Chronocidal

I really hope this one's wings are as loosely glued as the original release, otherwise replacing the wing hinge is going to be terrifying. 😱

Funny to think the Arcadia implementation of the VF-25 booster pack set is arguably better than Bandai's in many ways. The wing boosters on the Bandai are notoriously finnicky to stay on, and unlike the Bandai shoulder... pads?.. the Arcadia ones actually rotate and open up into missile launchers. I do wish they'd come out with a full release of them, but while they're cool to display in fighter, they're too clunky in all the other modes to really feel natural.

Aha! It's in! Stayed up later than I intended, and got the email right as I was headed to bed. Also.. for the record, the yen total charged was 51,750, which came out to A little over $413. The conversion saved me.. almost enough to ship it.

Ok, where's a 1/12 F-14 when you need one...

I kind of hope they re-release the VF-19P alongside the VF-5000.. whenever that one happens. The one I'm STILL waiting for is a VF-19F from the Master File though, just the plain white one with black stripes. It would make such a good base for customs.

You know what, I'll bite, for the fancier gold paint. That's even less than I actually paid for the original Yamato Fire Valk on its own.

Ok, exchange rates are kind of wild.. that's a sound booster bundle.. for the same price as the original Fire Valk release.

Heh.. I just went to look at the product page on HLJ, and they've updated the release expectation to April now. Wonder what's going on with their stocking situation.

The old Yamato isn't going to work, because the entire arm mechanism is different, and uses a sideways hinge, instead of extending the elbow with a slider. Any old beat-up Yamato VF-19 should do the trick though, if you could find spare parts. The way these are breaking looks really wild though, as if they're being massively ham-fisted trying to rotate the arms. If they're stuck that badly, someone at Arcadia really borked up the assembly or painting somehow. It might be worthwhile for someone to Shapeways a replacement for those parts. Now that I know how to get them apart, I might disassemble mine the whole way, and upload a model to test.

That actually reminds me of one funny, and probably unintentional feature of the Arcadia version. Since all of the other YF/VF-19 molds come from the base design of the Fire Valkyrie, all of the other variants can actually hide their center head laser under the arm shield. Remove the shield, then rotate the laser down, and it'll nestle up between the elbows, provided you've folded down the little panel at the top of the spine.

No, this is entirely new. The shoulders have been solid on this ever since the original Fire Valk release, I think, which uses the same shoulder design. I just messed with my older "beater" YF-19 that I transform and mess with all the time, and no, the screws to directly loosen that joint aren't reachable, even after transforming it. They're covered by the shoulder pauldrons, and I'm not sure how those can be removed. They're all glued shut. The best option looks like it would be to remove the arm from the shoulder pivot, which can be reached without transforming the arms, just by dropping the legs, and lifting the torso using the spine linkage. It's a tricky angle though, and you might chew up the body getting in there (though it wouldn't show with the arms transformed, so may not show in any mode). Once that's undone, it looks like this would actually be an easy preemptive fix. The shoulder comes free once that screw is out, and you can easily access the pivot holding the failing joint, and loosen it up (or swap out the arm for a non-broken one). What actually concerns me here is that I have to wonder if the weathering job is the reason for these breakages. It's not hard to imagine them just applying all of their surface treatments to all the parts, without thinking about the effects that would have on the mechanisms. The arms might be all glued tight with weathering compound. Edit: Just as a note, getting that screw back under the shoulder cover can be tricky. Because of the angle, the best way I was able to do it was to drop the screw into the hole, seat it in the shoulder socket and give it a couple of twists to hold it steady, and then push the shoulder flush with the mount and screw it down tight. You'll probably want a non-magnetized screwdriver to do it too, mine kept yanking the screw out of position.

I would hope so, but Arcadia absolutely does not need another case of shoulder cancer in their new releases. It looks like it'll be prudent to loosen the shoulder screws before trying to move the arms at all... which I think can be reached, if I remember? Frankly.. if this happens to mine? The arms have next to no markings in the first place, I'll just swap in a pair from one of the original releases. Also, a reminder.. if you want to take the leap to disassemble the wings and remove the high speed mode, Sculpteo still has my original replacement bracket design available in POM and acrylic. Sadly, they discontinued their metal cutting service, but the other materials are much more affordable anyhow, and should be plenty sturdy. https://www.sculpteo.com/en/print/pom-wing-mount/ii6HRFai?basket=1&noclickredirect=1&uuid=sV8kLMUyFQxaLWonmDI6Ie Just be aware, you will have to file away some of the longest edge of the bracket so it doesn't collide with the legs. This was the first version of the file I added, and I never re-adjusted this pattern for the POM cutting process, which requires an added margin for the laser to melt. If I ever find those original files, I might upload a revision, but the material is easy enough to modify by hand that I didn't think it was necessary. Top is how the part arrived, middle is the one I filed down to not collide with the legs, and the bottom one is one of the metal ones I ordered, before they discontinued that material.

You know, this unfortunately does not surprise me at all. This is the same thing that broke on my original Yamato 1/60 YF-19. The shoulder design has honestly always been bad, and insanely difficult to get into to repair because of the shoulder covers. The original release was just plagued with original recipe VF-0 explodium, and those parts disintegrated. This.. just makes me think something was tightened down too much. Fortunately, this might be a fairly easy thing to replace with a printed replacement part. It's really not a complex design.

Yeah, that is definitely something that the Bandai YF-19 mold suffers from, and that's the need to massage it and tweak it for potentially hours to get everything to fit into place correctly. I like how it looks in all modes, but I very rarely transform the Bandai one. The Yamato/Arcadia VF-19s and YF-19 all feel much easier to transform.

The art style actually kind of reminds me of some of the really early 1950s carrier-based jets. The shape of the pod on one side looks a lot like the intake of an F-80 or F-3D Skyknight.

I would definitely recommend looking over Jenius' review on Anymoon.com for a good rundown of the two, since he very well covers the comparison of the two at all levels. https://anymoon.com/blog/?p=8151 He also reaches the same conclusion I did, as it seems others have as well: If you can afford it, just get both. There is the oddball of the VF-19 Advance, if you can track it down, but I do not know how that would compare to the other two in terms of price. Personally, I like that one's design slightly better than the DX YF-19, just for the different feet, and what I consider a slightly better paintscheme (even though it's SMS markings, vs the original UN SPACY version). It also doesn't include any of the missiles, using the Frontier-style wing boosters instead. The DX and Arcadia YF-19 releases both have the full set of missiles to load on the plane, though Bandai also includes the fold booster, as well as the special arm cannon mount seen for a few seconds in the animation, and they even adapted it to work in fighter mode (albeit, a bit awkwardly with a gunpod). My personal take on the two? The Arcadia feels easier and more intuitive to transform, is closer to the original animation (both in proportion and paint/markings), and nails the classic hand-drawn look. The Bandai feels more like a transforming model to me, with a much more involved and intricate transformation, slightly better flexibility for posing, much more painted detail (I would personally call it overdone), and an overall look that feels closer to the slimmer Frontier-era designs, almost to the point of looking like a transforming version of the Hasegawa aircraft-only kit. Note.. they also both suffer from having a generally ineffective "high speed mode" mechanism to fold the wings back. While the missiles are a great idea in principle, the extra weight will probably send the wings flailing around out of position if you handle them a lot. The Bandai version has a slightly better mechanism, in that it has some amount of a ratcheting feel to it, but it can still easily go floppy. If you aren't afraid to do the work to take the wings apart, there are things that can be done to fix this, but it's tricky work, no matter which version you decide to get.

True, it was consistent, I just always thought it looked dumb. It made me think it was just something unintentional that no one ever caught, since the color schemes on the other planes were all consistently unlike that one.

Like so many of the design and texture choices in Frontier though, it feels as though Bandai stayed true to things being dorked up by the animators in the first place. Aesthetically? A whole bunch of things they did make no sense, and the only excuse I can find is "Oh.. the animators did that... I guess we should too." The "NO STEP" markings on the underside of wings is very likely the same thing. Does it make sense for that to be printed in zero-g environments? Sure.. except that if you're floating, you don't have to "step" on anything. I've always thought that excuse only exists to cover the fact that the animators mirrored the textures on top and bottom of the wings.

Definitely going to grab one of these.. fingers crossed I don't get screwed twice and have the crotch plate missing on both releases. That's actually part of why I was glad I picked up the YF-25.. the blue was a close enough match to look good on Michael's original release. Personally.. I think it even looks better, due to having the colors flipped. Michael's valk always had a few weird color choices that stood out in a bad way, like the bottom of the nose being blue with white gear doors, for some reason... when the original v.1 VF-25 actually had the full underside matching somehow?

Oh, ok, that explains a lot about the shape and arrangement of things.. though that opening on just one side throws my asymmetry alarm off the scale.

Maybe so, but I'd be interested to see how much you'd really have to swap out of the total contents of the kit, just in terms of plastic volume. Reason I think there would be so much commonality is mainly because one of the things I will never forget about building the VF-25 kits is just how much of those kits was piles of ABS internal structure to snap the exteriors onto. There would be a lot of changes to the external parts, and a whole bunch of new sections like the gun turret and extra engines, but the skeleton and transformation of the YF-29 is pretty much identical.

I still don't understand why they never made a 1/72 transforming version. The thing uses 75% of the VF-25 parts in the first place.

Which one is the 89 version, the original movie toy with the fold out handle and suction dart launchers? I always wanted one of those back then, but never got around to getting one. That new design isn't bad, not a terrible upgrade, but I think the "ear" prongs look a bit too spindly.

I kind of feel like you could slap together a competent EXO Squad game as a mod for one of the Mechwarrior titles.

I'm thinking this one is going to be the fighter-mode display permanently. Might even tack the wings in place so they stay put, and never transform it.