Chronocidal

Took a little time today, and slapped my copy of this kit together.. yeah, it's probably going to stay in battroid forever. It's not the worst fighter mode I've seen, but it's not great. Reminds me a little of the original 1/72 Yamato toys. The toes are about twice as big as the need to be, and the heels are about three times as big as they should be, while the legs are massive chunks, and they don't even try to make an excuse for why there are no arms in fighter mode at all. The way they curved the backs of the lower legs also throws the tail hinges off-angle at a weird slant, and kind of ruins what would otherwise be a mostly alright profile. It's kind of all over the place. I did find it kind of cute that they included slots to mount a fold booster. Not a bad little build though. Decided to challenge myself and go without the instructions, and it came out alright. The knee hinges were the only tricky part, since they can go together a few different ways. One odd thing is that Bandai went very "minimum effort" on this one.. there's a whole lot of asymmetrical assembly, because they just didn't feel like making dedicated left and right versions of a lot of parts. The arms, wings, feet, and most of the leg joints are identical for left and right, most of which feels pretty justified, but even the rear landing gear are identical, with pegs for tires on both sides, so you have to clip one off (not that there's any actual reason to use them, of course, and Bandai seems to be fully aware of this). All in all, a pretty nice little posable Battroid kit. Don't fool yourself by thinking you can make a decent fighter with it though. Gerwalk is okay, but it's still clunky and awkward because it's the YF-19.

The 171EX never seemed to have too many issues, but for whatever reason, the teal CF variants tended to explode catastrophically. No, I'm not even exaggerating. Yes, all of those parts are from one disintegrated knee joint. Between this, the constant issues with shoulder triangles cracking/shattering, and what I'm going to call the general engineering incompetence involved in the design, it's amazing the EX didn't explode just as often. I remember hearing that both this and the Yamato VF-17 were designed by the same CAD design team, but it is insane to wrap my head around that idea. While the 171 tended to break apart like a frag grenade, you could pretty much use the VF-17 to bludgeon someone.

I've been generally assuming that's what they did. As soon as Yamato released the kit versions, it was really easy to get a full picture of all the individual parts.

I don't remember for sure, and mine are buried in storage at the moment, but did the VF-2SS have the same sort of cardboard, just from the larger box size and heavier contents?

The majority of that's probably in the wings, and all the extra folding bits. Would be interesting to see how much a VF-1 weighs in at, though, if you have one handy.

You're also not going to get a set of fast packs molded in red, so there are other side benefits. Assuming they're actually molded, of course. Even if the figure itself is mostly garbage, I'm betting a fair bit could be salvaged for use with one of the Yamato kits. I might have to hunt down some Autobot logos to fit him though.

I don't think it's a stretch to say they absolutely could have chosen a different way to design it. They just chose not to. Bandai has done their own (often inferior) take on many things Yamato or Arcadia already did, and for better or worse, Bandai is going to be Bandai. They're going to make bad decisions, and they're going to defend them to the death. The problems with the approach they took are pretty evident though. The overall proportions of the VF-0s are great, just like the Arcadia ones, but that left them with incredibly tight tolerances to fit within when shrunken down, and it inflated the sizes of some of the parts that were already very small in 1/60. It also resulted in them copying some of the mistakes Arcadia made. Notably: - The landing gear doors are a royal pain in the backside to open. They left Arcadia's opening door design in, rather than attaching them to the gear, probably because it was less work to not have to design gear door plugs. They didn't do this with the VF-4, and while I can appreciate the effort to have less spare parts to keep track of, now you have to keep a tool handy to open the doors anyway, and those tiny door hinges feel like they are just destined to break. - The folding panels that seal around the head in fighter mode were already fragile and prone to pop off on the 1/60. The hinges here got scaled up so that the pivots are roughly the same size as the 1/60 ones. They work, but they were already fiddly in the larger scale, and now they're half the size. - The tailhook colliding with the gunpod was an issue in the first release Arcadia VF-0D, and they fixed that by the VF-0S release, and the later PF VF-0D. Bandai didn't get the memo, and brought that "feature" to both the HMR VF-0D and VF-0S. - The VF-0D in particular suffers a bit visually from the fact that the design has a lot of compact hinges for all of the folding parts. Those had to get scaled down significantly for the HMR, but not enough to make them really look good, in my opinion. Those are chunky hinges in the wings, and I don't know if there's really anything you can do about that. Frankly, if they're including battroid-specific wings, I think I would have preferred non-folding tips on the hardpointed wings, because they just would have looked better. I'm not going to say that I don't love having these little VF-0s around, because they're nicely done, but they're absolutely more fragile-feeling than the other HMRs, and feel more like a model kit in weight. The plastic is thinner, and there's much less metal than the VF-1, most notably because they didn't redesign the feet so they could be die-cast. I can understand why they didn't; the VF-0's feet are just more detailed, inside and out. But reworking them to be metal would have been a big improvement.

You don't see that fiddly-ness on the VF-1 because it was designed to be in that scale. With the VF-0s though, every detail is pointing to them being re-scaled copies of the Arcadia 1/60 molds, with all of the material limitations that process brings with it. They were never designed to function at that scale, it was just very convenient for Bandai that they happen to work well enough to sell.

Yeah, no, Bandai has repeatedly demonstrated that they are incapable of making a solid VF-1-style transformation into fighter mode. They do not understand how the arms and legs and backpack have to fit together, and everything feels slightly out of line, and far too fiddly. The DX is the best at it, but even that feels like things don't quite fit as they should at times (mostly due to the stupid pegs used). It's honestly bizarre. It's like they are completely incapable of using the same types of engineering tolerances they have on every other franchise when it comes to something like the VF-1. Even their model was a disaster of misaligned and ill-fitting parts when it came to the arms, legs and backpack. Edit - I realized belatedly that you're probably talking about the sliding clips for the shoulders, rather than the rotation hinges Yamato used. Those generally work mostly okay for me, but the stiffness of the shoulder joints is unfortunately far stronger than the clip holding them on, and they tend to pop off of their rails more often than not. I've also noticed that the position of those clips actually limits how far back the wings can sweep in fighter mode, which isn't really a problem, just an interesting difference.

Yeah, I think that chest look might be pretty easy to mitigate by filing down the ridges on the inside of the chest that lock into the shoulder tabs. They look like they're quite a bit oversized. I did the same thing with my M&Ms back in the day to keep those ridges from scraping off the white paint on the shoulders, and it never stopped those from holding together fine, but these KOs might be a different story there. That video though.. I would love to know what's making the thing sit so cock-eyed in the last few seconds. it doesn't look like anything in particular is wrong, it's just somehow sitting on that mirror at an angle.

Honestly, for all of the benefits of being able to get all the other franchises internationally, it still feels like a loss to still have to import anything SDF/DYRL-related.

I can't even say the triangles (upper or lower) were the biggest issue with the CF-171. That entire production batch was laced with explodium, especially the silver parts.

Oh wtf.. Bandai, stop crapping all over our existing art with your nonsense tampo, please.

Those aren't the mushroom pegs, those are the removable pegs that you pulled out to swap the wings. It doesn't look any different than what's on the old version. The "mushroom" peg is the one on the left, and is the actual pivot point of the wing. The cap on that peg is generally very easy to snap off when removing the wings, but it doesn't actually matter most of the time, since most of the force of holding the wing on is done by the larger removable peg on the right (provided it actually stays in, of course). Sad to see there's really no improvements other than the finish though. The 171s never were really missing any markings to begin with, but if they really wanted to improve them, all of the changes should have been made to the armor packs. I don't know if the chest panels were ever shown to open, but they could have at least added working hatches to the quad pack on the arm.

You assume that the instructions are actually clear and comprehensible. If this is anything like any of the third-party transformers I've bought, I expect they come with an A4 sheet folded in half three times with a 5-step transformation.

Honestly, it wouldn't even be hard to completely negate the swappable wings. Just install a screw instead of the mushroom peg, and they're in for good, with no changes to the molds. Stupid pegs always broke off anyhow, so it's not like they ever did anything.

I might spring for one, just because of the matte finish. I only got one of these the first go-around. Still, funny to me that we're getting a re-release of this one, rather than a tan one with Hayate. What, was he not as popular as Alto or something?

Definitely in the same spot, and I need to start thinning down what I hold onto. I have a lot of duplicates acquired just from the sheer nonsense of trying to make sure I get a single copy during pre-orders, and some specific cases like the VF-171s that I ordered multiples of just to make it more likely that I'd get one good one out of the bunch The HMRs are dangerous though, and it's really easy to justify multiples, since they're so much smaller. It falls into the same sort of logic as "if they have half the calories, I can eat twice as many, right?"

Ok, those are absolutely beautiful. Considering the effort involved, I can see why they didn't do that themselves though. Would have been a good start if they molded them in more colors to begin with.

What's going on with the release dates? Amazon's saying it's not out until October.

Oof... looks like it doesn't even come with the second missile pack though. Just the strike cannon, and one spare clear one. Considering they're not actually symmetrical, I wonder which one they're actually including. Hope you don't plan on using the packs on something else.

I recall hearing other stories that the MiG-23 airframe has a history of being difficult to handle, and who knows how fickle a Russian swing-wing aircraft would be. I recall one story about a captured plane being plowed in hard when a general steamrolled his way into getting to fly it, and could not handle it. Mostly just reminds me of this old meme though.

It's actually really helpful for them to have not glued that, so I haven't minded. Makes it really easy to pull out to paint or decal it, or in the case of Roy's, you can pretty easily convert it between TV and DYRL versions by swapping the instrument panels. Still some other minor differences, but since Bandai seems like they have no interest in making a DYRL Roy, I'm happy to swap a few parts here and there. I just need a spare DYRL pilot to paint, and I should be good.

I haven't seen any real reason to go for the knockoffs, but I might actually jump on this one. It actually includes something Yamato and Arcadia never did: A full set of painted TV missiles! I have enough other Yamatos to mess with that I won't really care if it feels sloppy, it'll be a great conversation piece.

I'm not even sure I've heard of them doing replacement parts in Japan. Every time I've ever heard of them dealing with faulty products has been a full return/replace of the item.