Chronocidal

I'm much more interested in those than the Fire Valk.. so we'll see if Bandai actually bothers to follow through on completing the rest of the main valks. I guess it's fortunate that the VF-19P can just use the same mold, since that's probably the one I'm most interested in overall, but I really want to see how Bandai's overall shape compares with the Blazers. So far from what I'm seeing, I'm liking what the different nose and intake profile are doing for the fighter mode.

Yeah, there was never a loadout in the animation, but it makes sense,. The hardpoints are built into the structure of the wing, and who knows if they might be used for tanks as well, so it wouldn't make any sense to remove them. Also, I'm looking forward to filling up a VF-19P with weapons from the other releases. ... Someday...

These are just so ridiculously similar, I'm really looking forward to doing a comparison. Went ahead and asked AE to ship mine, along with an HMR VF-19P, so hopefully it won't get hung up due to the usual DHL shenanigans.

Yeah, it looks like everyone is somehow just completely missing all of the ways to get it aligned better. I'm not sure what to think there.

I think you could maybe say that about some of the MCU releases, but as bad as some of those got, I don't know if they actually sank to the level RoS dug to.

Probably more that they just completely missed this part. Whether that will look any better is still up for grabs though, since it's just dropping the pod even lower. Plus, Bandai didn't make the lower fin under the barrel retract like Yamato's version did. But hey, not even Bandai could remember to unfold that gunpod for some of the poses in the instructions.

Yeah, so, I'm not trusting that example. That's not being pushed down by the crotch plate, it's not even touching when you view it from the front. I think that's mostly just user error not understanding how to mount the gun so it doesn't drag. Not to take all of the blame away from Bandai though, the real problem (on this and the YF-19) is that they expected a nearly vertical grip mounting point to somehow support an angled grip without the gun also tilting downward the same amount. The whole issue for both versions could have been fixed if they just.. you know.. planned. It does look like they've attempted to address this with the Fire Valk, by making the gunpod handle rotate, but we'll have to wait and see how effective it is. That display though.. that honestly looks like they purposefully mounted it as droopy as physically possible. And I'm not one to explicitly trust Bandai not to lie with its pictures, but the single picture in the instructions showing the mounted gunpod puts it at no worse a position than the YF-19 or Yamato version. Over time, I've managed to get my DX YF-19s to display it very nearly level. Honestly, the main issue? It's that blasted connection they added so the shield locks into the torso. I hate to say this, but just like MOST of their Macross products, Bandai is absolutely terrible at understanding the necessary tolerances for the parts they design themselves, and how they have to fit together. They have never understood the complexities of how to get arms and legs to mesh well in that configuration. There's never enough room for the parts they design to fit the way they're intended, and it just leads to everything being off-kilter. In the case of the YF-19, they incorrectly toleranced the distance the arms need to attach to the shield and have it lock in correctly on the rear of the fighter. What that means is that the when the shield is attached, it rotates the lower arms upward, because the shield is pulling forward on the upper surface. That, in turn, means the gunpod is forever pointed downward. It's really easy to fix though. Detach the shield, and the arms and gunpod line up perfectly fine. All you would really need to do is lengthen the shield a few millimeters, and the issue would be gone. In the YF-19's case, you know what I did? I yanked out the attached neck cover. Leaving that structure out allows the shield to flex a bit more, letting the arms settle into a level position, and leveling the gunpod completely (you know.. aside from the bent barrel, because they still mounted an angled grip in a vertical arm slot ). I don't know if the shield on the Fire Valk is attached in the same way, and I doubt it can be, because of the shoulder flaps, but the way to get the gunpod level is probably going to depend on slightly detaching the shield from the arms to let the arms sag a little, and drop the rear of the gunpod lower.

Yeah, that's just the natural impact of the insane hip joint Bandai developed. It gives a pretty good range of motion, but holy cow does the entire mechanism of the hips scare me from all the tiny parts. Edit; Also, as a preemptive safety measure, you may want to loosen the screws in the hip joints for ease of use. The YF-19s always came insanely tight, and I know of at least a couple instances where it led to the plastic parts breaking around the screws. I can only hope that the mechanism is similar enough to be able to loosen it the same way this time around.

I like the idea, but I don't think any re-write of the connective tissue between 7 and 9 could ever actually make either of those movies work in a "cohesive" way in the first place. Nothing about the setting of the sequels works from the foundations upward, so you can't really rebuild anything without nuking it to bedrock level first. I can't disagree that there was potential in some of the ideas they explored, but it was all built on nonsense that falls apart if you think about any aspect of it for more than 5 seconds.

Yeah, it's painfully obvious how much HLJ is overcharging on this. Just straight up 30%. To ship just the VF-19 with FedEx would total about $130, with a rough breakdown of $50 actual shipping, $75 duties, and $5 extra handling whatever. I've got until April to ship it, so it's staying there for the foreseeable future. I'll see how much AE wants to charge me to ship it along with my HMR VF-19P, but I am still not keen on using DHL for anything.

Just got one copy dropped into my HLJ warehouse, so it gets to sit there for a while while they sort out shipping.

Same for the intakes, but those shoulder panels were always intended to be behind the shoulders, so it'd just be going directly against the original animation. Interesting though, the new photos just make it even more clear that there was some intensive retouching of those early product previews. The panels divisions are all clearly visible in the instruction manual, when they looked almost completely scrubbed out on the product site. I kind of wish they had managed this sort of neck cover on the YF-19, but I'm not sure yet whether I like the collar sticking up behind the head. Hopefully it can stow deeper than their preview images have shown.

I mean, there's probably no reason they couldn't use those holes to help anchor the sound booster, but judging by the HMR (and the Yamato VF-19s for that matter) the holes aren't in the right spot for the VF-19P fins anyhow. I am hoping the final product isn't so sloppily painted though. I guess they wanted those spots to look like thrusters or something, but they couldn't even get the holes painted black around the inside.

Will give them credit, I think I do like the proportions of this one's nose section better than the Yamarcadia (better shape of the neck/LEX, and it makes the nose look longer), but this thing looks like a genuine frankenvalk. There is so much Yamarcadia DNA here, I don't know what to properly call it. So much of this looks directly copied, it's kind of insane. The landing gear look straight up identical (minus the paint, of course ). I think they did a bit better with the knee extension, but then again, the Yamarcadia didn't really need the sliding covers for the Fire Valk, just the YF-19. Bring on the Yamcadai DX! Though, moreso, bring on the rest of the VF-19 series. I'm still waiting for someone to make a white and black VF-19F.

Honestly, it's probably more about the licensing, like so many other things currently driving the franchise. They seem to be prioritizing designs they can freely sell to anyone, rather than just the local fanbase. Or from a different angle, they might not be able to get the licenses to make those specific characters. We haven't seen anything from the other pre-Frontier series either, I think. I still want an actual Sheryl valk though.

Honestly.. if we're going with Palpatine surviving, there's no reason Ben didn't. After all, he just fell over and disappeared. Not like he was dropped down a hole into a reactor that exploded, or anything.

Boy I hope Jazwares reconsiders their packaging for the Tie Defenders in the future. Good thing I picked up a pair. I was only able to pull together three (mostly) un-warped wing panels between the two. Seriously, those plastic molds had a death grip on the ships, I had to cut them out with my sprue clippers.

Dunno if this is on anyone's radar, but apparently MR got the molds to the old Diamond Select phaser and communicator. Not sure whether it's missing any major functions, but I was not expecting the price to be anything this reasonable, and I just decided to order one on impulse. https://www.masterreplicas.com/collections/star-trek/products/star-trek-phaser-type-2-2266-69

Yeah, it's kind of a natural progression to the active camo/paint they had in Delta. I don't think we saw anything like it in Frontier on a valk (unless you want to count Battle Galaxy ), but they obviously can project holograms over pretty much anything they like at this point.

Yeah, I had varying levels of leg lock on the couple I got, and it was never consistent. The tabs were pretty shallow, and it wasn't hard to knock the legs loose on any of mine. For all its failures, that is one thing I don't think the 171 ever had issues with. I can't say I ever had the issues with the Yamato 17s' feet that I did with the VF-19s', but I also had even less desire to display a 17 in gerwalk than I did the 19s. Mine seemed to hold up well-enough in battroid, but I never displayed them that way for more than a few minutes at a time. I'm probably a bad judge of 17-related stuff in general, I was just happy to get a solid fighter mode to display. Yeah, fair, I guess I was never a big enough fan of the 17 for the issues with the Yamato one to bother me? I thought it looked good enough, but it did have the same kind of weird backpack issue that the DX YF-21 has. It was always one of those designs so firmly planted in the "impossible anime magic" category that it was never going to really look like the animation. What I guess is kind of funny to consider.. have you looked at the old Bandai 1/65 versions? They were far more limited in articulation and features, but I'm starting to think they got some things right that neither of the more modern takes have figured out.

Yeah, the general availability of this one speaks volumes. Though I do suspect it's kind of a perfect storm of disinterest. Bad representation of a design that already had low international appeal, just due to the weirdness of the show it came from. Basically, anyone who really wanted one probably got the Yamato when it was new, and was happy with it. But since that point in time, there's really been nothing to make any new fans of the design. The Fire Valk at least has overlap with the YF-19, which is just eternally popular, but the VF-17 doesn't have that. Sadly, Bandai is chasing the international dollar with a design that has no real demand locally or abroad, rather than making stuff for their primary market that everyone wants, and would still jump through the financial hoops to get it.

I think the trick to this is that, if you didn't have to stick the gunpods to the outside of the YF-21's belly plates, you could absolutely just make a small bulge like the Yamato VF-22s had, and it would look much better than their actual gunpods. Yamato didn't attempt that internal mount either, it's just not physically possible. At least with the VF-17, you can just leave the gunpod off, and pretend it's internal.. but then again, you're still missing the actual gunport on the leg, which I'm fairly certain Bandai couldn't be bothered to even paint on. Which.. yeah, that's another ten pounds of $#!7 on this dumpsterfire. Even ignoring the proportional differences, the 17 and 171 share almost no panel detail whatsoever, and the 171 is covered in micro-missile launchers that the 17 never had. I think the absolute best case you could ever make for this thing? It looks like a halfway point between the 17 and 171, as if it was a test model for the upgrade process. Which.. ok, yeah, I could buy that, planes go through those sorts of mid-lifecycle upgrades all the time. Still, I absolutely recognize that it's just my coping mechanism to explain away things that don't make any sense in-universe. I kind of came to appreciate the "Strange New Worlds" Enterprise in the same way, since, if I ignore any actual adherence to any timeline at all, it looks like a mid-point between the TOS and TMP versions. I can appreciate the design and its theoretical lineage, even if it's completely outside the bounds of the canon.

I'm just waiting around for them to get to more of the Batwing designs, personally. I never really cared for any of the designs past the classic 89, which they nailed pretty well. I'd really love to see a Forever or TAS Batwing in the same rough scale as that newer Forever Batmobile though. Shame they couldn't make the 89 Batwing to the same standard though. It really needs a redesign to bulk up the body and streamline the cockpit, probably using something closer to the UCS A-Wing, or even the old TV Batmobile canopies.

Judging by the package contents, it looked like Bandai actually included two separate sets of shoulders with the fins in both positions, rather than make them move. I'm not going to pretend it makes any sense, but Bandai certainly aren't known for trying that hard either.