MKT

Price of HMR VF-0S have been slowly dropping at Amazon JP. At this posting time, it is Yen 12,895 and that hasn't included a further 10% Japanese VAT deduction. Broke down and ordered another copy.

Received the VF-0S today. To be honest, I had some trepidation because there have been little rumblings here and there on the quality not being up to usual HMR standards. These were mostly to do with how cheap the plastic feels & how thin the plastic is until light shines through easily, stuff that were never an issue with previous HMR releases like the VF-4. Some quick impressions: In hand, the plastic feels.. different than other HMR VFs, but not necessarily cheap. In fact, the texture feel very similar to the new plastics used for the recent VF-25 WWM and YF-29 Max. I've only handled Battoird & Gerwalk so far, and find some parts do look quite thin, with joints & hinges around the chest area flexing a bit more than I would like during mid-transformation. But none of the parts feel as though will break easily - on contrary they are quite strong. I'm thinking Bandai is really going for accurate proportions here, so perhaps some parts are smaller / thinner / finer to achieve that for this size. Where other feeling of cheapness may come from is its weight. It is only 94g, compared to the VF-4's 110g and VF-2SS's 122g (the VF-1 is 80g). So it does kind of feel lighter than expected for its size. Once I start putting it through its paces though, its quickly apparent that that the tolerances are pretty much top notch. On my copy at least, all joints move with consistent fluidity and mostly appropriate tightness depending on area, making this toy a pleasure to handle. I feel this aspect is the hallmark of excellent engineering, more so given its scale. Kitz Concept would do well to take copious notes here for their 1/72 VFs! Only the cockpit shield was much tighter than it should be; on the upside it does cover the canopy completely in Battroid (I was afraid it wouldn't, seeing quite a few mis-transformed examples before this). Unfortunately, the plastics appear to have some unwanted levels of translucence. This is the complaint by some, but the way I see it, wrongly attributed to plastic thickness but is due to the plastics color itself. It's not noticeable during normal handling, but the moment some light gets behind it, the translucence becomes quite apparent, like the following pic .. After Battroid, I moved on to Gerwalk and have to agree with others who mention this is the best mode. The range of articulation & balance here is really nice, and I attempted to have it emulate Roy on one of his moves during his Gerwalk melee with Ivanov on the aircraft carrier deck.. It is really a treat to have the rainbow cockpit canopy here again, after losing it from Yamato's valk days. For now, I'm leaving it in Gerwalk for display..

Thanks.. but what is that drawing, is it a settei sketch?

Haha fat turkey.. I can kinda see it from certain angles.. Well, just a few more pics of the VF-2SS: Here I'm picturing the VF-2SS being on the way up some hangar to be launched. Handling normal fighter mode is already not that much a fun affair, but once the SAP is added, it's a whole new level of frustration to align everything symmetrically. The whole VF looks even more of a mess from below. With the SAP pack, the look graduates fully into a heavily armed space fighter - exactly its intended role. But sometimes I would imagine it as a stand in for another video game fighter-shooter, perhaps not a Silpheed but more of Thunderforce. I tried to take some pics of Gerwalk, but IMHO it is visually the weakest mode. After trying out a few angles and binning them, in the end I just took an upskirt pic and called it a day.

Other than the waist, it appears the joints in hips, ankles and feet have been tightened considerably. Pose-ability now greatly improved now without risk of toppling over like Yamato's. One of the chest cannons now have proper hole at the tip, matching the rest of them.

While waiting for my VF-0S to arrive, I spent some time to reacquaint with the HMR VF-2SS.. My introduction to the VF-2SS was all the way back in mid-90's, during RPG sessions with my buddies using just the Palladium RPG book. What made the experience here different from our other sessions of the original Macross RPG (Robotech!), was that we did not watch the Macross II anime, so the plays became rather short-lived as we were not at all familiar with the important world settings, characters and overall story for context to draw from. But I would be studying the line-art of the VF-2 variants & other mecha for quite a bit, greatly admiring all their updated designs from the original Macross. It was only just a few years ago I watched Macross II. Though very middling overall, seeing the monochrome line-art jumping out from their pages and now animated in color was a treat. Fast forward to today, when I look at the VF-2SS's fighter form, it is quite different from other VFs in the Macross universe in such a way that there are individually recognizable jet fighter bits like the rather normal shaped wings, vertical stabilizers, and nose cone; but when all parts come together as a whole, it just about leans more towards a space fighter rather than atmospheric jet fighter like most other Macross VFs. Nevertheless, my absolute favorite feature of this VF design, is the shape of the nose cone. At this angle, it has all the right curves, blending well with the rest of the body... Bandai really did well with the VF-2SS sculpt, it's great most of the moving parts can flush rather well together even if it means some effort needed to finagle them just-so into position. The opening cockpit canopy here is the highlight feature that we perplexingly continue to not get with other HMR VFs... Battroid is where I feel the direct lineage to the VF-1 shows through. The shape is largely similar, but everything made slender and curvier. The HMR sculpt really evokes my memory of the line-art that Evolution Toys' version doesn't.. And so, after finally watching the anime, I can have the VF-2SS in a pose something similar in spirit to the anime, in a way the RPG book doesn't convey..

This is basically their existing P-Bandai / web exclusive model. The fact they are not even doing this, is perhaps whatever projected orders they crunched will not even meet MOQ for profitability. There’s also the idea (not sure where it originated from), that antagonist mecha generally don’t sell well. I got impression that Bogue’s 31AX didn’t move much quantities, so perhaps there’s some validity to this.

The PFs are done from the batch of base YF-19 released few months back. But it appears the reissue of this base YF-19 has quite a bit higher defects than normal? So just speculating, there could not be enough leftover for the PF after accounting for defects & replacements, so Arcadia might have to schedule a whole new production batch for it.

@Kicker773 never fails to amaze everytime!

The mold is already there, they have 2 x Hs repaints to choose from, and they can also do a WWW release to up the numbers...

Haha I don't mind at all @no3Ljm. Love what you did with them!

Well, still waiting for the Elvis valk, and after so many years, this mold continues to be a once and done thing. I happen to take down the SV-262Hs from my shelf, where it has been in the same Battroid pose for years, pretty much from when it was new. We know, this toy has relatively less amount of metal in it compared to other chogokins, then also reflected by the much-reduced size of the chogokin logo on the box. Could the less metal be to its advantage? So am now happy to report, that most of the joints, especially in the legs, appear to be pretty much as stiff when it was new. The right shoulder joint does not seem to be as tight as I would like, as it has problems holding the admittedly rather heavy gun in a more outstretched position, and always wants to swing back down. I'm not sure if this is caused by it bearing the weight of the gun over the years, but perhaps not, as the other shoulder also exhibit the same semi-looseness even though that arm only carries the shield. Here's a pic of its frozen-in-time stance whilst we are it: Meanwhile, I recently happen to come across a rather cool pic, that shows off an F-4 Phantom II underside.. I sometimes think views of fighter jet undersides can be a bit under-appreciated, and so it inspired me to take couple of pics of the VF undersides because it is one of Macross VFs' strengths as far as transforming jet toys go. The first is of an VF-31A, because why not. Such clean execution. Yumz! But back to the SV-262Hs, I flipped my other copy in Fighter mode to have a look at its bottom, and have renewed appreciation on how well-executed it is. Now the YF-21 / VF-22 have the smoothest underside, but Kawamori kinda worked around it because it was mostly 2 panels covering it up (a semi shell-former!), but here on the SV-262 it is really just great design to have all the various parts come nicely together... And lastly, another extra pic. I just love the SV-262Hs color scheme, and all its tampo markings; they stand out so well in all modes!

Drill holes on a piece so small? I wish I got that steady a hand.. Nice work!

Great score!

The yet unreleased Bodolza toy gets to re-experience death all over again.. hence no toy of him for another 40 years!

These were from the Imai Files? They look much better than the new designs, although both have some similar elements. I suppose, I wish the new designs would give us something more variegated in the base bike itself, that requires different enough transformation scheme, rather than just variations of weapons & skin-deep cosmetic changes. We already have these types of variations in the existing quartet. Something beyond skin-deep would be, for example, the hoverbike ride-armor variant that was also shown in the pre-production sketches, which at least gives us different enough flavor in terms of the transformation. Although, I understand the unstated main purpose of this new Breakers is just a way for Sentinel to re-use as much as existing molds as possible to milk fans. I don't know, it appears the Tread may not sell in as much numbers as the Legiosses; and if that is true, then for a new unanimated series (not even a comic / manga) that have revealed just a handful of drawings so far, the designs have to be really good to convince enough folks to part with their money for the eventual toy.

Haha just did a comparo too. Yeahh Mirage's bigger. And whilst at it, we can see the whites of the insignias follow the base valk, so Max's brighter.

Lol so here Bandai did a reverse and made it more complicated on the toy than needed. Chalk this one up to more of Bandai's.. idiosyncrasies.

This never gets old..

I'm conflicted whether to get extra copies, for the eventual Ghost or Reactive Armor packs. Yet Bandai has never done add-on packs for the Macross HMR line so far, only full-set packs. Although for the older HM line did they separate them out.

Good observation @MacrossJunkie. Looking back at my copy, the insignia doesn't seem to be terribly out of alignment. I suppose this is why the Delta chogokin valks all have their insignias resized, reangled or reproportioned compared to the line art, to avoid them spilling onto more panels and prevent higher chance of misalignment.

Megazone 23 Part II

Haha the arm missiles looked like it came off Macross Delta Armored before, now the shoulder missiles look like it got pilfered from the VF-1 GBP..

Great pic! Although I would say the VF-1 here look much shorter compared to other VF-0 vs VF-1 pics posted earlier. It really highlights how small shifts in leg & feet positioning really affect the perceived heights. Personally, not a big issue for me now as long VF-0 is noticeably bigger, but this all started when Bandai published the same 14cm VF-1 height for the VF-0 lol..