Aoshima VFG

[no3Ljm]

[kajnrig]

Sorry to update just to ask, but did Aoshima ever announce a release date for their VFG Koenig Monster?

[TMBounty_Hunter]

I don't think so, but Shizuoka Hobby show is only about a month away so....

[seti88]

 

[no3Ljm]

 

[no3Ljm]

[Chronocidal]

Any idea of whether the kit comes with the original wings and tails as well?  Don't think I would use the fish for anything, and they just ruin the clean lines of the Kairos.  

[TMBounty_Hunter]

 

[Chronocidal]

I really want to see that one released, I'll probably grab two.  I don't think I've ever seen a transforming kit of that, and it looks just about as good as the Bandai toy.

[Big s]

4 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

I really want to see that one released, I'll probably grab two.  I don't think I've ever seen a transforming kit of that, and it looks just about as good as the Bandai toy.

I’m curious to see if anyone mods it into the official version without the kitty bimbo riding its back 

[TMBounty_Hunter]

 

 

 

Still no date or price

[no3Ljm]

Photos from the recent Shizuoka Hobby Show 2023.

Edited May 10, 2023 by no3Ljm

[Sanity is Optional]

On 5/10/2023 at 11:45 AM, no3Ljm said:

Photos from the recent Shizuoka Hobby Show 2023.

Good to see they're continuing actually using series characters in these after the Ranka one.

Give me Sheryl damnit! Milia would also be good!

[no3Ljm]

VF-25F RANKA Boxart.

[TMBounty_Hunter]

 

[Chronocidal]

Weird backpack split aside, that honestly just looks like you could make it into a pretty solid VB-6 model that might fully transform without many compromises for the figure.

Which is nice.. because I really don't care about the figures, I just like nice displayable size of these valks.   The fighters are pretty close to HMR-scale..-ish.

[kajnrig]

I thought they were finally using a new mold and we'd have our first muscle Girl, but on closer inspection there's a distinct lack of six pack, and the arm bands are giving the illusion of biceps. Shame. If anything warranted a big strong muscle waifu, it was this kit. Oh well. (I'm also not a fan of that face; those eyes are the most uncanny mix of vacant and hostile.)

I hope it sells well and motivates them to do more Destroid kits.

[seti88]

https://www.aoshima-bk.co.jp/special/vfg/vb6/

 

 

[Chronocidal]

Seriously, I'm sold for maybe two of those, it looks like a really solid VB-6 kit.  I do want to see how the classic destroid mode works without the figure riding it though.

[kajnrig]

3 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Seriously, I'm sold for maybe two of those, it looks like a really solid VB-6 kit.  I do want to see how the classic destroid mode works without the figure riding it though.

The linked site has tons of photos of the two halves with and without each other. Tl;dr there's a lot of empty space, fortunately the cannons can be combined with or without the Girl kit.

[Big s]

On 6/26/2023 at 10:49 AM, kajnrig said:

I hope it sells well and motivates them to do more Destroid kits.

I think they’re stick to transforming items for the line, but as a consolation that could mean a variable Glaug 

[sh9000]

I think I'm going to put a few VFG Fighters with my HMR Fighter collection.

[Chronocidal]

On 6/29/2023 at 9:38 AM, sh9000 said:

I think I'm going to put a few VFG Fighters with my HMR Fighter collection.

The VF-31s will look better than the VF-25 series I think just because the overall proportions feel better to me, but the VF-25s aren't bad at all, especially with the super packs.  The Klan version is probably the most solid super VF-25 kit that exists.

[Big s]

The flying Monster is up for preorder tonight at the usual places. Was checking out pics of it on hobbysearch and as some have pointed out it does look like it might not be too unrealistic to modify this into the official VB-6

[Chronocidal]

Thanks for the note, just grabbed a pair at HLJ for this fall.

[wmkjr]

Photos courtesy figsoku.net  at WF2023 Summer:

[Kelsain]

So, I see that the fighters are mostly about 1/100 scale. What about the figures? How tall are they on average?

[Chronocidal]

9 hours ago, Kelsain said:

So, I see that the fighters are mostly about 1/100 scale. What about the figures? How tall are they on average?

I want to say the figures are roughly the same scale as a Figma?  The Roy VF-25 figure is a little over 6 inches tall.

The fighters are a little bigger than 1/100 though, based on the 1/100 fighter mode kits.  Without comparing to the fictional length, the 1/100 is about 7.5 inches, while the VFG version is 8.5, making it about 1/88, which if I remember correctly, is almost dead on for the actual scale of the HMR VF-1s.

The fighters are a little off-scale and off-model though, since their proportions have been tweaked.  The VF-25's legs are quite a bit chunkier, while the wings look a bit stubby.

Overall, they make pretty good fighter mode kits in general, if you just want something in HMR scale.  The super VF-25G there is incredibly solid compared to the Bandai 1/72 kit.  I've also got a couple of the Kairos variants to build, including that fancy VF-1D-inspired training scheme, which I love.

[SteveTheFish]

I used to live in Shizuoka Prefecture and I taught English. The city where I worked at got a new supervisor who was over the foreign English teachers like myself and it was a case of "The Emperor's New Clothes." People were convinced that she was brilliant but she was actually pretty stupid. Her idea of proving her worth was to crap on us foreign teachers and she was gunning to get rid of me. The guys at HLJ told me that Aoshima was hiring when I talked with them at the Shizuoka Hobby Show in 2015. I interviewed for an import/export specialist position. They were looking for someone fluent in English to help break into the North American market. I interviewed for the job and was hired. Later that year they announced that they had obtained the Macross license, which covers everything Macross. I began in April 2016 working for the business department and the very first meeting the R&D guy Kaneda announced that the company would make the VFG kit. I thought, "Oh my gosh, this job is going to be so cool. Macross for the very first meeting!" I had taken a pay cut and was driving 40+ minutes each way, but I thought that it would be worth it in the end. Well, the job was crap because of the bosshole in charge of the business group. He treated everyone like crap and 8 months later I quit. It's a long story, but essentially they held my feet to the fire to increase their sales in North America but without having to cater to that market. My college degree was international business and marketing, so I sort of knew a bit about it. People in North America don't know what a Toyota Royal Crown Saloon car is, nor the name of some Japanese minesweeper that was sunk at Guadalcanal. And what's KanColle? Nobody cares about that. I pursued the license for the first two Alien movies, offered it to them, and they just gave up on it. The idea was eventually explored by Max Factory for their Moderoid series, and so they released that Ripley Power Loader model kit. My idea was to focus on the ships, APC, etc. It would help if the people running a plastic model company actually gave a crap about the hobby. Nobody in the business group built models except for me and my team lead.

Anyhow, I can't badmouth the company too much. I was one of many who quit because of that guy. I made some friends. I haven't talked to Kaneda in a long time and I haven't been to one of the trade shows since 2018. I don't know if he still works for Aoshima. The initial character designs were done by some artist who makes character designs for Capcom video games, so the initial promo art was done by him. I don't know who ended up doing the final designs though. The catgirl thing is probably Kaneda's fetish or something. I'd rather see Misa or Minmay straddling a VF-1J, but he seems to focus on the more recent stuff. If I make it to the All-Japan Hobby Show in September and see him, I'll tell him that he needs to consider it. I told him to do that back in 2016.

I bought the first VFG kit. The kind man who ran the parts department mailed me the updated ver. 1.5 parts when I showed him that I had a defective part. He was a kind man, but he's since retired. Anyhow, I never finished mine because of the stupid stickers. I will have to hand-paint some parts instead of using the stickers. It's ended up as a shelf queen. I really should get back to that model, but I'm more interested in other kits at the moment.

I really thought that it would be a dream come true to work for that model company, but in the end it turned out to be just a sales job as my input as a business analyst was disregarded constantly. One perk was that I could take home model kits to build as "research" to familiarize myself with the company's products. The dope they hired to replace me didn't know crap about plastic models, but he speaks better Japanese than I could when I worked there. That's all the short-sighted bosshole cared about. He didn't care that I knew how to make the company successful in North America. Since I couldn't speak honorific-level Japanese fluently, he treated me like crap. So, I quit. Eventually the jerk got demoted, the last I heard. One friend of mine from there went on to work at Hobby Japan, and he has me do occasional translation jobs for him.

[Convectuoso]

I just got the Kairos kit. I'm going to build it for Fighter mode only

[sh9000]

 

[SteveTheFish]

Hey, there is Kaneda! He has gray hair now. Well, apparently he is still working at Aoshima. He had a plan to produce a kit of the police spinner from Silent Mobius several years back but I imagine that plan must have been abandoned by now. I really wanna go to the All-Japan Model Hobby Show at the end of the month and see people I haven't seen in many years.

[sh9000]

[Chronocidal]

Interesting they went with the custom Walkure schemes and not the ones in the show, but maybe they're just alternates?  And half of them seem to be Kairos-based, which I can't call a bad thing.  

They actually don't look bad, I might have to grab a couple...  I just hope the tops of the fighters aren't screwed up with all the attachment ports for the little animal bits they've started including with these.

[kajnrig]

I'm happy to see these turn out so well. Are they using different molds as well? I want to say the proportions are different - slightly less moe blob, longer-limbed - from the regular VFG girls, and even from the various prototypes, but that could just be wishful thinking.

Will definitely pick up at least the Makina and Reina kits when they come out, probably the Kaname too. I agree it's odd they went with the Kairos wings for Makina and Reina and ONLY Makina and Reina, but on the other hand, it helps them stand out and emphasizes their closer connection to each other... but I'd also bet that more than that, Aoshima are banking on the more popular Kairos design to boost their appeal since the characters themselves aren't as popular as the other three. (I have no source about said popularity, just making a guess based on my gut feeling.)

IIRC the original character-coded designs these are based on were from a CG video for a Walkure concert where they were all FSW Siegfrieds with their respective J/F/C/E/S heads and all equipped with the gunpod equipment pod. (The Hasegawa Reina 31E kit does come with all the parts necessary to build it with the radome, though. Dare I hope they include that here as well?)