Chronocidal

Does it come with a pack of buns for the hotdogs it's carrying under the wings?

Is that actually a pinned hinge, or something just snapped in? I remember some part of the leg around there being prone to pop out.

Have to second that, I just got my WWM release version, and while it might not be the tightest VF-25 I have, it looks like one of the best finished. The lack of plastic shine really makes it stand out, and I love the scheme. I'm also really hoping Bandai has just completely ditched the styrofoam packaging at this point, since both this and my Alto YF-29 re-release have been in normal clear plastic. It's so much easier to unpack them when you can skip the extra bag, and I have to guess they've done this to help prevent the foam from off-gassing and contributing to plastic yellowing.

I mean, yeah, to be fair, they're going to look chunky if they don't mold unique pieces for half the plane. XD

Seriously, why don't they just use their own work as a reference? That one looked better in all three modes than this one looks in either of the two we've seen. It even got the tails and cockpit shaped correctly, instead of redesigning them for... reasons?

As long as we're doing mad science, the GN-U DOU version.

We just need to cross-breed these two to get the Bandai legs, and Yamato arms..

What, and admit they got it wrong the first time?

HAH.. Please, no I never want to see those hinges again lol The different angles do look like the nose section has a slightly different shape though, now that you can see more of it. I actually would love someone to get a lower angle to get a proper planform, since it looks like the LEX might not go as far forward as I first thought. The shine on the spine does make me think it's tapered differently. The canopy looks much flatter at the front to me, and the canards are lower than the YF-19 even had them. I can't see any visible mechanism for them either, but I'm pretty sure this one is a solid prototype, since there are a lot of seams missing in the fuselage. I'll be interested to see if they do another origami fold in the legs like the YF-19 had, or go with something simpler this time.

The completionist in me says I'd probably grab one, but I'd much rather spend the money on a PF Arcadia re-release, because this gets worse the longer you look at it. The arms look so puny compared to the Yamato, those tiny hands.. They could improve SO MUCH just by making the arms longer, moving the tails back, and using them to hide some of the junk that trunk is packing. Seriously, that backpack is a giant pile of WTF. What is even going on there? The way they reshaped the canopy still looks like garbage, because the nose looks both too short and all bloated, when there is no reason not to shape it like the art. I don't even know if that's a minority opinion on the YF-19. I think the blocky heel and obnoxious tampo are really the only detractors from that design. They managed to work in the correct crotch plate flip, and pulled off proportions a lot closer to the Hasegawa kit, though they definitely overcomplicated things with that crazy folding panel mechanism in the legs. I think somewhere between the two would be perfect, but they're both incredibly good.

What they did to this one I think is still overboard, but far less of an eyesore than what they did with the stupid YF-19 wing markings. Those were beyond obnoxious.

I believe the proper term at the time was "battying", due to an amusing forum censor. And yes.. I think it was actually released close to the v.2 VF-1.. I got mine from HLJ in December of 2009, and that was during a clearance sale, so it had been out a while by that point.

Might be a pain to match, but I suppose you could just paint over them. Won't have any tampo, but it'd be better than nothing, and you could probably get the Hasegawa decals for them.

Oh, I was actually meaning his radar dish pod, not the super packs. I much prefer the AX without the thermometer pack, so I swapped in the normal VF-31 charger pods on my 31AXs. You could swap it with the speaker/projector pod too, if you wanted, or even the giant cannons from the armor set. They're all interchangeable.

Yeah, the nose is entirely borked to high heaven as well. I don't know. It feels like whoever is designing this doesn't actually have a grasp of why the design is aesthetically pleasing in the first place, and is messing with all of those elements in the process of making it "work," without understanding why it doesn't look good anymore.

I have no idea what is going on. My brain hurts. On the plus side.. Bandai colored the backs of the hands properly.

Don't forget, they'll have to develop a new set of replacement wings that can phase directly through the legs.

"Milking" would imply they actually intend to make enough of these to lure buyers in. Happily, I could not give less of a crap about these parts.

Ok, honestly, this shot would look great.. with ONE change. Cut off the badonk, Bandai. It doesn't belong. Either cut it off, or extend the wings, tails, and arms so it isn't so redonkulous. I know why they did it this way, but a reason does not equal an excuse. I get it, they had to make room for the legs. If you make the legs bigger without making the rest of the plane bigger to match, you screw up the proportions, and the overall result is ugly. That doesn't have to happen, because the wings and tails are completely inconsequential to the transformation, and could be changed to make the fighter mode not suck a lot easier than the legs can be shrunk without making battroid suck. Extend the arms, and enlarge the wings. Or even just stretch the arms so the tails aren't jammed into the midsection. The arms are already too short anyway.

The way it's said here (and it could be a bad translation, obviously), it sounds more like he's saying Bandai's is coming along, so it might be a few years until they can do their own.

One of these days I'm going to find some way to get a set of my 1/48 strike parts x-rayed, just to see if they've had all of that detail from the start.

Up at AE here: https://anime-export.com/index.php?product=62727

I would actually be okay with this, because I'd love a different take. But I feel like I woke up in some bizarre mirror dimension today, because all of the details for both this one and the HMR advertisement look like they just copy-pasted the Yamato design. I'd love to see a side-by-side in-person, because I'm having trouble finding any differences at all, aside from the fact that the 1/60 one appears seamless, the same way the VF-31 display models did for so long, before Bandai bothered to finish them. The mold lines look identical, the panel lines all are in the same places, and all of the panel separations on the HMR one look like they just shrunk the Yamato version. One of the weirdest parts? I have a hard time believing that Bandai would ever make a VF-19 with feet that small. They actually fit into the leg. Nothing about this design looks like Bandai made it. I think the only things I'm seeing slightly different are the shape of the canopy frame and the black ahead of it being more angular, and the nose being smooth instead of having the two little raised strakes on it? It's just weird. I would have expected it to look more like the Bandai YF-19 mold, because they teased a Fire Valk at their show a long time ago, around the time the VF-19 Advance was released.

The old packs work on the 31AXs, so you could just swap it if you have his 31.

If I can find my old flight sim YF-21 file, I might mess with the proportions and perspective to see if I can match the photos, and give an estimate of how it's shaped.. but I don't know if I want to be that depressed.