MKT

Is this the first time Risa Ebata illustrating valks? Looks good!

Agreed.. the wheels also look weird sitting so far out instead closer to the body. But this pic now brings to mind yet another issue.. Earlier I was rueing Moshow didn't make parts like the arm pieces and hip armors connected (to the backpack) in Ride-Armor mode with option for the joints to be detachable for articulation even if the transformation scheme is parts-forming. The additional issue I'm just realising now is that having every part connected really sells the real robot/mecha idea of what the Ride-Armor is supposed to be - an exoskeleton or powered suit that helps & enhances the wearer's abilities. That's the core fantasy of a powered suit, and I had some kicks how after so many years of seeing it debuting in Mospeada and BGC, we are now seeing real-life implementations of them being in used in certain industries today to augment the wearer mostly in physical tasks. Once the bike pieces are separated and individually worn on their own like the pic above, they now appear to encumber the wearer instead. So Stick / Scott looks like he's carrying this ginormous weight on his back and might as well be strapping dumbbells on his forearms going into battle. The only thing that can bring this back to making some sense in this head canon, is that in Moshow's alternate universe Scott isn't wearing individual body armor pieces in his base suit (without the bike), but instead first wearing a complete head to toe powered base suit like Iron Man, to which the bike parts attach to in full Ride-Armor mode. So the red segments, which are cloth in the original show, are now imagined to be metal and the toy's aesthetics actually aligns with this. Likewise the pistons at the legs would be easier to make sense of if he is first wearing a full body powered suit, and the other little touches that Moshow did such as moving panels on the base suit to receive the bike parts feel as cool as they look.

Eh so even the base white color's painted? I was under impression earlier it has some sort of clear coat on top of white-molded plastic, but if the whites are painted then it would be good news for longevity against yellowing.

Couple more images. Earlier on we speculated that the Legioss forearm slots are possibly where the Tread pegs on to, but looks like that is not the case now.. Are those slots now redundant?

Meanwhile, a nice in-hand video on Moshow's Cyclone. It weights in at a pretty hefty 1.2kg, but the good thing is it’s able to stand on its own in Ride-Armor mode. And though its parts-forming, each part have additional transformation steps on its own to go from one mode to other. I guess I’m starting to come around to the parts-forming, & the size really gonna have presence. It’s even cheaper than USD180 in Asia. For eg, in Singapore: https://www.tfh.com.sg/product-details.php?p=40337

Finally!!!

Looking more at Fighter mode, they have somehow managed to take a sleek jet form and turned into kibble-mess under a jet silhouette - like TF toys.

The third elbow joint must have been glued in place, seeing how no one is able to unlock it so far. It's an intentional change by Threezero from the initial promo images, and the biggest clue of this change is when the promo pics of Roy's 1S, put out just before the 1J's release, also show that joint being locked. I feel this sentence kinda sums up the 1J, based on all the impressions, reviews & videos so far. The Yamcadia v2 is a solid toy because what it has, it does them well and the shortcomings are more of what it doesn't have. There's really no complaint on what already exists on the toy, we just wish they implement something more after so many years. For the Bandai DX, it has very nice improvements to the Yamcadia v2, but also went backwards on some stuff. Sort of 2 steps forward, half step back. Threezero has more little compromises than the DX, but remains to be seen if the positives outweighs the negatives and to me they only manage to be so by a small margin. And at this price point, it seems to be just right given what it is. But I'll reserve final judgement until actually get it in hand.

Here we have the biggest Cyclone / Ride-Armor ever made, has all sorts of added surface details to take advantage of the size, and it's a complete parts-former that would be much more acceptable in tiny renditions like the B2 Fives. I get that it now frees up articulation, but I wonder if they could have at least make those forearm armor & hip pieces connected with option to make them detachable for added articulation, something like the DX VF-1 waist bar. It can certainly be engineered for this size. Knowing myself, I'll probably get it eventually for the novelty factor given the price vs size & Moshow's quality factor. It's just leaving a bit of sour taste at the moment, and I'll wait a bit for it to go away lol. Looking closer at the size now, the question mark now is whether it is really 1/10 as what has been bandied about previously or if the published 29cm total height is correct. Either one is true but it can't be 1/10 and 29cm at same time.

3D rendered video, but the bigger issue and disappointingly, its a partsformer! Really didn't see that coming, and feel quite blindsided by it.

There are 1/100 VF-25 from the VF100 line: https://anymoon.com/blog/?p=2927#more-2927 They are crazy partsforming galore, but make for decent display pieces with other 1/100.

The Yamato is the correct 1/100 scale, and if not mistaken Bandai's VB-6 is undersized towards 1/110. But the thing is, the whole HMR line fudges on scale anyway. They are technically non-scale, so we are seeing them to be sort of +/- 10% of 1/100 across the releases. Myself am not so particular about scale to a tee, as long as they are in ballpark and still manage to look great together. But as @Chronocidal has also pointed out, Bandai's VB-6 is much better put together compared to Yamato's and is the much better toy. Ok look forward to your reviews. I thought it's also appropriate to post this GIF again, courtesy of @no3Ljm haha.

The Yamato VF-19F & S were among my first handful of valk acquisitions, and over the years I give increasingly more respect to what Yamato did with this mold. Yamato has really set the standard for the VF-19, and the fact that this mold still stands up more than a decade later in HMR form is just a testament to how right they got it in the first place. That said, I'm not too enthusiastic about the F/S wing design - the stubbiness of them just looks kinda weird for a jet, but everything else is lovely and that blue is the perfect shade in my eyes. Congratulations, and there has never been a better time to start collecting HMR. The HMR VF-1, which is a nice mold by itself, always felt slightly lacking in comparison to its larger cousins and really needed the Destroids & enemy mechas to lift it up. But these newer HMR molds that Bandai have been pushing out recently are really killing it, and there are aspects of them that I do like better than the larger 1/60s.

Congratulations, and next purchase could be the VF-0D. I feel it is different enough from the 0S / 0A to be its own thing and that Fighter mode is just yummy. Bandai did make a VB-6, in fact 3 of them. And they are near HMR scale. https://anymoon.com/blog/?p=4194#more-4194

Yeah for a long time I thought faces on valks were pretty weird, and what’s more jarring was the MAXL - boobs on valks too?! Is this Transformers or Macross lol. But eventually I came to accept their aesthetics, in the same way of closing an eye on piloting a valk with guitar controls. The Fire Valk do come with a masked faceplate to hide its mouth, & I always imagined I’ll be using that for Battroid display, but since the face is a defining feature on top of the searing Ronald McDonald scheme, I might as well embrace it.. It just dawned on me that if I’m not wrong, Mac 7 has the most variety of valks in any Macross series, so it’ll be a shame if Bandai stops at just the VF-19 molds..

Not too worried yet about the plummeting price as far as affecting future releases. The VF-0S also dropped quite bit, and though it wasn't as fast as the Fire Valk, it never recovered throughout this period and Bandai continued to give us the 0D & 0A. But then again, Bandai has dropped lines for less reasons, so we are back to them being unpredictable..

I would avoid the old HM VF-19S, unless one really likes the color, sculpt and need it now, or for collection completists. The current HMR VF-19 Kai's mold is far superior every way in quality & engineering. Nevertheless, even if other HMR VF-19 are easy repaints with minimal new parts, Bandai is just so unpredictable with their pattern of Macross releases these days that we don't put much high hopes anymore on what's coming next. The VF-19 (and by extension the YF-19) has one of the most ingenious transformation schemes of any valk, and the HMR Fire Valk beautifully captures it in physical form. Plus, it is now sitting firmly below MSRP, so it's great buy.

When I think about head lasers on the HMRs, I'm now reminded that the VF-2SS didn't need swappable ones. They are on proper ball joints to angle whichever way appropriate for its mode like a lot of the larger valk toys. The VF-2SS is bit of an outlier; it shows that HMR can be more PT than they currently are with the ball-jointed head lasers and properly hinged cockpit canopy, but Bandai then decided to make certain elements part-swapping on purpose for all valks after that.

I hope Bandai does more cash grab by revisiting the 31A Kairos mold.

^^^ Sorry to hear the metal hook at the hip joint broke, but glad to hear it didn't affect its articulation. I'm just thankful Bandai had the sense to make the hip housings to be metal, otherwise if they were plastic there would be many a broken or sheared housings due to the force needed to rotate them. When I got to the head, I was impressed by how the head spike & lasers can be moved and hidden out of the way in Fighter, and even more impressed how the surrounding covers & flaps cleanly hide them (In the HM, the spike and lasers have to be removed & stored away elsewhere). For the 1/60, I've only ever handled the Blazer valks with their head lasers sticking out in Fighter like any other valk, and so now I believe the Fire Valk is the only valk that's able to hide all its multiple head pointy bits in Fighter. The way it does so is pretty elegant and is yet another reason why Macross transformation design, translated properly into toys is just so satisfactory. Oh and the blue cockpit canopy looks much better than the yellow tinted one of Arcadia's.

Great set-up as well.

Awesome!! As much as the Detolf's were by far the most value vs display volume, the display possibilities expand so much more with wide shelves.

Unboxed the VF-19 Kai, so just some impressions: First thing I noticed after pulling out the trays, is that the schematic drawing sheet is now silver instead of black. Coupled with the high gloss surface, the white lines want to blend into the background and are near illegible. Tried my best to capture on pic, but there's just so much glare obscuring parts of it lol. On to the valk itself, I messed about with it in its default Battroid mode for a while, before taking it straight to Fighter to see how it compares against its predecessor the HM Fire Valk that came out years ago. 1. The forearms are on metal sliders, just like Arcadia's. When sliding them back and forth, I noticed the left forearm is much looser than the right. This possibly afflicts all copies as I'm seeing lots of comments on this in FB groups. Fortunately, it doesn't become an issue in any modes, because there is stopper mechanism to hold the forearm in place when retracted for Battroid / Gerwalk, and when fully extended for Fighter the forearms do get held in place by the shin cutouts & shield. 2. The diecast on diecast articulation points are really tight. For example, the double-jointed elbows takes more force than necessary to bend them. However, by far the most frustrating aspect of this are the hip joints. These are CRAZY tight, as in, they are tight on the level of Sentinel's first issue Legioss ETA's shoulders & knees. Trying to rotate the hips back & forth independent of moving the swing bar is akin to.. trying to tear a raw chicken drumstick off its thigh, to give a crude example. On my copy, the right hip is even tighter than the left, and when transforming it to Fighter, I could not rotate the final 5% to its appropriate position. As that piece forms a chunk of the lerx which would be quite out of alignment if I left it alone, I had to open up the hip to see what was going on inside (didn't take pics though). Luckily the assembly of the hip housing around the diecast joint is a simple affair, with the hip housing being 2 halves held by a single screw, and just lubricating the diecast joint inside immediately solved the stiffness and unlocked the final 5% movement range I needed. I'll likely open up the other hip later to lubricate it so I won't get so much grief next time. 3. Opening the hip housing made me realize the housing is actually diecast (nice!), and I could not tell that before as the paint match between it and the surrounding plastics is near, if not 100%. During the course of transformation, I found the whole back / spine piece is also diecast, just like Arcadia's (DX is still plastic), and also excellently paint matched. As far as I could tell, all the reds between various parts matches well to each other to a single shade of red, unlike the old HM where there are noticeably about 3 different shades. 4. Nevertheless, the reds & yellows of the HMR and HM are very close down to the matte finish, that it's little doubt Bandai intended it to be such so the HM Soundbooster can be nicely paired to the HMR valk. I'll bring it back to Battroid again later and mount the old Soundbooster to it. 5. Other than the hips, transformation to Fighter is a pleasure and just like the HMR VF-0 mold, everything comes together so precisely that it feels even tighter than its larger 1/60 sibling in this mode, exactly like the HMR VF-0 mold vs Arcadia's. Just rock solid Fighter mode that makes handling & swooshing great fun. The old HM on other hand, doesn't hold a candle in engineering & tolerances and really shows its age now. Still, I do prefer the HM's sculpt in Fighter for reasons @Chronocidal have well explained in an earlier post. 6. Unlike the HMR VF-0, which just feels ever so slightly out of tolerance, the landing gear doors here are very nicely flushed when closed. About the only fault I see so far in Fighter is the action of opening the rear bay doors - the doors pop off entirely too easily from their hinges, and it happened on both sides for me. They can snap back in, but it is a minor irritation. The gears themselves plug in more easily than the VF-0 due to the shallower depth, but what's up with the rear gears having comically thick posts? Ultimately, I won't be displaying this in Fighter (the HM will do that) and will have it in Battroid, where the sculpt truly shines. Thigh fillers ala the 1/60 actually fits the semi-partsforming nature of the HMR better, so the lack of it here is a small bummer. But all in, I'm quite happy with the HMR Fire Valk, and hope Bandai produces more Mac 7 valks in this line.