S.H. Figuarts One Piece

S.H. Figuarts is a series of 14 cm tall action figures made by Bandai. This series pertains to the Tamashii Nations top brand, Bandai's label for high quality articulated figures that can be compared to Kaiyodo ' s Revoltech or Max Factory ' s Figma distributed by Good Smile Company. Tamashii Nations encompasses several other well known action figure lines, as Saint Seiya Myth Cloth or Soul of Chogokin.

The brand name is composed of the acronym for "Simple Style" and "Heroic Action" and the playword on the words "Figure" and "Arts". Indeed, in Japanese, figure is pronounced as fii-gaa (フィギュア) and arts as aa-tsu (アーツ), giving way of the new word fii-gaa-tsu (フィギュアーツ) by merging.

S.H. Figuarts actually came out at first with Kamen Rider figures in early 2008, but by mid-2009 started to expand with figures of other anime licenses as G Gundam, Kakugo no Susume (Apocalypse Zero in the U.S.), PreCure, and during 2010 with figures of Dragon Ball Kai and One Piece. The very first focus on Kamen Rider can be easily explained by the fact that S.H. Figuarts actually succeeded to the Chogokin derivated series Souchaku Henshin (a.k.a. S.H.), which was already dealing with this series and other metallic characters from similar live-action series. S.H. Figuarts departed from the Chogokin filiation by mainly using plastic material instead of die-cast metal, in order to easily produce more details, and by eventually including non-robotic characters.