MKT

No timeline given to release yet, but folks could already PO with early bird 25% discount when this was shown at AGK 2024. Retail is at HKD1250, around USD160 smack in TZ territory.

Haha it's too bad Mac Zero's the only series that has no emphasis on music, so that last pic can't even pretend to be a single cover.

+1. It could be the only DX mold Bandai hasn't milked yet. 31A Kairos is another, but its technically 89% the same as the other Siegfrieds.

I just looked this up, & gotta say this thing is pretty amazing. The icing is how the Batpod integrates into the Tumbler, even though imperfectly but Modoking must be the first one to attempt this.

200% agree with this haha

Nice reviews on the HMRs, and the earlier Fugu VF-1 write up @mikeszekely. It's interesting to read your viewpoints coming from a Transformers collector. It is a surprise to hear the plastic quality of the HMR VF-1 feels better than the Fugu, but as I do not own any KO 1/60 so far, I can't assess except the original Yamcadias do subjectively feel better than the HMR to me. As @Slave IV pointed out, the tolerances on the >15-year old Yamcadia also trumps both Bandai's, including the KC 1/72, and from what I'm seeing based on reviews the ThreeZero's as well. Because the joints on the Yamcadias move fluidly, I've never once felt if the joints are questionably sized or fragile. However, your experience with Fugu with some joints feeling too tight to the point of squeaky & some feeling too loose sounds like the same experience I have with KC's mold, leading to the same scrutiny about the size & strength of the joints, materials etc. Within the HMR, the VF-1 does have thicker & more robust feeling plastic compared to the VF-0, but the sculpt suffers a little as a result. We see this when compared to its larger cousins the Yamcadia & Bandai DX, for eg the HMR profile is a bit wider at the rear section from the top down view. The VF-0 on other hand is really a proportionately shrunken down Arcadia 1/60 (which is not a surprise as the same design studio worked on both) and so the plastic is as thick or thin as needed in areas for a more precise sculpt. For eg, we can see that the rear of the wing gloves, where it meets the leg shins in Fighter, have very thin plastic to look more accurate. Nevertheless, despite the thin plastic they never felt particularly fragile. This also extends to other very small joint parts like the chest clips & the neck pole joint, which feel like they are made of durable POM plastic. I empathize with fighting the clearances while transforming the VF-0 though. The first time I transformed my VF-0 into Fighter nothing popped off, I just worked it slowly and everything fit into place so it was rather an enjoyable experience. But if things are off or askew by a little, the usual wiggle jiggle will not work and we have to go back a few steps in the transformation to seat other stuff properly first. On my second VF-0S copy much later, things popped off exactly like yours did during transformation, and I wasn't really sure why but it's likely I rushed it through a little thinking my familiarity with the mold helped, but somehow didn't. On the heat shield, I think all HMR VF-0S suffers from the same tightness - it does take a disproportionate amount of effort to pull it down all the way, and compounding the problem is that it may be initially difficult to tell where it actually stops when deployed. A lot of initial pictures I saw then of the heat shield always have the final mm or so of the canopy peeking through, but rest assured it does completely cover the canopy if deployed correctly. On the subsequent repaints the 0D & 0A, the heat shield tolerances have been adjusted & is much easier to slide up and down.

On the Tread, it does look like the cockpit disappears deep inside the chest, and the top panel where the head is needs to open up to do so. The cockpit can then either swivel or slide all the way in under the head panel. I'm hoping the latter, because then it maintains the proper pilot alignment like what they did for the Legioss. The boom is a bit of puzzle, because even if it is shorter than other toys before it, it still shouldn't be able to wholly retract into just the crotch housing. But seeing that the boom has a folding joint, I'm guessing the boom retracts out the other end into the butt booster piece, and the folding joint is to accommodate the butt housing's articulation. The Tread is gonna be heavy, and I hope the landing gears are now metal instead of Legioss's plastic ones.

Is this the first time Risa Ebata illustrating valks? Looks good!

Agreed.. the wheels also look weird sitting so far out instead closer to the body. But this pic now brings to mind yet another issue.. Earlier I was rueing Moshow didn't make parts like the arm pieces and hip armors connected (to the backpack) in Ride-Armor mode with option for the joints to be detachable for articulation even if the transformation scheme is parts-forming. The additional issue I'm just realising now is that having every part connected really sells the real robot/mecha idea of what the Ride-Armor is supposed to be - an exoskeleton or powered suit that helps & enhances the wearer's abilities. That's the core fantasy of a powered suit, and I had some kicks how after so many years of seeing it debuting in Mospeada and BGC, we are now seeing real-life implementations of them being in used in certain industries today to augment the wearer mostly in physical tasks. Once the bike pieces are separated and individually worn on their own like the pic above, they now appear to encumber the wearer instead. So Stick / Scott looks like he's carrying this ginormous weight on his back and might as well be strapping dumbbells on his forearms going into battle. The only thing that can bring this back to making some sense in this head canon, is that in Moshow's alternate universe Scott isn't wearing individual body armor pieces in his base suit (without the bike), but instead first wearing a complete head to toe powered base suit like Iron Man, to which the bike parts attach to in full Ride-Armor mode. So the red segments, which are cloth in the original show, are now imagined to be metal and the toy's aesthetics actually aligns with this. Likewise the pistons at the legs would be easier to make sense of if he is first wearing a full body powered suit, and the other little touches that Moshow did such as moving panels on the base suit to receive the bike parts feel as cool as they look.

Eh so even the base white color's painted? I was under impression earlier it has some sort of clear coat on top of white-molded plastic, but if the whites are painted then it would be good news for longevity against yellowing.

Couple more images. Earlier on we speculated that the Legioss forearm slots are possibly where the Tread pegs on to, but looks like that is not the case now.. Are those slots now redundant?

Meanwhile, a nice in-hand video on Moshow's Cyclone. It weights in at a pretty hefty 1.2kg, but the good thing is it’s able to stand on its own in Ride-Armor mode. And though its parts-forming, each part have additional transformation steps on its own to go from one mode to other. I guess I’m starting to come around to the parts-forming, & the size really gonna have presence. It’s even cheaper than USD180 in Asia. For eg, in Singapore: https://www.tfh.com.sg/product-details.php?p=40337

Finally!!!

Looking more at Fighter mode, they have somehow managed to take a sleek jet form and turned into kibble-mess under a jet silhouette - like TF toys.

The third elbow joint must have been glued in place, seeing how no one is able to unlock it so far. It's an intentional change by Threezero from the initial promo images, and the biggest clue of this change is when the promo pics of Roy's 1S, put out just before the 1J's release, also show that joint being locked. I feel this sentence kinda sums up the 1J, based on all the impressions, reviews & videos so far. The Yamcadia v2 is a solid toy because what it has, it does them well and the shortcomings are more of what it doesn't have. There's really no complaint on what already exists on the toy, we just wish they implement something more after so many years. For the Bandai DX, it has very nice improvements to the Yamcadia v2, but also went backwards on some stuff. Sort of 2 steps forward, half step back. Threezero has more little compromises than the DX, but remains to be seen if the positives outweighs the negatives and to me they only manage to be so by a small margin. And at this price point, it seems to be just right given what it is. But I'll reserve final judgement until actually get it in hand.

Here we have the biggest Cyclone / Ride-Armor ever made, has all sorts of added surface details to take advantage of the size, and it's a complete parts-former that would be much more acceptable in tiny renditions like the B2 Fives. I get that it now frees up articulation, but I wonder if they could have at least make those forearm armor & hip pieces connected with option to make them detachable for added articulation, something like the DX VF-1 waist bar. It can certainly be engineered for this size. Knowing myself, I'll probably get it eventually for the novelty factor given the price vs size & Moshow's quality factor. It's just leaving a bit of sour taste at the moment, and I'll wait a bit for it to go away lol. Looking closer at the size now, the question mark now is whether it is really 1/10 as what has been bandied about previously or if the published 29cm total height is correct. Either one is true but it can't be 1/10 and 29cm at same time.

3D rendered video, but the bigger issue and disappointingly, its a partsformer! Really didn't see that coming, and feel quite blindsided by it.

There are 1/100 VF-25 from the VF100 line: https://anymoon.com/blog/?p=2927#more-2927 They are crazy partsforming galore, but make for decent display pieces with other 1/100.

The Yamato is the correct 1/100 scale, and if not mistaken Bandai's VB-6 is undersized towards 1/110. But the thing is, the whole HMR line fudges on scale anyway. They are technically non-scale, so we are seeing them to be sort of +/- 10% of 1/100 across the releases. Myself am not so particular about scale to a tee, as long as they are in ballpark and still manage to look great together. But as @Chronocidal has also pointed out, Bandai's VB-6 is much better put together compared to Yamato's and is the much better toy. Ok look forward to your reviews. I thought it's also appropriate to post this GIF again, courtesy of @no3Ljm haha.

The Yamato VF-19F & S were among my first handful of valk acquisitions, and over the years I give increasingly more respect to what Yamato did with this mold. Yamato has really set the standard for the VF-19, and the fact that this mold still stands up more than a decade later in HMR form is just a testament to how right they got it in the first place. That said, I'm not too enthusiastic about the F/S wing design - the stubbiness of them just looks kinda weird for a jet, but everything else is lovely and that blue is the perfect shade in my eyes. Congratulations, and there has never been a better time to start collecting HMR. The HMR VF-1, which is a nice mold by itself, always felt slightly lacking in comparison to its larger cousins and really needed the Destroids & enemy mechas to lift it up. But these newer HMR molds that Bandai have been pushing out recently are really killing it, and there are aspects of them that I do like better than the larger 1/60s.

Congratulations, and next purchase could be the VF-0D. I feel it is different enough from the 0S / 0A to be its own thing and that Fighter mode is just yummy. Bandai did make a VB-6, in fact 3 of them. And they are near HMR scale. https://anymoon.com/blog/?p=4194#more-4194

Yeah for a long time I thought faces on valks were pretty weird, and what’s more jarring was the MAXL - boobs on valks too?! Is this Transformers or Macross lol. But eventually I came to accept their aesthetics, in the same way of closing an eye on piloting a valk with guitar controls. The Fire Valk do come with a masked faceplate to hide its mouth, & I always imagined I’ll be using that for Battroid display, but since the face is a defining feature on top of the searing Ronald McDonald scheme, I might as well embrace it.. It just dawned on me that if I’m not wrong, Mac 7 has the most variety of valks in any Macross series, so it’ll be a shame if Bandai stops at just the VF-19 molds..

Not too worried yet about the plummeting price as far as affecting future releases. The VF-0S also dropped quite bit, and though it wasn't as fast as the Fire Valk, it never recovered throughout this period and Bandai continued to give us the 0D & 0A. But then again, Bandai has dropped lines for less reasons, so we are back to them being unpredictable..

I would avoid the old HM VF-19S, unless one really likes the color, sculpt and need it now, or for collection completists. The current HMR VF-19 Kai's mold is far superior every way in quality & engineering. Nevertheless, even if other HMR VF-19 are easy repaints with minimal new parts, Bandai is just so unpredictable with their pattern of Macross releases these days that we don't put much high hopes anymore on what's coming next. The VF-19 (and by extension the YF-19) has one of the most ingenious transformation schemes of any valk, and the HMR Fire Valk beautifully captures it in physical form. Plus, it is now sitting firmly below MSRP, so it's great buy.