MacrossJunkie

I think the rectangular piece is most likely the piece that keeps the stabilizers in place on the arm. Check both arms and see if one has come off.

If you look at the fighter mode pic, you can see a bit of orange under the cockpit. My guess for how the heat shield works is that the cockpit pushes in to allow the heat shield to slide up over it. Despite how it looks, it could possibly still be a one piece heat shield that is hidden in the nose cone. I can't see it fitting anywhere else. In any case, it's more ingenious than the SHE model where the heat shield flipped over on a hinge from behind the cockpit and light years better than the cut-it-out-yourself-and find-your-own-damn-way-to-attach-it heatshield of the 1/72.

I think overall it looks pretty decent. The smaller tailfins don't bother me as much. It's still proportionally bigger than the 1/72's. In fact, the first thing I noticed wasn't the tailfins, it was that the top intakes and and back of the legs were very boxy. If you look at the 1/72, the line art, and various other models, those areas are rounded off which fits the style of the rest of the fighter. For that top area to be boxy flat surfaces instead of the smooth curved surfaces that they should be, it kind of sticks out like a sore thumb and spoils the aesthetics. It doesn't even have anything to do with having to compromise due to anime magic like the tail fins. For some reason, they just arbitrarily decided to do it that way which is why it bothers me.

I'm not that optimistic about Yamato being able to obtain the license to do the VF-25 or other Frontier mecha. Just judging from Bandai's past history with the Macross licenses, they'll probably hold on to the rights to produce the toys just so they can re-issue the DX 1/60s every now and then as they have with the 1/55 chunkys and the 1/65 M7 valks with no improvements of substance other than possibly adding some more tampo printing or other minor things. It's a shame that they didn't put a comparative amount of effort as they have with some of the other chogokin toys they have made. Just look at the Aquarion which far surpasses the VF-25 in complexity of design. I'm not particularly a fan of the Aquarion, but I can appreciate the difficulty of designing and making something where not only do the three component parts transform into vehicles on their own, but can be reconfigured into many different robot combinations and also retain some measure of posability as well. Bandai managed to make an awesome looking toy with that. They have the engineering know how and if they had put half that effort into making the DX VF-25, I think we would have had something that more Macross fans would have been happy with.

Interesting. While checking out the pics of the Defender on http://hk.myblog.yahoo.com/iam-cybergundam/article?mid=14768, I noticed that the red sensor "eye" can slide up and down along that whole enclosure. I wondered how until I looked closely at that last pic which had the upper body removed and showed what looks like some kind of slide lever on the left hand side. It probably says it right on the blog, but I can't read Japanese. =P I also just now noticed that it has an alternate extended ammo drum that you can plug in that extends past the back. Yes, I'm slow to notice these things >.<

Well, here's one, albeit not fully intact, but you get the idea of what they included. Here's some close-ups of a few stickers applied to the toy. Forgive the quality of the pics. I'm in the process of moving and don't have what I need to do better. I haven't seen any pics with the toy stickered up either so here's a couple as well. It's kinda yellowish due to the crappy incandescent desk lamp I used. I plan on trying to weather this thing like the Yamato one when I get the time to, so hopefully that will turn out well.

I'm not sure how or why Bandai managed to do it, but in many ways the shots of the final versions are worse than the original colored early prototypes. The Ozma version for example doesn't look too shabby in the early prototype picture, but the final looks like it has Down Syndrome. The early version has more of a neck and the head rises above the "shoulder blades". The ankles while being too low on early one are just too high to the point of being comedic. I was impressed with all the detail Bandai etched into the toy shown in some of the close up prototype pics, but without the supporting proportions that capture the essence of the valk, all that detail becomes moot. I mean you can say Yamato's YF-21 is not perfectly proportioned, but I don't think people were really expecting "perfect". The battroid mode's proportions do well in capturing the essence of the valkyrie as portrayed in the anime and line art in all the key places from the front and back. Bandai's 1/60 VF-25 however just doesn't seem to manage to do that, imo. Which is made even more disappointing in the knowledge that many of the compromises in proportions didn't not have to be that way as evidenced by the 1/72 model. The height of the legs with respect to the crotch piece in the model can be adjusted due to the U-shaped swing bar it appears to be using. If this was made of die-cast, there's no reason it couldn't have been used on the toy while keeping the durability aspect. Instead, they just have a straight rod coming out of the upper part of the crotch piece itself to attach the legs to.

Hi. Pseudo first-time poster here (Used to post here back before the forum software was changed a few years back and then stopped when I fell in with the evil that is MMOs). Has anyone mentioned that the stickers that come with Tomahawk are a vast improvement over their previous releases or at least up to the YF-21 (I never picked up a v2 1/60 VF-1 so I have no clue how the stickers are on those)? I was very surprised when I started cutting the stickers to put on my Toma. They are akin to the takatoys stickers in that they are very thin and are a single layer, but not as shiny as the takatoys stickers. I hope they continue to make their stickers this way as our options for good alternative decals/stickers for new valks is pretty much dwindling or nil at the moment.