eugimon

I don't know... the yamato green looks pretty spot on in the middle picture you put up. I wonder if the LED will make the entire clear cone glow red like it is in the anime?

I voted for could have been worse/better... but only because there wasn't an option for: great design/sloppy execution. As it is, I'm very satisfied with my YF-19. I don't mind the small things too much and I think the 1/60 blows the 1/72 version right out of the air.

yeah, I'm sure there's a neck joint... it's such an obvious joint to have and will do a lot for posability when the figure is on the bike.

Hmmm... looks fine all transformed.. but the bike by itself just looks weird. the back part of the book looks all squashed in.

Sorry Graham, I have to go with David on this one. When I placed my pre-order for the YF-19, I didn't KNOW that the gunpod would be crooked, that the rear landing gear was going to be half assed and I especially didn't know that there would be a fast pack gift set sold later on. This is why I won't buy a first release yamato product ever again.. they don't give us information to make an informed decision.. and lately, I feel like I've been left holding the bag. It's great that yamato will send out free replacement garlands.. but who cares if they all have busted shoulders? It's great that yamato is replacing the VF-0 shoulders, but FRAK! they shouldn't have to replace those shoulders in the first place. And yes, goodie that yamato is going to fix the flaws on the yf-19 for the next release (unlike toynami who just kept releasing one crap alpha after another) but again.. when I paid for mine, I expected a finished toy... not one that I would have to dismantle and drill or glue bits of plastic on. This isn't like the back pack hinges on the /148s... or those people who complained about yamato not releasing every head variant with the 1/48s. I love my 1/48s... but I love them because they were good to go right out of the box. yes yes, there were crooked skulls and yes they made improvements on the design.. but those were IMPROVEMENTS not fixes to design frak ups. Now, maybe to some, a crooked gunpod and the landing gear aren't a big deal.. they aren't to me... in fact, I think the fuselage thing is being played out of proportion...And I'm not mad or complaining about the high price point on the YF-19 either... yamato can charge what they want to charge and we as consumers decide to pay it or not. Including these fast packs, whatever. I won't buy the stand alone set, but maybe I'll pick up a bundle later on... But after the the garland and then after the VF-0... I don't have patience anymore with yamato. Get it right the first time and people won't complain. And until they do get it right, I'm going to stand up for MY right as a consumer, when I pay full price for a brand new item, it should be free of manufacturer goofs.

while I wouldn't mind seeing a humans vs supervision army storyline.. I'm not interested in seeing some remnant protoculture colony dragged out... the whole uber advanced progenitor race thing works better as a mystery, imo. especially when kawamori seems intent on making the protoculture not just an uber progenitor race, but an uber mystical power progenitor race... which I can deal with in small doses... but I really would rather avoid spirita, giant space monsters and flying rocks from here on out.

longer for me, I'll wait for the fixed bundled version. but then again, if they get all the bugs worked out, I should have put away enough for 2...

some people have been saying that the high yamato prices are not the fault of yamato but due to retailers marking the products up... while it is certainly true that retailers are middle men and do mark up prices, how do you know that yamato didn't the raise the wholesale prices first?

drifand, I was totally thinking the same thing... the only other company that I felt I was burned for being an early adopter has been apple. I no longer trust a first release of any apple product! And I grew disgruntled with the 20% apple premium a long long time ago. As for yamato... well, I said it in a previous post... the past three yamato releases: garland, vf-0 and yf-19 have turned me from enthusiast to consumer. I'm not willing to be an apologist for them anymore. When I spend 200+ dollars on something, I fully expect that it won't fall apart simply because some exec at yamato decided that they would be cheap and use inferior plastics or couldn't be bothered to inspect a production sample for QC errors. I'll wait and see how the SV-51 turns out. I'm not bothering to pre-order this thing at all. No more 1st releases for me.. not when I have every reason to expect it to have design flaws, to be addressed in the next release and that will have over priced stand alone accessories that would have been cheaper if I waited until the gift bundle. Graham, I'm sorry you think we're being overly critical and negative. But right now, I have some 800 dollars woth of busted yamato toys sitting in my closet and it looks like i'll have to spend more money just to fix them. This isn't stuff that broke because I'm so clumsy american who can't be bothered to read the manual.. this is stuff that just shattered on me because of poor design or poor materials choice.

hah! I actually think the toynami cyclone looks pretty decent. I'm still not getting a first release though

uhm... so alan lee is the guy who illustrated the centenary edition of the lord of the rings and the hobbit and has pretty much created the visual look of middle earth for the past 20 years... he's pretty well regarded... he was approved by the Tolkein estate before they let him illustrate the novels... so maybe he knows a little bit about middle earth.

just because option A isn't good doesn't make option B good by default.

oh zing! good one!

bah, toynami can't even see "there" from where they are. my alpha has pretty much every yamato goof all rolled into one little floppy blue POS.

bwahahahahaha.

I'm actually not angry about it.. so if you're imagining me sitting around and fuming, sorry... I had more of a smirk going when I wrote that post. but I DO want the shin/ghost pack.. I bought extras of the initial 0s just so that I could display it with the ghost pack, actually. I just feel cheesed about how many little issues the VF-0s has... and the shoulder breaking and then the whole no shin type, oh wait, here it is! thing. I'll probably end up getting it anyways and have to eat crow.

my mp convoy was from the first run.. not this recent crap reissue.. but yeah... mine had issues. the right chest door doesn't lock in bot mode, there was chrome paint spilled on the roof and I don't remember where the stress marks were but I remember thinking, WTF??? and given it's ankles aren't tight neough resulting in a convoy that sways with the breeze... I left him in cab mode and eventually boxed him up. lucking the chrome paint chipped right off easily enough. and with SS... pretty much all of the joints associated with the wings are showing stress marks... some joints even have panel lines running right through where the "c" part of the joint matches with the rest of the body. the color and hip kibble, I don't mind. I actually like the hip kibble over leg kibble.. but fearing that the wings are going to snap off because somebody scored the freaking joint is ridiculous. IMO, worse than yamato's brittle plastic... an engineer should just know better than to score a stress bearing surface.

Hmmm, the image that sticks most in my mind is of the shot of stick flying off, leaving earth. I don't have a screen grab of it but I'm pretty sure this image from robotech.com is taken from that scene (refering to the bottom image, of course) compared to: this is how I remembered the alpha/beta combo and I guess thats what I was expecting.

hmmm, that would disqualify takara given how poorly I received my MP convoy (stress marks and spilled chrome paint on the cab right out of the box) and the MP SS (more stress marks in this one toy than in all my 1/48's combined.)

congrats! At 11lbs, your baby was almost exactly 2x the birth weight of mine... !

I would like to finally get a low viz 1a. Came close a few times but always backed out for one reason or another. I'd also like the 1/48 super max. I have the miria, so I guess I'd get the max just to be a completist. And yes scream-man, if I wasn't so angry about the shin VF-0, I'd get that as well.

some leeway is understandable... I don't grief over how far back the backpack sits in the GERWALK mode of the 1/48, for example... but to me, the beta/alpha link up just doesn't look like they work together.. that picture looks like a some carefully balanced an alpha on top of it. maybe it will change with the final version.

I do like the Beta design.. i think it fits in nicely with the moseada design aesthetic, namely function over form. Here's why I don't like the toynami version, at least in this incarnation: There's a big gap between the wings of the alpha and the body of the beta that isn't there in the anime. The anime version of the beta/alpha link up presents a much more uniform looking vehicle... this looks very much like the beta driver rear ended the alpha. The level of detailing on the beta looks significantly less than on the alpha. I'm looking at the chest, shoulders, arms, hands... there's just a lot of flat empty space. Which is fine, but again, when it's paired up with the alpha, the two just don't look like they belong together.

bah. yamato is teaching me to never buy a first release of theirs. Not even considering the shoddy QC, these bundles are just much more cost effective.

wow... I waited all this time for a big box with wings. If this is a final version, this is a pass for me. sigh.