San Diego Comic Con 2013 Preview Night isn’t set to begin for hours yet, but our first major Halo toy news announcement has already come out from a most unexpected source: Kotobukiya! Kotobukiya did a brief tour of duty with Halo collectibles with their Kotobukiya Halo 3 ArtFX Statue series, but we haven’t heard from them in years so far as Halo goes. But it looks like Kotobukiya is returning for a second campaign in Fall 2014, when their new line of Kotobukiya Halo 4 ArtFX and ArtFX+ statues will start to be released!

I’m of two minds about this announcement. On the one hand, I think it’s great the Kotobukiya has finally decided to give Halo 4 a go. I did not collect and have no particular love for the Halo 3 Kotobukiya ArtFX statues–in fact, I think they looked pretty average for costing as much money as they did, and not nearly as good as the Square-Enix Halo Play Arts figures. As a result, you can still find almost every Kotobukiya Halo Master Chief and Spartan statue on ebay for under $100 even after being out of production for several years.

Even so, Kotobukiya has improved massively as a company since they made their Halo 3 collectables, and I’m definitely interested to see them tackle characters from Halo 4. Can you imagine how cool a Promethean Knight statue could be, perhaps with a couple Alpha Crawlers flanking the Knight? Yeah, me too.

On the other hand, by the time the first Halo 4 Kotobukiya ArtFX and ArtFX+ statues are released in Fall 2014, Halo 4 will be two years old and the next Halo will already either be upon us or very close to coming to fruition! I can’t imagine what Kotobukiya is thinking, getting a license for a video game that’s already been out for close to a year and that will have been out for two full years by the time they get any products released. I’m hoping that this is just placeholder artwork that Kotobukiya is using, and they’ve already secured the rights to Halo 5 (or whatever it’s going to be called) as well.

What do you think about this news, Halo collectors? Are you excited to see Kotobukiya take another crack at the Halo franchise with their fairly priced ArtFX statue line, or do you think this new branch of Halo 4 collectable statues is an unnecessary addition to the Halo collecting world?