{"id":45480,"date":"2025-10-22T00:00:05","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T04:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/?p=45480"},"modified":"2025-10-22T15:20:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T19:20:25","slug":"cryptkins-kraken-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/2025\/10\/cryptkins-kraken-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Cryptkins: Kraken reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mini-Figure<\/p>\n

He's a bit timid and would rather stay at home with you, rather than attack anyone on the high seas. With his numerous tentacles, he's pretty helpful getting stuff done around the house. He may get pretty huge, so make sure you have a large bathtub - or an ocean - nearby.<\/i><\/p>\n

These days a \"kraken\" is just a giant squid (though gianter than an actual giant squid), but in their earliest depictions they looked like a fish (which was consistent with how whales were drawn) with a mane of tentacles. If you've seen that new video of a sperm whale eating a squid<\/a>, you can probably imagine how ancient sailors might mistake a whale with a squid in its mouth for a single combo creature. This little Cryptkin is very squid, sitting up on its nine tentacles, with its fins acting as a wavy crown over the top of its head. The eyes and beak have been moved up to where a \"face\" would be on most other creatures. It has a purple body, fading from dark at the top to light at the bottom, with green speckles on its head and pale yellow on its underside.<\/p>\n

Bagged separately inside the box with each figure is a small card with art of the Cryptkin on one side and biographical facts (well, \"facts\") on the other: name, full-grown height\/weight, descriptions, diet, and habitat and range, with a map of the world to help drive that last one home. It's cute that the Kraken is described as an \"omnivore who has a strange appetite for wood, especially if it comes from a ship coasts of Norway and Greenland.\" No wonder they eat ships! The shading for their home territory is just in the North Atlantic, so clearly they prefer cool water to warm. Sure, that tracks.<\/p>\n

There are two Kraken variants available. At Emerald City Comic Con in 2019, Cryptozoic offered an exclusive \"Treasure Kraken,\" limited to 300 pieces, that was painted to look like \"the green hue of treasure that has oxidized in the ocean.\" In other words, goldish, but with a blue patina. The eyes are still red, as is the feature of the line - of course, it makes extra sense in the Kraken's case, since the real ones were described as having flaming red eyes visible from far away. Convenient! It also suggests most sightings were at night or near sunset, which would also help explain how a whale and squid could be conflated into one creature.<\/p>\n

Then, while the normal Kraken was available in every case of figures, there was a variant available exclusively at Hot Topic. The \"Kosmic Kraken\" is the same mold as the standard, of course - but with sparkles on the surface that make it rough rather than smooth - but it's cast in a translucent teal plastic and has dark purple spots. Like the various versions of the Cerberus<\/a> mold, his card has different info about him:<\/p>\n

Given the legends about him floating through space, smashing spaceships and anything else that comes his way, it may come as little surprise that he has a bit of a rebellious side. With his impressive number of tentacles, he can get into a lot of trouble really quickly. If you're anywhere near an airport of a space center, he may even try to hitch a ride!<\/i><\/p>\n

The art on the card shows him sitting on some alien planet and shovelling rocks into his mouth like popcorn (fitting, and the \"facts\" on the back list his diet as space rocks and cheese, the latter because it reminds him of the moon), rather than floating through the sea and looking at the underside of a boat. Also, for his range, the card lists \"anywhere in the cosmos\" and in fact shows not a map of the continents, like all the other Cryptkins<\/i> cards do, but rather our entire solar system. I didn't even remember getting any of these at Hot Topic, but there's nowhere else this would have come from.<\/p>\n

<i>And now, some more OAFEry:<\/i><\/H5>