Re: Mazinger Z & Super Robots (Shogun Warriors) and other Mecha - Official thread!!
I picked up the Hi Metal R VF-2SS from Macross II: Lovers Again.
Box has beautiful new artwork by Masami Obari across the entire front of it, he's certainly lost none of his touch over the years.
Fighter mode is impressively solid given what a cluster**** the design is. It's still a chore to get everything lined up "just so", but unlike the Evolution Toys version, it'll stay that way once you finally get it.
There's a neat little gimmick where the interior of the cockpit rises out of the body of the plane slightly when you open it.
Gerwalk is solid, and surprisingly well-articulated.
Battroid mode is a real treat. Some amazing work in the leg and knee joints, the whole thing comes together extremely cleanly with no need for gap fillers or to swap parts beyond the hands. All the plastic parts besides the rifle have a very pleasing matte finish, a vast improvement aesthetically and engineering-wise over the HMR VF-1, which is based on a decade-old mould and really starting to show its age compared to every other figure in this line. There's also a huge amount of metal in this figure, throughout the entire inner structure of the torso, the joints, and the feet.
Comes in a huge box for a relatively small figure because of the SAP parts. These really fill the figure out - it has rock-solid metal hip joints but even they have some trouble with the weight of the backpack. Almost all the missile bays open on integrated hinges, only two doors on the lower leg require parts-swapping.
Great toy, but perfect? Not quite. For one I had to pry some screw covers loose and tighten things up out of the box, one leg was visibly splitting apart. Also, in maybe the most bizarre QC issue I've ever had with a Bandai product, they used the wrong type of screw in part of the chest assembly. Thankfully I was able to pull a donor screw out of the backpack and swap them around with no ill effects. There's also some horrible-looking nub marks in really prominent spots on the SAP parts - really wish Bandai would get that under control. Even after all that, this is remarkably well-engineered toy in a very small package - blows the Evolution Toys effort out of the water (air?) at half the size and a third of the price.
I think the Eva Metal Builds - at the very least Unit-01 - are pretty much guaranteed to happen, Evangelion is a license to print money in Asia.
