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Looks like it can hold the gunpod just fine, but to be fair it wasn’t shown holding one in the series. The other thing the hasegawa does is they have the big cheap toy looking chest and the Plamax definitely fixes that. Looks far better and way better action poses. The Hasegawa looks like it couldn’t walk without falling on its big ol boobs

Well, it's definitely on brand for the pilot. Gives it character, but I don't remember it. Had I seen it, it probably would have stayed with me, as it's almost a mech, especially if it could flap or fold its wings. Kinda reminds me of this gem from LEGO Chima, my favorite set out of the whole theme.

Thanks for the image! Interesting... the blue parts are labelled "want to use if possible" and the red parts are "not used parts". However, many of the red parts have "プロポーション優先": Prioritizing Proportions.

Yep, that's a dang fine-looking set of Combaticons, even if Space Shuttle is a bit too light. It's almost a shame we have to combine them (which, ok, I do it I want to write about it, but technically you could always use these guys for individual bots and keep using MMC's for combined mode...). Before we get started, we can do a little prep work by removing all their accessories, including arm guns, and transforming Heavy Gunner, Munitioner, and Tornado into their alt modes. We'll go in the same order as they were released and reviewed. Getting Heavy Gunner into combined mode is pretty easy. On the back of the tank we'll fold down the fuel drum to reveal a hole. Spin the turret, and on the front of the tank fold down a flap to reveal two round holes and one T-shaped one (or maybe I-shaped, I unfortunately hit that age where I'm starting to need readers). That trio of holes on the front of the tank will plug into pegs on top of the foot he came with. Fold up the calf, and there's a pair of tabs that fit into slots on Heavy Gunner's thighs. Munitioner will require a bit more work. Unhook the sides of the jeep from his hips, extend the double waist hinge, tuck the steering wheel in, remove the spare tire, and split the thighs. There's a gap between his legs that you need to wedge around a T-shaped peg on the gestalt foot. With the legs pushed back together with the tab between them, you can put the front of the jeep back into place and reattach the sides. Fold the gestalt calf up, and a tab will go into a slot on a hinge next to the steering wheel. Now for a little cleanup. Take the spare tire and plug it in between his seats, then fold the windshield down over it. Get the bumper and flip it over, which will reveal some grooves in the grill. The knee joint of the gestalt will slide into those grooves, and you're done there. For Heavy Gunner you'll have to split the back of the tank enough to work the T-shaped connector on the other knee down into it. We've got half a giant robot already! Night Tracer is a bit easier to begin in robot mode. Start to fold up the arms like you're going into truck mode, but don't fold the fists over. Spin his waist 180 degrees and open up his shins just enough to fold his feet inside (but NOT his heels, we'll need those in a bit). Splay open his green backpack. Special joints will allow you to extend and then fold back the biceps, then hinge them over so they're right up against each other. Another hinge will dislocate the elbow and allow you to fold his forearms against his back. On the backpack, swivel the gun barrels around to reveal bigger ones. Fold some flaps out to make the backpack wider; those flaps have tabs on them. Line up the backpack so that the forearms are nestled into cutouts for them, then close the flaps so the tabs got into slots on Night Tracer's forearms. Leave the sides with the cannons open for a minute, though. Lift the sides of his hip skirts up, turn his thighs 180 degrees, and have him do a split. Special joints will allow his thighs to split near the knees and hinge up like he's doing a Soundwave impression. His heels will hook into the backpack, and then you can close up the sides to lock everything in place. Extend the cannon barrels and that's it, that's Night Tracer's combined mode. You can attach him to the gestalt by sliding the T-shaped hole on his grundle over the peg on the gestalt waist. There's peg holes where Night Tracer's toes were, and another just above where he slotted onto the waist. Get the front of the torso and plug it on by lining up pegs on the inside to those holes. Fold the gestalt head down, and it'll tab on in four spots, onto tabs sticking out from Night Tracer's feet, and over the joints that folded the biceps over. That'll lock everything into place. So far, so good, yeah? But don't put the chest plate on just yet. Leaving it off gives us a bit more clearance around the shoulder joints. On that note, grab Tornado, split his tail, unhook his arms, fold them out of the way, untab the rotor, get it out of the way, and untab the sides so you can work with the legs. Split the legs, pull the sides of the helicopter out and flip them 180 degrees (but don't be like me and fold the bits along the tops of the sides back in, we're not going back to bot mode). Basically, you want to untab the top of the cockpit section, slide it out a bit, then flip it over so it looks like the first picture. Do that on both sides, then you can mash the legs back together, but leave the sides out for a minute. Tab the sides of the helicopter back into the chest, put the arm-engines back, and put the rotor back. Now here you have two options. The first, which is how the instructions actually show it, is to simply put the tail back together like normal. Easy enough. But, for completeness, I'm going to show you another way. Leave the first segment of the tail out, and there's a tab on it that'll go into the arm-engine. Fold the tail up at the second hinge, and a tab will plug into the first segment. Tuck the rear-most segments all the way around to the inside, folding up the stabilizers as best as you can. This look is meant to emulate the cartoon a bit more, but it does leave Tornado's head partially exposed. We can sort of cover his face by turning it back to its bot mode position, then taking the intake on his chest and double-hinging that panel up in front of his face. This will also reveal the attachment point for the gestalt shoulder joint. Lastly, get the gestalt's left hand. Tabs on it will fit into slots on the nose of the helicopter. Now you can close those sides up, locking the hand in place. I think it's easiest to start with space shuttle in robot mode, then transform the upper half of his body into the space shuttle. Splay apart his lower legs, folding out all the panels on the outside part that the wing attaches too. Fold open the panels on the bottoms of his feet, pivot his ankles, then fold the toes in and put the foot back into place. Use the double hinge on the inside panel to extend it, and fold up the tip of the vertical stabilizer. Use the double hinges on both sides of the legs to have them cover up over the thighs, then push everything back together. Rotate his waist 180, then you can attach the right hand by lining the four tabs up with four slots. Attaching Tornado is easy. You see that T-shaped peg on the left shoulder joint? It just slides right into that gap you created when you folded Tornado's chest up over his face. There's some extra steps involved with Space Shuttle, though. Untab the cockpit and bring it and the brown part it's attached to back, then angle just the purple part forward again. There's a little hatch you can open to reveal a groove. Line up the groove with the bottom of the shoulder joint and push it up into place, then close and tab up the cockpit again. Finally, like up these three big peg holes on the back of the chest plate with the three big pegs on the blue torso and plug them together. At last, we have Magic Square's Lord of War, their MP-style Bruticus! And he's going up against the reigning champ, MMC's Bruticus. So what can we see here? Well, it's kind of funny how they both copied different aspects of the cartoon. Like, MMC went out of their way to make sure that their Swindle did some actual transforming to resemble the animation model's yellow lump with a purple stripe, while Munitioner is still pretty clearly a Jeep. Lord of War has more cartoon-esque proportions in the torso, hips, and thighs, and his arms are oriented more like the cartoon (the sides of the vehicles are the fronts of the forearms). At time of writing, despite going super Sunbow on the individual robots, Lord of War has a blue torso, blue thighs, and a gray chest plate that doesn't look like part of Space Shuttle, plus gray feet. This is toy accurate, not cartoon accurate (though this is actually my preference, so I win!). While I have the toy/OX upgrade kit on my MMC Bruticus, by default he has a cartoon-style chest and feet that match the limbs. I feel like the toy look was always better for MMC's Bruticus, though, because the torso has the same wide chest, narrow waist, wide hips that the G1 toy has. MMC also has the front of the tank at the knee, not the rear, and it folds over. This is very G1 toy accurate, but not necessarily more cartoon accurate. It's more like Brawl becomes a rectangle with treads and turret. I guess the elephant in the room is size. I know a lot of people who passed on MMC's Bruticus, sticking with Zeta, because size/scale was more important to them than accuracy, and MMC's Bruticus was just too small for them (even with the extra height from the upgrade kit). Never really bothered me (my solution was to replace all the other combiners with MMC's, then they're in scale because they're equally short 😁). I didn't really think Unique Toys' Bruticus looked that bad until now. Very greebly, and the limbs look too big for the torso. If you've been using UT for your Bruticus, it's definitely time to upgrade. It's time to toss Zeta, too. They're basically the same height (I know Zeta looks a little taller here, but I think I don't have his head pushed on all the way), but Lord of War is so much cleaner and has better proportions. And, not that you can really tell from pictures, Lord of War is the most stable of the four. MMC's is pretty good, minus the loose shoulder ratchets, but UT and Zeta both want to lean. I remember when Zeta's Bruticus came out everyone was talking about how revolutionary pants were for a combiner, and how much stability they add... well, Zeta's Bruticus is the only figure I've ever had give out and fall off a shelf at 3:30am. I'm not at all worried about that with Lord of War. The individuals in this set all had pretty great articulation, so it pleases me to say that carries over into combined mode. His head swivels, can look up about 45 degrees, down until his chin touches his chest, and even has a bit of sideways tilt. The shoulders rotate, and can move laterally about 90 degrees. His biceps swivel, and his elbows bend 90 degrees. His wrists swivel and can fold back into a "stop" pose. Then each individually-articulated digit has a ball joint at the base and two addition pinned knuckles each. His waist swivels, and although it's ridiculously tight he's got that double-jointed waist dealie that their Primes and the first three Combaticons had (I think Tornado and Space Shuttle didn't because they had to build in Lord of War's elbows). That means he's got plenty of back bend or ab crunch. The hips are also like the smaller bots and drop down, allowing him to kick forward around 120 degrees, backward a little under 90, and laterally 90 degrees. His thighs swivel. His knees are actually pretty cool... there's buttons on the backs of the thighs that allow the entire joint to drop down, revealing that the knees are actually double-jointed. As such, they bend backward a little short of 180 degrees. The toes of the feet have a double hinge, so they can tilt up or down a bit, and his ankles can pivot roughly 90 degrees. Realistically, you're less limited by how he can move and more by his weight... it can be difficult to keep him balanced in more dynamic poses. Notice that his hands have slots in the palms... yet no gun? Hopefully Magic Square will make something available in the future. While he himself doesn't have a weapon, his constituent parts do. And you can store those accessories on his body! Tornado's arm guns plug in where they normally would go on the tail, just tuck the the hinges in tighter. Space Shuttle and Heavy Gunner's guns wind up in the same spots they go in alt mode, more or less, which sadly leaves them visible from the front. Heavy Gunner's double-barreled thing (or single, in my case) uses two tabs to plug into slots on the back of the calf. Likewise, combine all of Munitioner's weapons into their alt mode form and a peg on it will plug into a hole on the other calf. That just leave's Night Tracer and Tornado's guns, which plug into spots on the backpack. This set doesn't always have the most fun or intuitive transformations, but it's hard to argue with the results. We've got five excellent robots with five solid alt modes and one excellent combined mode. Aside from the transformations, the flaws are pretty minimal... Space Shuttle is a bit too light, the alt modes are maybe a little too cartoony if you like more realistic ones, the combined mode doesn't have a weapon, and the combined mode abruptly goes from a super cartoon team into a more toy-colored gestalt (which, again, is absolutely NOT a problem for me, for some reason I like most of my combiners to be cartoon robots with a toy-style gestalt). And to be totally clear, that last issue will be rectified, as Magic Square is already planning a cartoon upgrade kit. If you're on Zeta or Unique Toys (or, dare I say, Warbotron?), it's 100% time to upgrade. Lord of War demolishes them across the board. But should you replace MMCs? I think that's a tougher question. I think there's more to appreciate with the engineering in MMC's, and they tend to have more realistic alt modes. Plus, if you're a fan of G1 toy Bruticus, MMC's kind of captures the shape of the torso better. There's also the fact that MMC also has their Defensor out, and they're just starting to release their Constructicons. If you're going all-in on MMC, they'll scale better with each other. On the other hand, if you're mixing and matching, Lord of War scales better with combiners from XTB, Fans Toys, Zeta, DX9, etc. And, like I said, excellent robot modes, and a stable combined mode with better cartoon proportions and articulation. I alluded to it earlier, but the individual bot modes are good enough that you could use them as individuals with MMC's for your combined mode, if you wanted. Ultimately, for me, it comes down to something I said when I reviewed MMC's Ruination repaint. I'm not trying to take anything away from MMC here. I strongly preferred their Bruticus over Zeta and Unique Toys, even if it was shorter. The "all-built-in" engineering is pretty amazing. If they hadn't done the repaint, would I have bothered buying Lord of War to replace MMC's Bruticus? Who can say? But the fact remains that I get the experience of MMC's figures from the Ruination repaint, and I don't need two of them. So for me, yeah, MMC's Bruticus is done. After the holidays I'll put it up for sale, likely with a deep discount. Lord of War is my Bruticus from here on out.

It was spell checked, supposed to be ship not shop. Spell check is my biggest nemesis it has cute lil feet

I'm not sure what you're referring to, unless the character Hawk had a shop. I vaguely remember the character let alone much else about him. I know the actor who played him, Thom Christopher, passed away in 2024. RIP

To be fair, I feel like the unusually low altitude of that particular bar owes a lot to the fact that most of the fantasy anime produced in the last couple years has been isekai. Edginess doesn't really pay dividends when it's cringeworthy Godmode Sue MC power fantasy like That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Re:Monster, etc. Thanks for the heads up. I have a feeling I'll probably decide to pass on Clevatess S2. Clevatess S1 has already pretty much lost me. As of episode 8, it really feels like the author of Clevatess didn't really know what to do with the story after the protagonist gets back to civilization. The evil Human wizards would be an enormous downgrade from the dark beasts as a plot-driving antagonist even if they weren't all flat characters. Bug Guy and Magneto from Wish.com somehow manage to be less intimidating than the bandits from a few episodes back, and the angry mob they find to do their bidding isn't even a patch on them. I genuinely had to stop for a minute almost right away because one nameless extra goes on this weirdly specific and emotionally charged rant about how the Heroes ain't sh*t because their weapons and armor were paid for with tax dollars and all they do is kill unstoppable man-eating monsters no-one else can fight instead of doing real work like tree farming, logging, and construction. It's clearly meant to be a rousing speech in context, and he clearly intends it as a grievous insult to Alicia, but it's such a bizarre and nonsensical pronouncement from this random background character that it took me right out of the story and left me laughing and Alicia doesn't even acknowledge that someone is talking to her. There are some good ideas here, and some good world building... but as strong as it started it wasn't able to keep it up more than a few episodes.

Yep thx that's it, ill keep an eye out!

I'm heading out tomorrow morning before work to pick up Studio Series Windcharger and Airachnid. I'm hoping that the new Thundercracker is there also.

To be fair, she is drunk

Pass the Monster Meat, Milady! remained a pretty fun series to the end. Not terribly substantial by any means, but it never failed to be entertaining in a cute sort of way. My watch group finished up The Apothecary Diaries S2 last night. They had a pretty good time with it, and the promise of a two-part Season 3 in October 26/April 27 and an original film around December 26 was definitely well-received. Solo Camping for Two also ended this week. I won't miss it. It's a terrible ambassador for the hobby it's meant to be promoting and its attempt to liven up what's basically a camping equipment infomercial starring a low-functioning alcoholic with a romance subplot founded on a threat of a false rape accusation lands exactly as poorly as you'd think. The animation is unmistakably cheap start-to-finish, and it feels like they only made it to two cour by making most of the series pan-shots across static frames.

From the looks of the trailer...

I'm planning on running out tomorrow to get a few last minute stocking stuffers and more wrapping paper, but I'm not hopeful.

If Kosinski isn't making his sequel it's kind of a moot point.

Despite how little I care about Mezco anymore I went ahead and ordered Shredder to match the Turtles.

My Sentinels have shipped. https://www.hasbropulse.com/product/marvel-legends-series-xmen-97-marvels-sentinel/G06525L00 Also available again but for a higher price.

89 Comic Joker.

The Hawk shop is pretty memorable and weird

TBS.

Ezekiel.