Ultimate Grail Get + Diorama Box duo review
It has finally happened.
12 years of searching and missed opportunities...my last two grails have come into my possession within a few months of each other.
The Latios and Latias Diorama Box playsets.
It genuinely still feels surreal to even be holding them at this point. They are even more beautiful and vibrant than I could have imagined. I don't even want to go back into the amount of stress involved with getting these two safely into my hands, but it's done. It's finally done.
With this, I can now say that I am DONE collecting Pokemon playsets! I now have all ChibiPokeHouses (minus a couple of tiny parts, which I'm in the middle of sourcing), all the Pokeball Micro Playsets, all (I think) Happy World playsets, and now all three Diorama Boxes. I know there's a ton more, but I have almost no interest in the larger and more modern sets, or the Bandai sets. They're just not anywhere near as appealing to me as the vintage-era sets, and I had to talk myself out of getting the Manaphy set (which is less a playset and more a train track with a cardboard background).
It's been a fun ride for the most part, but I couldn't be more glad that it's now finished...as long as they don't start up the ChibiPokeHouse line again!
Suffice it to say, this is a review I have waited a long time to make. Pokemon Heroes was one of my favourites as a kid, and honestly the first film to make me cry like a baby. I LOVED the design of Alto Mare and the secret garden, and it always pained that they stopped the ChibiPokeHouse line literally on the cusp of this movie. The very last set was actually for the Pikachu mini-movie that went with it (Camp Pikachu).
I didn't actually know these sets existed until a fair ways into my playset collecting, and stumbled upon them completely by mistake. But they are, for me, a long-desired answer to the lack of a ChibiPokeHouse for the fifth Pokemon movie. Having said that, however, they scale completely differently to the ChibiPokeHouse line as far as the figures are concerned. In fact, the figures don't even really scale to the playsets, themselves, which, ironically, wouldn't have suffered from some ChibiPokeHouse-style minifigures.
Let's start with the Latias set, officially called the Diorama Box - Alto Mare Square
The boxes both have a different motif on the front - this one is based on the in-movie depiction of Latios and Latias.
The sets are definitely designed with the "use your imagination" school of thought, and, as such, are fairly light on the action features, in contrast to ChibiPokeHouses.
You can press the top of the steeple...
Causing Kabutops and Aerodactyl to burst from the ceiling of the museum, and the fossil above the entry way to "disappear."
It's not much easier to tell what it is, in real life, and I actually had to shine a flashlight on it to see it, myself.
You can also twist the little fountain on the right section of the set...
...and move the boat through the water.
The figure which comes with the set is literally the standard Moncolle Latias figure. Again, the sets are strangely scaled with figures consistent with the Moncolle line, but vastly disproportionate to their own sets.
Moving onto the Latios set, officially called Diorama Box - Secret Garden.
The motif on this set, I believe, is the Soul Dew. Not to be nitpicky, but how beautiful would it have looked if they'd used a slightly darker, translucent blue for the motif?
This one is definitely my favourite of the Diorama Box sets. Look at all the lovely little details on this one, like the pattern around the waterfall, and the temple in the background. They've actually used perspective really well with this set, to give it a much better feeling of "depth" and size, when compared with the Latias and Gotta Dance! sets.
If you press the top part of this tree...
Latias will pop out! You get two legendaries for the price of one in this set! :D
The fountain water can also be removed...
Revealing the Soul Dew underneath.
And as with Latias, the figure included is the standard Moncolle Latios.
Just before I finish, the vintage playset Collector's Guide/"Super Lexicon" I alluded to in my last post is underway! It's turning into a much larger undertaking than I thought and I'm determined to get down every last detail and translation I can get my hands on. I'm looking forward to sharing it with the Pokemon collecting community, in hopes that it can help other potential playset collectors complete their own collections.