MacrossJunkie

On 8/1/2023 at 12:26 PM, MKT said:

I just wonder how acceptable will it be to fans if Bandai diverges too much from canon transformation. The belly plates, lower leg and now possibly the hands are going to be different from what has been worked out in the line-art.
I am personally ok with these changes so long as the everything is generally in the same position, considering the amount of anime magic involved for this VF. 

Personally, I'm not too bothered with how it gets to a particular mode as long as the end result is the mode looking right. So far, it's not achieving that and falling way short. 

I'm still holding out hope that a new prototype wasn't ready to be shown yet so they showed the same old prototype we've already seen for years.

I love the YF-21/VF-22 and would like to see Bandai do it justice.

43 minutes ago, borgified said:

Your referring to this one @MacrossJunkie correct? 

It's actually a Hi-Metal prototype YF-21 from Feb 3, 2010 which was announced on Toyark by a former member here. 

Yeah that. Sorry, I actually don't really know what's the difference between Hi-Metal and Hi-Metal R. I don't really follow those lines so I'm rather ignorant about them.

To be fair, I don't know how much of that 21 proto was supposed to be a parts-former, so it's possible they could only achieve that look through swapping legs and other parts. 

The old D'stance garage kit/model also achieved very good proportions aside from the neck in fighter mode being too long. 

I'm disappointed that the Bandai version just looks bad in all modes, like they couldn't decide which mode to focus on and it was designed by committee.

1 hour ago, snakerbot said:

Yeah I think I'm here too. Especially given these thoughts:

I know I said way back when that I thought I was sold, but now I don't know. I honestly think I prefer the Yamato even in Battroid, just based on pictures. At this point about the only thing pushing me to get this is that I don't have a Yamato and they're so expensive now.

Seriously. The only thing good about this is the leg thickness and its placement in battroid mode. Everything else about it seems like a step or two backwards from the Yamato.

They had a really nice looking HMR prototype years back. I wish this looked more like that.

Saw a post about this on Reddit. Was happy to see it wasn't vaporware and came here excited to see more photos of it and see what revisions they made to it after all this time.

Disappointed now that it looks to be the same old thing they trotted out years ago. 

Just opened mine up despite it arriving yesterday. Overall, looks pretty good. I wish the wings locked in position or something. I was surprised and a little disappointed that, despite the size of the ghosts and the price, these ghosts don't feature any landing gear whereas the Lil Drakens did. The super parts for the ghosts snap on and seem to stay in place pretty well. No worries about pieces falling off during handling. 

Apparently, BigInJapan has them in and the package is heavier than they expected so I got another payment request for additional shipping charges 

21 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

I don't think molds deteriorating can fully account for the nonsense I've seen in the past couple of releases I got.  We're talking mis-drilled pinholes, and cockeyed assemblies that leave valks barely able to transform correctly.  The molds aren't getting any younger, but I think there's a pretty severe shortage of skilled labor, across many industries.

 

Like I said. either the molds or the factories they're using are getting increasingly sh@#$y

... most likely a combination of both. Things don't fit as well or as tightly as the earlier releases due to degradation, but also missing glue, broken parts out of the box, misassembly, missing parts, etc.

Now that these are world wide releases, I wonder if they're considering the feedback from customers outside of Japan or if it just goes into the trash, completely ignored. 

2 hours ago, Lolicon said:

The only upcoming DXs are reissues. Nothing new but HMR. 

On the upside, I'm saving a lot of money having no new valks to buy for a long while!

2 hours ago, seti88 said:

Bandai losing their DX mojo?😄

Seems to suit them just fine to milk molds that are probably past their prime, resulting in toys with increasing numbers of issues.

Either that or the factories they're using in China are just getting increasingly worse.

13 hours ago, Vintage Fanboy said:

.. i'd just talk with some guys who got their Revival ver., and some said that the Renewal ver., has (still) better assembly (for each) parts and better mold (?!?). As they didn't say in details, i thought (maybe) Bandai uses the same (more than a decade old mold of Renewal ver.) and therefore the Revival ver., feels like "deteriorated" in some parts?!?

..please shre with us any inputs / the comparison if any of you got both of them.. 🙏🏼

I don't have the revival versions, but if their releases with the VF-31AX and Max's YF-29 are any indication, their quality control has seriously suffered.

They have had various problems that weren't issues for prior YF-29 and VF-31 releases. I think that is what people are talking about, whether it be degradation of the mold or bad plastic or whatever else. 

4 hours ago, Lolicon said:

The matte finish is lovely, but you could achieve the same effect with some matte topcoat sprayed onto the Renewals. But I understand not everyone has the time or wherewithal to do that, so the Revival version is a good choice if you absolutely must have that matte finish.

That and the extra tampo markings. It's true though that if you spray a matte finish over top of either of them, it comes out the same in the end. I can also attest to the fact that the new matte finish that the newer stuff came out with does not in fact make the surface any less hydrophobic, so you have to spray very carefully and lightly to prevent any pooling.

On 5/5/2023 at 5:39 PM, Chronocidal said:

I remember your breakage too, but I think that was a very different case.  If I'm remembering correctly, yours sheared off at the actual hip splay pivot, which is absolutely a joint that takes direct stress when posing the legs.  The entire leg is supported by that one shaft.

This one isn't even a part that moves, it's just the screw holding the thigh together, and you can see where other supporting pegs were sheared off.

 

Yeah, I think you're right. In any case, I think it's shameful that they knew about breakages, delayed the release, and then apparently that time spent didn't seem to resolve anything.

On 5/3/2023 at 1:13 PM, mog_kupo said:

 I was going from fighter to gerwalk, following the tutorial by Jenius when the lef leg just broke as soon as I tried to get it down from fighter

You are right, its not a rotation point 

I guess it was mostly due to a faulty plastic or some over tightening of that screw since the blue part its a separete piece and shouldnt cause any strees on the part that broke

 

My VF-19S broke in practically the same place back in the day. Except I wasn't transforming it when it broke. It was standing in battroid mode in a sealed case and after a week, I found it lying down with the leg having come off on its own. That same peg had seemingly disintegrated because there were crumbled bits of plastic and was impossible to glue back together like that.

How the heck are there so many broken pieces? Didn't Arcadia delay the release because they found so many breakages? I recall they had some photos many months ago with a whole table of presumably faulty YF-19s.

Man, those new supers look practically purple. I was hoping they would re-issue the armored packs at some point, but I'm afraid Bandai will monkey's paw it somehow.

Still very pricey for a 70 class card. but then so is everything about this generation of cards from both green and red camps.

10 hours ago, azrael said:

There's still time. 😁 All the big announcements came already and there should be no big announcements until Summer 2023 so there's still lots of chances for sales between now and summer. I'm not hopeful though. Most companies are eying lower revenue in 2023 so I don't see many massive price drops this year.

Thankfully, at the very least, the moratorium on the import tariffs that would have made certain pc parts like GPUs, motherboards, and such even more expensive had it expired has been extended further. 

Man, I was so eagerly awaiting the 7900 XTX thinking the performance would be where AMD claimed it would be and with the performance per watt improvement that they claimed. AMD was pretty truthful about the Zen 2 gpus and the Ryzen CPUs so I had no reason to doubt them this time around. Too bad it was nowhere near the 50-70% improvement over the 6950 XT and the the Lovelace chips actually turned out to be more power efficient than the RDNA 3 chips.

After finding out what a disappointment the 7900 XTX was, I ended up getting a RTX 4090. No melting cable issues here and I undervolted it so it's drawing much less power while not really losing much performance. 

Now I'm doubly glad I ended up getting the 4090 as it seems the reference design for the 7900 XTX is having heat issues, which der8auer believes is a problem with the vapor chamber design. Apparently there are far more reports of this issue than the melty connectors for the 4090 ever had. 

I wouldn't mind the standard color scheme for the 0D like the ones with Shin & Edgar during training in Ep 2.

I think it would be hilarious if they started making landing gear out of hard white plastic, but then painted them gray or silver.

11 hours ago, vladykins said:

 

LOL it is the lyrics to "Just the Two of Us", which while I remember the original song, remember more from Dr Evil and Minii-Me rapping in jail with the chorus to the song.

 

Holy crap, you're right! Haha

I didn't recognize it because it was all fragmented with other stuff mixed in.

2 minutes ago, David Hingtgen said:

A green renewal VF-27 would be much appreciated if they took it back to the original dull olive green color.  The 1.5 version was WAY too deep/bright a green, and didn't match the show at all.  (but the stripes were at least grey, while the 1.0 has lavender stripes carried over from Brera's)

Agreed and the green wasn't even uniformly consistent.

12 minutes ago, David Hingtgen said:

Not a perfect match but quite close when dried.  I ended up painting the coppery-plastic part of the hinge too.  

It's a good enough match I may start painting other "coppery plastic" bits, too. 

It looks very close. Great job, particularly considering how much harder it is to match metallics, imo.

On 11/26/2022 at 9:59 PM, Angesdad said:

Oh nice. You put the double stripes on the non-centered head lasers too and even managed to get the curved line on the circular part. The whole thing looks great with the extra decaling. 👍

The mold looks good, but they made the same mistake Arcadia did with their original VF-0D release regarding the color and later fixed with the premium finish edition. It's too dark and saturated.

17 hours ago, Boomerdave said:

Something funny I noticed about the stickers. There are some that it doesn’t tell you to use in the instructions that are the caution " Here are all the details of the device type" stickers -  basically a block with a whole bunch of tiny tiny type in it to make it look technical.

 

Since they weren’t used, I was trying to figure out where to put them on. When I zoomed in with the Magnifier on my phone they apparently took headlines from a newspaper. Most of it is about budgets and Nancy Pelosi lol. I looked at some of the others, (including the ones that go on the back of the PPC's) and anything that has micro type is the same thing exactly. You'd never be able to read it unless you look really hard.

They must have put this sticker sheet together at the last minute because that news was from October 26th.

Nvm, 26th of last year.