mph2501

I know, right? The MQ's ship mode always seemed like an afterthought whenever I saw it; like, "Oh yeah, it also has this cruise mode...". The early-early design (spread 1, which I didn't scan, so sorry) looked more like a classic oblong vessel (in fact, it looked more like the Valhalla series from the Digital Mission games), although I couldn't tell from looking where the damn carrier deck went; it just sort of disappeared under the center-line cannon. As versatile and zippy as the MQ is, does that mean we're going to see squadrons of them escorting colony ships now? Those non-trans frigates and ARMD carriers aren't worth a damn, now. If I were the NUN-SPACY, I'd order a dozen of them and replace the older crap ships. Of course, the YF-19 still would have blown right past them....

Hiya! I got my MQ about a week and a half ago, and I love the heck out of it. I also hate the thing. I have nothing against the design itself. It’s a cool ship. The problem is that it’s another “screw you” to the toy designers as far as execution goes. The metal legs cause the rear section to sag in cruiser mode. I know they tried to fix this with that little clip the back, but it’s too little, too late, just like the guide clip inside the waist. There’s too much mass for those things to be effective. They need some kind of latch mechanism to lock it in (or a real powerful magnet.) Likewise, the enormous gun and carrier pods cause the “arms” to sag in carrier mode. Now, the metal joints are nice and stiff, but to the point where there’s got to be some stress on the plastic there somewhere. That said, I’d rather it be stiff than all lousy-goosey, like my first Ozma VF25. The arms hold up in battle mode, oddly enough. Why they can't stay stiff in cruiser mode bugs the heck out of me. That said, I love the detailing, I love the accuracy, and though they may still be pretty out of scale, I like that it came with the teensy little VF's. Maybe they only have a squadron or two inside that carrier, but when you hold them up to the bridge/head, eeeeehhh.... maybe it's best not to do that. HLJ shipped its MQ’s with a cool “making of” booklet that showed some of the earlier designs (image attached) and I wish they’d settled on one of those, b/c they featured bow/arm sections that locked into the hull (see the bottom left part of the scan) Everything looks like it rotates into place and locks together cleanly; knees lock iup into the arm subassemblies so you have clean deck running from carrier into knee and so on. It looks a little more solid, like an enormous catamaran. Personally, I hope they do a better job on the New Macross-class Frontier, if they ever make one. You know you’d buy it. The Galaxy, too. I would. Especially if the Frontier came with a little scale partsformer Quarter. You can have that idea for a small percentage of the gross, Bandai. (I'd also settle for just a free set of both carriers) On a side note, my Armored Ozma Special suffered structural failure. I was transforming it with the leg armor on when, silly me, I let the hip section swing for a moment and lo and holed! the entire hip section breaks off of some flimsy little rubber bit. It snapped back onto the fuselage/nose section but, well, you were warned. Look at it, I can’t see why they’d make that section anything but a single piece on that part of the nose. I mean, it doesn’t need to flex when you bend in that weird hip assembly. Just a weird way to engineer the toy, and that added weight of those big plastic leg armors just killed the little nubbin.

Hiya! I last surfaced when the 2nd raft of DX VF-25's were released, and now I'm back again with another review. My VF-25 Armored Ozma DX came in today from HLJ (yeah, I preordered) "How I stopped worrying and learned to love the Messiah" Part II: "Kawamori Hates Toy Makers." When I first saw and fell in love with the design, I had one dark thought: "Man, this thing is going to be back-heavy." Guess what, it is. Luckily, Bandai seems to read feedback from people like us, because they did the following: 1) The toy's joints are stiff enough to hold poses and support the armor. 2) They included a little piece so you could extend the neck (yes, it's kinda cheaping out but hey, it's a decent fix, IMHO) 3) The plastic is light, yet tough. I dropped the engine nacelles twice onto a hard wood floor, nearly having a heart attack both times, and the things stayed intact, so kudos. Once again, it''s a solid toy that transforms.... well, without the armor it transforms quite well. My first Ozma has incredibly loose upper-arm swing joints, and these are tight as a drum. The shoulder swing joints are WAY tight, but you know what? I'd prefer it that way, because as we all know, these things loosen over time. But they didn't need to re-design the toy, they just needed to do the armor right. I would have preferred the shoulders to be jointed inside their guards to the thing you "swan dive" them out if you wanted to, but the metal joints make up for it, and it's okay with me. Now the armor. First: the bad. I don't know about you folks, but the Cyclops sensor array on the back falls off of mine. Also, I wish Bandai would go to all-pegs (or magnets, hellooo) because they went back to 1985 and used tabs to hold those forearm guards on. Little tabs are major fail because they rely on tension, and these things are gonna break. I'm sorry, but it's true. The only other problem I have is that the gun pod is just too darn delicate-looking for the design, which is why I'm shaving down the pistol grips on the cannon from an old Omega Boost toy for him to hold. I'll post pictures of this later. It's a nice big gun from another Kawamori design, and will look cool. I wish it'd been designed with a badass railgun mount like the VF-2SS instead of those weensy little needle guns on the nacelles, but oh well. Now the good. The hip plates snap on and STAY on (thank you, Bandai) as does every other piece of kit the thing has. However, the hip cannons... yeah, they're a two-part transformation. You have to assemble and disassemble the things. The engine nacelles you have to get used to fitting in and snapping on just right. Also, they are so damn heavy the wing panels don't want to lock very well in battroid mode (they do lock, but watch out). Also, the upper body is just too back-heavy overall and you have to counter-balance by leaning him forward on his fantastic strong metal ankles/leg joints. Finally, the calf armor ALLOWS KNEE MOVEMENT! WOOO! This is them saying "hey, we got the FAST pack version wrong, let's fix it in the armored design", and they did. Bravo. The reason I said Kawamori Hates Toy Makers (even though I revere him as the master designer he is, don't get me wrong) is that these designs have been making Bandai, Yamato, etc, bend over backwards and sideways to get right. For decades "Hey guys, here's a TON of armor pieces that don't all logically fit together in all three modes. HAVE FUN!!" Not to mention the joint mobility, proportions, etc. Really the manufacturers have been doing stellar jobs with the animation magic/proportions fudging that goes on. The chunky designs of old gave me fits too, but the most recent raft of Yamato/Bandai jobs? Well done. So, despite paint scratches, neck-joint inserts, and so on, they're still damn great toys, and my hat is off to those of you who are buying/building the models because let me tell ya, and this is coming from a hard-core modeller, I'd be intimidated by the model version. I mean jeezus, the armor, the joints... YEEK! So, to sum up, it looks great as a battroid, so-so as a gerwalk, and really shines as a plane (Like Graham, I too love whooshing it around). Get it, enjoy it. See you for the DX Macross Quarter. PS: I have resisted buying an Alto type because, unlike the Mikhail and Luca types, it doesn't bring anything new to the design (for me) but a head/color swap. If one of you can convince me, I will, but for the time being, two Ozmas, a Luca, and Mikhail are enough for me. --

I have to agree with the folks who are saying the camera's picking these things up. I'm eyeballing the thing right now and I just.... don't.... see it. Another issue with those pics is the way they green shades differently. All of the light is coming from the right hand side of the pic (or the RVF's starboard, for you technical people) so the way the shadows fall, you're seeing several tones anyway. Also, the plastic's glossy, so it's bouncing light, too. I still like the toy. It looks cool next to my Elint Seeker, and is currently flying formation with Michel and the SV-51 Ivanov type (which is their predecessor, design evolution-wise, but that's a whole other discussion). And yes, that is an all-Tachikoma ground crew marvelling at them.

Hello again everyone. Here's my RVF-25 Luca Custom review, in brief. or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DX VF-25 (part 3: the RVF25) You've heard my thoughts on the Mikhail version and on these DX's in general, so I'll spare you my tiring whining about landing gear and magnets. I'll cap off the boilerplate by saying this one has all the same armor gripes (missilepods, loose hips, calf armor), with this added bonus: There is no place to clip on the gun pod in fighter mode. Not that I can see anyway. Of course, this isn't such a problem, considering the superfluous extra bits that arrived a week before with my Michel Custom, namely the spare gunpod with its little clip. Of course, there is the matter of that bloody great big sensor boom that's in the way, but we'll get to that in a minute. If anyone found a little trick to attaching the gun to the fighter that I'm too thick to discover with my substandard eyes please, do sing out. Now, the ventral sensor boom. BE CAREFUL WITH THIS. My first time transforming it back from Battroid to fighter, I wasn't thinking and the end of the boom ended up tucked between the folding waist and the body. No not make the mistake of thinking "oh, it's just tucked in why don't I give it a quick yank?" You'll end up with a bent antenna on the end and a nagging doubt in your mind as to whether the thing will snap, like me. Honestly as a design feature I miss the little Cyclops Eye the VE-1 had. Why it's on Ozma's Super Armor and not Luca's arm is a mystery to me. The sensor dish is marvelous. It spins on its own little housing and the two tines deploy with a crisp pop. The annoyance here is that the struts holding it up off the body are a bit short, so the missile doors on the pods don't clear, and the FAST pack nacelles allow barely any clearance when the tines are deployed. Annoying, but not a big deal. Now, the good. THERE IS NO DISCOLORATION. Not on mine, anyway. I took the attached pics (at least, I hope the attachment feature worked...) with only natural light. I know, some of them show a little difference in tone due to the lighting, but looking at it with mine own eyes, I can tell you the coloring is consistent. I was worried it would be a tri-toned mess as seen in others horror stories, and it's not. However, mine does have the double "004" marking error. Dammit. Oh well. As a post script, Over Drive helpfully informed me that Bandai had screwed up the Ozma FAST packs and were sending new, correct one by the end of April. At this rate they're going to supplant Hobbylink Japan as my supplier of Cool Japanese Things. Hobbylink continues to keep my business by getting my valkyries to me in a mere 8 days and their Early Bird Specials.

I was curious about that solution as well. Let us know how that works out!

Anyone allowing a child to play with these might as well be lighting one hundred dollar bills on fire to read the newspaper at midnight. Then sleeping on a bed stuffed full of more hundreds. That s/he burns every morning to cook his breakfast, which is also made of some kind of currency. S/he will not eat that breakfast but instead stuff it into an incinerator fueled exclusively with money. Also, the current raft of Macross toys (never mind the models) is so full of tiny parts and sharp bits that you could use a reasonably sized collection thereof to perpetrate the greatest child massacre ever known on western soil. So please, keep them away from children. At all costs. (This entirely satirical message sponsored by tax dollars I hoovered out of politician's mattresses when they weren't looking. We do not, repeat NOT endorse harming children or burning perfectly good money, or any combination thereof.)

@ Edwin3060 --The sniper rifle has these delicate little tines that are meant to deploy splayed out, and the things are so slender and delicate they make my "you're going to snap this off by accident someday" sense tingle. I wish Kawamori-sensei had just designed a different looking bigass gun that would have made less of a delicate toy. Also, because you mentioned it, I did try fitting the intake armor on the my Ozma, and it is, in fact SNUG on there. I can only imagine what the Casting & Assembly Dwarves at Bandai do to these things, which are otherwise identical beyond paint/plastic color and heads. (If anyone's ever seen/been a part of the process of making/casting things I'd be fascinated to hear the explanation, but offhand I'd chalk it up to the "no two come out of the mold alike nor will they ever") @Eriku- the only thought that occurs to me is that the tabs may wear out over time, although the above "no two are alike..." maxim may also be true in this case. If this is some kind of bargain-basement eco-plastic that is made to super degrade over time, I'd rather they pollute the poo out of a planet and make these little connection tabs that are integral to the toy out of... I don't, radioactive super magnetic ultra-dura-plastic. @KiriK- Pictures.... I'll try to take and post when I can. I did get a fantastic camera not long ago that I snap pics of practically everything with. Well, everything small. Something told me to wait before getting the Ozma and I'll bet ALL of our issues will be fixed by the time that monstrous beauty of a craft sees the light of day. You'd better believe I'll be ordering a Quarter, too.

To get back on topic my Michel just arrived from HLJ, and here's my mini-review. The thing is damn solid, and they fixed the loose arm swivel joints problem that's been plaguing my Ozma. I peered at the thing's plastic under white, yellow, and flourescent lamps, (successively,not all at once) and there wasn't really any discoloration to speak of. Otherwise, like the Ozma, it's mostly metal, rather durable, and transforms without a hitch. Still present are the laughably small landing gear. This only becomes an issue when you attach the frighteningly delicate sniper rifle. In short, the plane is lovely, but the armor? It's called a RARE EARTH MAGNET, Bandai. I'm sorry if Yamato bought up every other one in Japan, but Im sure if you looked beyond your own picturesque borders you could find a cache someplace. The chest armor pops off with alarming frequency, the hip armor is only barely held on by some kind of weak undernourished cousing of tension and friction, and the armor that clamps onto the backs of the legs restricts all knee movement. The missile pods and hip-gun things are plastic tabs and ball joints, which I'm terrified will break off at the most inopportune moment (like, when I'm transforming the thing),and there are little tabs holding on everything from the nicely modelled boosters to the depressingly restrictive leg armor. I'd swear my old Takatoku valkyrie with his thrice-repaired tabbed armor parts was looking at me and sneering as I fitted the Michel with its armor. You die-hard super-courageous customizers out there, bless you, will be tempted to order your own magnets and bore a series of holes, or simply cut of those noisesome tabs on the rear calf armor to give your valkyrie a fuller range of movement. My hat's off to you if you make it work. I know that's what I'm tempted to exactly do, but I'm stopped by the massive pile of cash I forked over to buy the thing in the first place. Oh yes, and the crotch-anchor problem. If you press the bits together with a little more oomph than you percieve is safe, they snap together with a satisfying click. I found this out by accident. Works on the Ozma, too. I'd still buy these over a partsforming VF-100's any day because partsformers make me itch. Like Graham I fear loosing the one essential bob whilst playing with it one day, and then you've got yourself a piece of foreign sculpture that won't go together right. So Bandai,? Magnets and landing gear. It's a short list. Work on it. See you for the Armored Ozma. M

I'm sure people have said this before but these lousy analog eyeballs just didn't see it: What the hell is up with the TINY landing gear? Yamato managed decent ones (well, on the larger scale VF's) so why is Bandai still stuck in midget land with the damn wheels? They might as well have used those old metal ones from the first VF-1 series... And you modders are braver than I. <salute> -- M

Are you referring to the mid-wing hinges? There's a little switch on the bottom that extends little metal bars to secure them. I agree that fighter mode's the best of the three. Man, but the hips are loose on this thing. Why doesn't Yamato make nice tight shoulders and hips? My Perfect Piece Tachikoma has tighter hips than this thing (anyone who has one knows about the joints on that thing...) I wish the hips were in a wider stance like the YF-21, but oh well. Thighs are taller and more slender than the CG art, though. My other complaint is those little tabs unde the shoulders. Still it's SO beautiful, and I'm running out of shelf space....