Cancer Deathmask

Cancer Deathmask is one of the 12 Gold Saints of Athena, the highest rank in the army of the Goddess of wisdom. Although he is purported to serve the Goddess Athena, Deathmask instead uses his power as a Gold Saint for his own sadistic and evil desires.  From the beginning, he is one of the few Saints that is well aware dark truth behind Sanctuary, but does not care because it allows him to continue being evil. Deathmask  is such a vile Saint that he likes to decorate the walls of his Temple with the faces of his victims; not just warriors, but also women and children.

The box of this EX Cancer Deathmask is the standard EX box. A nice sturdy box decorated to look like the Pandora Box of the Cancer Saint.

This is covered by a glossy sleeve containing much of the product info and pictures.

The Object Mode for this character’s Cloth is a crab.

It is a giant, hefty and shiny Object Mode that feels quite sturdy and is fairly easy to put together. After having figure out and fight a bit with June’s Object Mode, this was a nice change of pace. The Cancer Object Mode also stays together quite well!

One thing to note about the Object Mode is how the armor seamlessly fits into the design of the cloth, giving you a clean solid giant crab. However, there is some cheating done to accomplish this. Much of the body is made of the plastic shell used for the Object Mode, rather than being composed of the armor, as it should be.

The actual chest armor, waist and belt are hidden within the plastic body of the crab.

Now when we take the armor of the Object Mode and slap it onto our Saint, it ends up looking really great and is a very faithfully rendition of what the character looks like in the show.

While it does have the slim waistline that is a signature of the line, it is not as prominently visible as it is on some of the other Saints.

After the handling Chameleon_June last week, which had a ton of plastic, it was nice to handle a figure with an armor that is almost completely made of metal.

The covers for the back of the hands, the waist armor, the headpiece, a small square stopper piece under the front skirt piece and the bottom section of the leg armor and the spikes on the back of the feet are made of plastic. While that may sound like a lot, it only comprises a small amount of the armor.

As for articulation, Deathmask has all of the joints that make the EX line so nice and poseable: double jointed knees and elbows, an abs crunch, double jointed neck, ball-and-socket shoulders, etc.  The cloth also has its fair share of articulation to allow for toy to move when it is donning the Cloth. Each of the four pieces of skirt armor is triple jointed; so that is just 12 points of articulation in the skirt.  This allows some freedom of movement for the legs and gives Deathmask the ability to perform some good action poses:

like taking a wide attack stance…

or taking a knee.

 Furthermore, the shoulderpads are multi-jointed to allow the arms to move with less restriction.

Cancer Deathmask was one of the early releases in the Saint Cloth Myth line, which means the original release of this character suffered from a face that was ugly as sin and an armor design that was only an approximation to how it looked in the show.

So obviously, the EX release is much better in just about every way: the proportions, capturing the crazy essence of the character, the articulation, and fit of the armor.

The only thing that I liked better about the original was that the spikes on the back of the feet stay in place well. On the EX release, these spikes often fall off.

The only other minor complaint that I have with the EX figure, is that the headpiece will not sit centered sometimes, so it can look a bit off. You can either mess around with the headpiece until you get it right, or  display Deathmask without the headpiece.

I for one, however, cannot get used to seeing him not wearing his iconic headpiece.

Deathmask comes with 5 faceplates, which add a lot to the expressive nature of this toy.

My favorite of these is the laughing face. It is a nice mix of joy, craziness and evil.

The only issue is that with  this faceplate is that the headpiece on the figure hides part of his crazy and joyous laugh.

So you have to display the character without it to get the full effect of this awesome faceplate.

He looks even crazier without the headpiece!

As another extra, Deathmask comes with a three-piece, articulated, plastic cape.

So you can make your Deathmask look cray-cray WITH a cape.

Deathmask comes a respectable 9 interchangeable hands.  You have a couple of fists and a couple of splayed hands. The only one worth noting is the one with closed hand with the index finger pointing out.  This hand is for recreating Deathmask’s one and only signature attack: theSekishiki Meikai Ha (積尸気冥界波).

This attack separates the body and soul of the enemy, sending the soul to the underworld. In the underworld, the soul will march to its ultimate resting place in a hell pit.

When Deathmask faced Shiryu, however, he had to make an appearance in the underworld to give him a helping hand, as Shiryu was not quite ready to plummet to his eternal resting place.

I imagine that since Cancer is pretty sparse when it comes to extras that are unique to the character, Bandai decided to include two extra armor pieces- a chest piece and a front skirt plate- to replicate how the Cancer Cloth looks in the manga.

I am personally not a big fan of Cancer Deathmask, since he is one of the weakest and most evil  of the Gold Saints.  He also pales in comparison to the awesomeness that is Cancer Manigold from Lost Canvas.

However, the EX release of Deathmask gave me a better appreciation for the design of the character, his cloth and just how crazy the character really is. Furthermore, this is a very solid release in the EX line, with only a couple real (minor) issues.  So ultimately for me this was a great release of a not so great character, which raised my perception of the character… a little bit.