MKT

That's uh.. quite adventurous. I'm pretty surprised the 171EX alone is enough to counterbalance the 25S..

Thanks for suggestion. At this moment KC has replied acknowledging the issue, and will get back later with more info so hopefully there's a solution from there.

Kinda bananas they sent you a whole valk lol. Is the left wing flap at the tip missing, or just happened to have worked its way loose & still within the clamshell?

LOL I did try... as far as I could tell, the pants are part of a bodysuit that likely goes up to his neck. I wanted to remove his jacket to see what's going on under, but the belt is in the way & I'm not sure how to remove that.

Just as I'm warming up more to Max's figure, disaster struck. I was exploring putting him on a sitting pose, so was slowly lifting his left leg up and when I got to around the 50-60 degree range, the thigh separated from the crotch. There was no audible sound or any distinct feel of something snapping, it just suddenly felt loose. One of my biggest reservations on soft good figures, is that it is hard to gauge the range of motion limits since the joints are hidden beneath the fabric. Hence, I was already exercising much more caution than usual when handling Max. I have no idea if the joint itself is broken, or the thigh has a natural separation point via a peg & slot system like some other action figures. It does seem to have pull-down thighs like most other modern figures usually to enable a higher degree of thigh swing. Although the thigh has separated, I am unable to pull the whole limb out from the pant leg to inspect it, because it appears the pant leg has been glued somewhere along the lower leg. So when I pick up the figure now, the entire left leg is like wet noodle just dangling by the pants. The outer box has text saying something along the lines of 'refer to instructions before use', but there is zero literature inside (anyone else can confirm this?). I obtained this from my local toy store, but I contacted KC directly to see what can be done now. Awaiting their response...

An old test shot. Just wanting to highlight the fuselage and intake curves.

Just checked both ETAs on display and not noticing any cracks too. Others red & green still in their boxes, hopefully are ok.

This blows. The loose ball joints on previous DX'es were bad enough, never thought ratchet joints will have the same issue..

Got my Max figure in last week. In hand it didn't turn out as bad as I thought, maybe because my expectations were already low lol. Generally, when fiddling with it up close there are some cringey details, mainly the cheap looking material used for his white uniform, and his rather meh facial sculpt. On other hand, the cut of his outfit has been done rather well with a rather nice fit for a figure at this scale, and didn't seem as ill-measured as what I remembered from early pics. At normal display distance, it turns out to be rather decent and glad that I didn't have that expected buyer's remorse. A note about these KC cloth outfits - I hope some of the PVC detailing printed on the cloth do not dry out and crack prematurely. Now that I have Max, I think of Miriya and am now wondering whatever happened to KC's plan for her? We've been so caught up with their KS campaign, subsequent announcements of Destroids, Glaug & what not that she seems to have been forgotten... Not a sculpt or even artwork of her, when she should already have been released together with the metallic arcade VF-1s.

Epic live version.

It's a contradiction of sorts in Fighter.. I like the overall sculpt, especially the sexy curvature behind the cockpit but there's that weird abrupt cliff at the neck cover. The intakes look great here - it's a normal feature on most other valk toys, but a first for a Fire Valk (?), but that knee gap is distracting and looks even more prominent than Arcadia's. Couldn't Bandai make that black area red or something to mask it a bit? No complains on Battroid sculpt though. The legs are long yet suitably chunky. I'm just concerned that it doesn't look like there's a cockpit rotation gimmick, to enable us viewing Basara sitting inside the egress hatch. This is all the more reason for me to hold on to the other 1/60, or even hunt one on top of this. It's always the little Yamato / Arcadia extra little touches that really endears. Meanwhile, just recording for posterity:

I'll be getting this too, in the same way I got both DX & Arcadia YF-19. I hope Bandai also implements the pilot egress hatch in Battroid, and include the seat rotation gimmick like Arcadia. No partsforming seat please (looking at you DX 21). Great observation. Well, we should be getting more images very soon. Quite low key excited to see what new gimmicks this comes with.

I don't recall the stand plastics being made of the type that can become brittle, both white or black. Perhaps a couple of the semi-circle prongs did come off the gate right out of the box, but they were held with very thin sprues. The stand rods felt pretty robust. But I never used any of the black ones, as I felt they were pretty unsightly. For the figures with black stands and some of the later white ones, I went with ridiculously cheap KO transparent Tamashii Stage Act stands instead.

Found from FB, and seems to be a screen capture from latest Macross Showroom episode.