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Yeah. Looks absolutely stunning and badass at the same time. I don't usually go for stylized reinterpretations of mecha/robots, but this one feels like this is how GL would look like if the show got a reboot and the animators gave this guy an updated look or design. I still have my old Konami Great Impact GL as the OG anime accurate version in my collection .

No did not know... I selected ECMS😁

Gil Gerard's Buck Rogers was another cool icon from my childhood. RIP Buck Rogers Actor Gil Gerard Dies Aged 82 https://www.ign.com/articles/buck-rogers-actor-gil-gerard-dies-aged-82

You do know Amiami has no control on what local courier your shipping method gets (unless you pick DHL and maybe EMS)? Blame your postal service instead for handing it off to Uniexpress.

Becarful purchasing form AmiAmi.... this is their "Parcel Locker" delivery attempt by a local carrier called "Uniexpress" ....

From CCS Toys? I love the paintwork on this.

If you enjoyed the past 4 mainline games FM5 will be a huge treat. More cameos to come.

Yeah, I haven't shipped mine yet so it's a bummer to see how much value it's already lost BUT, on the whole with Macross collecting, I don't regret getting preorders in... most the time it ends up being a smart move.

There was this.

Makes me wish I held off on buying it. I way overpaid after shipping and tariffs were included. This would have offset it. It's too bad that this thing is not selling well enough that it's already on a massive discount. Engineering wise, I really like it and it's my first Bandai with only a minor QC issue in many years. Everything I've gotten from them from around 2019 or so has been really bad as far as QC goes.

Hi sir, did they announce this will be available in April? I did see some website stating that the release date was April but wasnt sure

Patience, my friend. All will be revealed with Blast-Off, the final figure in this review series.

Does Magic Square's Bruticus come with a cartoon accurate chest plate?

Well, it's only around a $20 difference 😅... what I'm more glad about is that I got this updated version, brand new, with what I feel are significant improvements to the figure.

Bib Fortuna variants

started playing Front Mission 5 last night. I saw a cameo

It's a rare thing to wind up paying less down the line. With the auctions "that got away" from me or where I didn't put a bid in, I generally wound up paying MORE later on. Glad it worked out for you!

Another day, another Combaticon. We're up to MB-06 Tornado, which would be their Vortex. Huh... Are we going to have a repeat of yesterday? If Onslaught was MMC's most-compromised Combaticon, Vortex was probably the runner up. His torso was narrower at the top and widened toward his waist, which is kind of the opposite of the animation model, his feet were like little vestigial stubs, and in a set that was pushing cartoon accuracy, he didn't even have the little nacelles on his shoulders. And once again, Magic Square has sauntered up to the party and dropped a figure that's almost too cartoon-accurate. I mean, the proportions are basically spot on, the landing gear is sticking off his hips in the correct fashion, and they've even managed to replace helicopter details on his shins with the cartoon's vertical black stripes. And, just like the other three, Tornado comes off clean, with no kibble that isn't supposed to be there. And man, that's just how good Tornado comes off next to MMC's Vortex, which was a revelation for me at the time. Unique Toys looks like they took the cartoon design and made it busier and bulkier. And Zeta's just looks like they took the G1 toy's torso and started stacking kibble on him until his limbs were more folded alt mode panels than actual body parts. Aside from the little arm guns, which are attached out of the box but do come off and get partsformed for alt mode, Tornado comes with his gun. He also comes with a big chunk of the upper body for the combined mode. One kind of wonders why this bit didn't come with Night Tracer and the chest shield already attached, and why Tornado doesn't come with a hand, but we've still got one to go, right? Once again, Magic Square doesn't dissappoint in the articulation department. Tornado's head is on a hinged swivel that can tilt down until his chin touches his chest and up a full 90 degrees. His shoulders rotate and move laterally 90 degrees. His biceps swivel, and his double-jointed elbows bend a total of 180 degrees. His wrists swivel and bend back, and his got individual fingers with ball joints at the base for swiveling and folding of the palm (thumb) or curling and splaying (fingers), plus one additional pinned hinge per digit. His waist swivels, and though he doesn't have the double hinge that the other three and therefore can't do a back bend, he still has one hinge that gives him 90 degrees of ab crunch. He's got the drop down hips, which can go about 90 degrees laterally and 45 degrees backward, but nearly 180 degrees forward. Tornado can axe kick Munitioner and Heavy Gunner in the face if he wants to. His thighs swivel, and his double-jointed knees can get around 140 degrees of bend. No up/down foot tilt, and unlike the other three he kind of doesn't have a full ankle pivot. The front of his feet do have a hinge that gives him 90 degrees of faux pivot, though. By now, you can probably guess that Tornado's gun has a small tab on the handle, and that the tab fits into a slot on either palm. The connection seems a bit better than on Munitioner or Heavy Gunner, though. It's kind of interesting that Magic Square and MMC both hit on the same idea... if the animation model gives Vortex round forearms, why not make them the engine nacelles instead of the tail, and stuff the tail into his torso instead? What's surprising is that converting the waist up into the back half of the helicopter is actually easier on Tornado, as I continue to find the clearance issues on MMC's frustrating. I've owned him for years, and I still don't think I've ever transformed him without the head coming off. Turning the robot from the waist down into the front of the helicopter is another story. Yeah, MMC's Vortex is probably my least favorite all-built-in limb to transform, but Tornado's got plenty of Magic Square's usual splaying the leg apart like a flower petal opening at the knees, then flipping and turning panels until they're basically inside out. It's the sort of thing where, even after you've done it once or twice, you still find yourself scratching your head and saying, "wait, how did this go again?". But hey, at least he's not a borderline shellformer like Zeta. So, subjectively, I might argue that MMC's Vortex is a much more realistic Kaman SH-2 Sea Sprite, and therefore better (Zeta and UT went for more realistic helicopters, too, but they seem to have gone for the wrong ones, namely a Sikorsky HH-53 Pave Low and a Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk, respectively). Objectively, we have to talk about cartoon accuracy again. Tornado's got that rounded face, something almost halfway between Vortex's lumpy G1 toy and the almost too-round cartoon. He's got the single window that wraps around the front, with the quartet of windows on either side. He's got the two nacelles just chilling on either side, with the additional intake above the cockpit. Most impressively, he's got the guns on his tail boom, but they're sticking out on little winglets. MMC, Unique Toys, and even Hasbro all included those little guns but put them right up against the tail. And if you look at his control art, it almost looks like that's how they're supposed to be. But that's just the angle of the control art; if you actually bother to watch scenes of Vortex in the cartoon then sure enough those guns are set on winglets that actually give them the clearance to fire around the crew area. This makes Tornado inarguably the most cartoon-accurate helicopter. I'll note that he's not perfect, though. The nacelles on the sides are formed from Tornado's forearms, which begged the question; what to do with the nacelles on his shoulders? Well, they flip over the shoulders and you wind up with two additional exhausts behind and between the engines. To be clear, I don't hate them; Vortex' animation model does have that extra intake over the cockpit that Tornado managed to capture, plus they half cover a gap in the tail boom. That said, they're not cartoon accurate. You may have already noticed that there is another landing gear that folds out of the tail. You might also have noticed the barrel of his gun sticking out of the nose is a most cartoon-accurate fashion. In fact, part of the reason it's so much more cartoon accurate than MMC's is because instead of sticking the entire gun into the nose it really is just the barrel. So... what do you do with the rest of it? Magic Square doesn't really say. The handle does fold in, leaving the same sort of peg that the others have used to mount their guns to their alt modes, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere on the helicopter to plug it in to. Perhaps, when we combine everything, there'll be a place on the gestalt body, kind of like how on MMC's Vortex's gun actually plugs into Onslaught. For now, though, if you split the tail boom, unhook the arms, and fold them and his head down you'll notice a cavity where the tail resided when it was in his torso. Nothing really fills that cavity in helicopter mode, so you can kind of stuff the rest of the gun in there and close him back up. It'll rattle, as it's just loose in there, but it can't fall out unless you open him back up. So that's something, I guess. Although I do like the realistic alt mode on MMC's Vortex, MMC's Vortex has always been my least favorite of MMC's combiner figures. Yeah, I like him even less than their Onslaught. So I have no qualms about handing the "best Vortex" crown to Tornado. He looks better and poses better in robot mode, and while the transformation has its annoyances, frankly, so does MMC's, so at best they'd tie there. And subjective preferences for realism aside, Tornado's helicopter mode is more cartoon accurate. End of the day, this is yet another strong effort from Magic Square with just one more team member to go.

But what time?