It's time, Clone-oa has arrived at his destination!
I was super excited for this plush and boy, does he deliver.
Here he is; Isn't he adorable?
He stands 11 inches/30 cm tall and is made or a SUPER soft material. No tag this time. I half expected another Hello from our friends at OLYFACTORY. I kind of love him in an ironic way. Honestly, this is a decent plush when judged by itself. I don't have the original UFO Klonoa that this is a knockoff of for comparison anyway, but I'll compare it a little later.
The stitching and general quality looks good, though I had to pick off some dirt and there is a couple of loose threads hanging off of areas where embroidery was used. The hands have no effort to distinguish fingers beside the thumb and pointing finger, which I personally don't mind but it does look a little odd. His pointing hand is fine, and the other resembles an oven mitt.
Surprisingly, the fabric making up the eyes and middle of his face appears to be print-on fabric. I never noticed this in the photos! The yellow, white and black are printed, but the pupils themselves are embroidered.
I bet it's hard to tell even in this picture! I dunno if that means it's good material used or just coincidentally holds color. It may fade with time.
The ears are unfortunately a little short. The black and white are sown in a way where the whole ear is white and the black is more of a "sleeve" that creates pockets. I guess if you want you could do the "coin behind your ear trick" with him and hide some spare change. They look a little strange with so many ends that they almost begin to resemble hands. I wish they reduced the points a bit to stylize the plush. This is the result of the fact that they scaled down this plush, likely to save money.
The real Klonoa UFO plush has two sizes, large and beanie. The beanie plush is around 11-12 inches tall. Since I don't own these plushes I need to use the photos here for reference.
https://twitter.com/klonoa_archives/status/829126680753041408As you can see between photos Clone-oa's hat has lost a lot of detail to it compared to the real deal and the cap is a lot shorter than it should be. Unfortunately the hat falls into itself a lot, so I may need to push in some stuffing to keep the hat in shape.
The belt appears to be too broad, encapsulating too much of the plushie. It is also made of felt rather than this leather-looking material that they used and is a much lighter shade or orange. The original plushes' nose is much smaller and the face is sown with more detail, which is dropped in the bootleg to a pink patch sown onto the white to simulate his smile. His cheek fluff, distinctly separated into three in the original, has been dropped into a vague shape resembling 2 tufts in the bootleg version. The legs are also stuffed, which isn't the case in the beanie version.
I honestly can't tell whether they bootlegged the large version of the plush or the small one, since details blend together, such as the small ears of the beanie and the lesser sowing lines in the face of the larger one. It's obvious they were only working off of photos, likely of both versions.
One possible error that I am unsure about, since literally no photos of the back of an official Klonoa plush exist, is that the bootleg completely lacks Klonoa's tail. It's hard to say if this is another giveaway or if the real plush also lacks this detail.
I saved the best thing for last though, a dead giveaway of this plushes' bogus nature and the fact that bootleggers always have to work in a baffling error or two; Klonoa has 2 Pac-Mans on his hat for the price of one now!
Really?
They didn't look at enough pictures of Klonoa plushes to make sure that it was 1 Pac-Man chasing 1 dot, or just the Pac-Man? He and his double are even facing the wrong way!
I do hope that I can pull them off of the plush with some patience and cut the dot out of one and re-glue it, because otherwise I think, even though it's kind of shoddy bogus, it is a nice plush by itself and I am happy to keep him.
Again though, I do NOT recommend buying these even if they are cheap on AliExpress. Namco sees no profit from the sales and the plushes are of uncertain quality. This might mean that Clone-oa here may be hazardous to your health.
What's your opinion on Clone-oa and his Klonoa 2 envoking double I discussed earlier?
