technically exists. It has appeared roughly twice, once for a coded Kane & Lynch homage, which tells you how the vote went internally.

The catalogue's backbone is the female military line: Soviet Red Army soldiers, Chinese and Russian special forces, snipers and honor guards, tailored with the layered-gear seriousness the genre demands and named with the machine-translated romance that gives Chinese third-party collecting half its charm. Sniper Little Sister. Lady Dragon in the Moonlight. Fox Legend. The Archive records these names exactly as issued, because improving them is impossible.

The breakout came early: 2014's Ultra Female Killer Violet arrived in three color variants at once and established the house style, sleek, armed and original. Licensed work followed where it fit the brand, most visibly Mai Shiranui from The King of Fighters and a fashion line built on Cara Delevingne's likeness, alongside collaborations with Tencent games including WeFire and Asura.

But the crown of the catalogue is golden and holds a staff. VeryCool's Dou Zhan Shen series, born from Tencent's game of the same name, and its Journey to the West line have made the company this Archive's leading maker of Sun Wukong: six Monkey Kings and counting, armored tellings of the Great Sage that stand among the most impressive Journey to the West figures ever produced. A house that built its name on female figures keeps its masterpiece in a monkey's armor, and somehow that is the most third-party sentence in this entire Archive.