Osaki Otamic 3D Icon II Massage Chair Review 2024

Does your back hurt on a near-constant basis? When you get home after a long day’s work, are your feet and legs screaming in protest? 

Have you been looking for a well-priced massage chair to help with those problems?

If you answered yes to the questions above, your search might have led you here to our Otamic 3D Icon II review. Unfortunately, this is almost certainly not the chair you’re looking for.

Don’t get us wrong, Osaki is one of the best companies in the business, and most of the chairs they make are superb. This one, however, is kind of all over the place. The chair just doesn’t feel like it knows what it wants to be. It’s a mashup of old tech, industry-standard tech, and cutting-edge tech—all thrown together randomly.

Amazingly, the Icon II winds up being better than you might expect, given that it feels like all the features were selected at random, but we can’t say this is one of Osaki’s better designs.

We should also point out that this chair is available on both the Osaki and the Titan websites. Titan is Osaki’s American brand, and you’ll often find Osaki models putting in appearances on the Titan website (though you only rarely see Titan chairs on the Osaki site). Any time you see that, just know that it’s the same chair and backed by Osaki’s world-class post-sales service and support.

In the sections that follow, we’ll step through everything the Icon II has to offer, and we won’t pull any punches when it comes time to talk about where this model just gets it wrong. That way, you’ll be able to make an informed purchasing decision. If that sounds good to you, read on, and let’s take a closer look.

An Overview Of The Osaki Otamic Icon 2 Massage Chair

Let’s start with the basics.  

If you decide you want one of these, you can order yours in taupe, black or brown. It’s a big, burly piece of furniture that doesn’t try to hide what it is. It measures 29.5” W x 63” L x 48.5” H (71” L x 35” H when fully reclined) and weighs 235.9 pounds, which is to say that this isn’t a chair you’re likely to be able to handle on your own when it arrives.  

Granted, once it’s put together, it’s relatively easy to move thanks to its rolling casters, but wrangling the boxes it comes packed in isn’t a one-person job. You’ll either want to have an assistant standing by or you’ll want to pay extra for White Glove service.

In our view, it’s better by far to just get a friend to come help you as the White Glove service is pricey, but if that’s not possible, then it’s something to consider.

There are two more things to talk about before we leave this section. First, the Icon II is a space-saving design, which means that it only requires 1” of clearance between the seatback and whatever wall you place it near. That’s huge, and it does help quite a bit in terms of finding a permanent home for the chair.

Second, it only supports 260 pounds of user weight. That’s a genuine disappointment.

While it’s true that there’s no formal standard supported weight limit in the industry, if you look at a broad cross-section of available models, you’ll find that the average is 300 pounds, with a great many models supporting far more than that.

Sadly, the Icon II falls well short of that informal average. 

It’s fine if you weigh less than that, but if you or someone in your family happens to weigh more, this could be a dealbreaker right out the gate. Either way, it’s something to keep in mind as we take a deeper look at what this model brings to the table.

The Otamic Icon II Massage Chair Utilizes A Weird Mashup Of Tech

This section is a bit hit or miss, but on balance, it is a strong component of our Otamic 3D Icon II review. We’ll march through the important technologies of this section and rate them as either being dated, state-of-the-art, or cutting-edge to give you a sense of what we mean.

Let’s start with the remote, which is dated. In fact, it doesn’t even appear that the design team gave it much thought. It feels like someone said, “Hey! Let’s take this ancient wired remote from a chair we built in the late ‘90s and graft it onto this chair.”

In an era where brightly lit touchscreens dominate, using a wired remote is really incredibly old school, and although the remote itself is well laid out, it makes operating the chair harder than it needs to be. This is something we’d love to see improved in a future model update.

On the other hand, the chair includes Osaki’s excellent body scanning technology, which is one of the best in the industry, and we’d rate it as being state of the art and tending toward cutting-edge.

Each time you sit in the chair, it will scan your back and adjust the position of the rollers to ensure they hit your body’s pressure points perfectly.  

The body scan routine gets it right the overwhelming percentage of the time, and on those odd occasions where it doesn’t, you’ll find controls on the remote that allow you to tweak the roller positions so that you always get the best massage this chair is capable of giving you. That’s excellent.

The massage track is 3D SL in its design, which allows the industry standard quad rollers to move along the X-, Y-, and Z-axis and do so starting from the tops of your shoulders all the way to the backs of your thighs.  

On top of this, the Icon II’s design team decided to incorporate a few 4D elements, which are all cutting-edge. There aren’t enough of these to call this a 4D massage chair, and to Osaki’s credit, they don’t, but this feels like another strange decision.

It wouldn’t have been at all difficult (nor added much more to the price of the chair) just to make it 4D from top to bottom. The real expense, from an engineering perspective, is introducing 4D technology. 

Once it has been introduced, it feels almost counter-productive not to make the entire design 4D.

See what we mean? 

There’s a lot of genuinely good stuff here, but it all feels very random. An ancient remote sitting next to a number of state-of-the-art features, with some cutting-edge stuff grated on. Very strange. In any case, even though it feels a little disjointed, we’ll be quick to admit that there’s quite a lot to like here.

The Otamic Icon II 3D Massage Chair Boasts An Impressive Number of Options For Its Price

This isn’t a high-end chair, but the design team managed to pack quite a number of massage options into the mix, and we really like that. It makes this a very strong component of our Otamic 3D Icon II review.

In terms of massage techniques, here’s what the Icon II has to offer:

Honestly, this list looks more impressive than it is. Shiatsu and 4D Shiatsu are the same technique, even if the massage is rendered a bit differently. There’s little practical difference between Percussion and Knocking, but this is the way Osaki lists them, and we think at the end of the day, the main reason is that eight techniques sound better than five or six.

In any case, it’s not a bad selection of techniques, and though this chair adds some variations to the theme, this is more or less what you find on most other massage chairs in the Icon II’s price range.

In terms of pre-programmed massage options, you get:

Some of the names Osaki uses are a bit cryptic, but the generally well-written user manual contains more detailed descriptions, and they all feel good, so there’s nothing to worry about on that front.

On top of that, the Icon II offers both partial and point modes, five intensity levels, and six different speed levels. For the money, this gives you an absolutely incredible number of combinations and permutations to experiment with.

There’s almost enough here to make us wish this chair came with memory slots so you could save your favorite settings, but that’s rare in the massage chair market generally and almost unheard of in chairs offered at this price, so we can’t really hold the absence of memory slots against this model.

The Otamic 3D Icon II Offers A Good But Not Great Airbag-Based Massage

We’d rate this as an average component of our Otamic 3D Icon II review. This model boasts 44 airbags, which is a decent number given the price of the chair. These are strategically placed to give a very good airbag-based massage that the user can modify via the remote, choosing from five different intensity levels.

In addition to that, if you don’t want to activate all of the airbags at once, you can selectively activate either the arms/shoulders or the legs/feet. Other chairs offer much more granularity in body region activation, so if this feature is important to you, then the Icon II is probably going to leave you wanting.

Our view is that this is a competently implemented feature, but it seems clear that the design team didn’t make an effort to do anything special here.

The Icon II Offers Zero-G Seating

If you’re not familiar with Zero-G seating, here’s a quick overview.

It’s inspired by NASA, and it works by placing you in a position such that your knees are elevated slightly above your heart. It also really does make you feel weightless, but that’s not why it’s an important massage chair feature.

It might sound like a gimmick, but Zero-G seating has been demonstrated to improve your circulation and lower your blood pressure. If you suffer from either of those problems, you’ll definitely want a massage chair that boasts Zero-G.

In addition to that, Zero-G seating will help you recover more quickly from any surgical procedure you might have, and if you put the chair into Zero-G mode before you begin your massage, whatever massage you order will feel better than it would in some other seating position.

All that to say, it’s a really good feature addition that has genuine therapeutic value.  Unfortunately, there’s only one Zero-G seating position on offer in this model, but one’s better than none, and we’re happy to see it included here.

The Otamic 3D Icon II Titan Chair Offers Surprisingly Good Heat!

This is honestly one of our favorite aspects of the Icon II’s design.

A competently rendered massage feels great, and you’ll get that from this chair.  Add heat to the massage, though, and it really takes things to the next level.

The Icon II offers both lumbar heat and heat in the leg massage ports, and that’s superb.  Sure, sure, it would be even better if this design allowed you to customize the precise temperature, but the simple truth is that there aren’t many chairs that do that at any price point, so it’s no great shock that such fine-grained controls aren’t available here.

Even without that, though, the presence of heat on your lower back and legs is amazing, and this may well wind up being one of your favorite features.

The Icon II Has A Superb Calf And Foot Massage

This is another very strong component of our Osaki Otamic 3D Icon II review.  Most massage chairs on the market today render their calf and foot massage via rollers in the footwell and airbags in the calf massage ports. That’s what this chair does too, but it also adds heat in the calf massage ports.  

Now, we could quibble and say we’d love to see heat in the footwells too, but the truth is, heat anywhere in the leg massage ports is amazing. If you spend several hours of each day on your feet and they’re screaming in protest by the time you get home, you’re flat-out going to love this feature.

Not only does it feel amazing, but it’s fairly customizable too. The foot rollers can be adjusted via three different intensity levels, and the airbags—being part of the larger airbag-based massage system—can be adjusted via the remote through five different intensity levels.  Absolutely superb!

4D Massage Chair Features Included

Earlier, we mentioned that this chair includes a few 4D features. Now, it’s time to talk more about them and explain what we mean.

There are three different modes that feature 4D massage roller action. These are Deep Shiatsu, Healthy Breath, and Massage Extend.

Activating any of these will allow you to experience 4D roller action, which is fantastic, but as we mentioned earlier, if you’re going to go to the trouble to make the rollers 4D in a couple of instances, why not apply that feature to everything?  

We’re a bit mystified, but we’ll readily admit that where 4D is available on this model, it’s awesome. We’re just not sure we understand the implementation.

Wait, Voice Control Too?!

The Icon II is one of a small but growing number of models that features voice control. We love it, but this is yet another reminder that this chair is a really strange mix of old, industry-standard, and cutting-edge features.

The chair understands the following commands:

The fact that this feature even exists on the Icon II is a pleasant surprise indeed. We really like it.

More Extras Than You Might Think

Even though the Icon II is a bit of an odd mashup of technologies, it’s got a surprising number of extras on offer. These include high-value additions like a massage timer that allows you to set the duration of any massage to your choice of 10, 20, or 30 minutes and the aforementioned voice commands, to lesser finishing touches like a holder for the remote and a built-in USB charger.

The USB charger offers nice synergy with the Bluetooth speakers as it allows you to listen to your favorite music or podcast while enjoying a massage and keep your phone charged at the same time.

Otamic Icon 2 Pros & Cons

If you’re still with us, we think you’ll probably agree that this chair is kind of a mess. Many of its features are quite good, but it all feels very random, and that, in our view, is the Icon II’s biggest negative (followed closely by its relatively low maximum supported weight limit).

On the other hand, it’s got voice control, some 4D features, and an impressive number of customization options as compared to other chairs at its price point.

Otamic 3D Icon II Review Conclusion

We can’t really say we like the Icon II, although we readily admit that it has a number of attractive features. 

The problem is the chair feels very unfocused. Yes, it’s got a fantastic heat function paired with an average airbag-based massage. Yes, it’s got voice control paired with an awful wired remote control system that feels like it time-traveled from the ‘90s. It’s just all over the place, and we don’t like that.

Given how many awesome massage chairs Osaki makes, we know they can do better, and on that basis, we can’t recommend this model even though it managed to score surprisingly well. 

In our view, it got that score in spite of the design team rather than because of it.

Other Options To Consider

If you’ve read to this point and have decided that the Icon II just isn’t for you, here are a couple of other options to consider:

This chair belongs on almost everyone’s shortlist. It doesn’t offer voice control, but it’s brimming with other features you’ll love and is very focused. We’d rate this model as the best value on the massage chair market today by a wide margin.

This chair is significantly more expensive than the one we just reviewed, but it’s almost always on sale. If you buy it during a sale, it’s still more expensive, but this model is everything the Icon II tries to be. It’s an amazing design you’re sure to love.  

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Official Manufacturer Support

References and Resources:

• Osaki Titan, Official Brand Website.
• Osaki Otamic 3D Icon II Massage Chair User Manual
• How Does Massage Work?, University of Minnesota.
• Why Does A Massage Make You Sleepy?, Sleep.com
• Can Massage Relieve Symptoms of Depression, Anxiety and Stress?, Mayo Clinic Health System.