Bandai 1/60 DX Chogokin Macross Plus YF-21

[mechaninac]

I don't know about anyone else, to me the whole thing looks misshapen and bloated in odd places, but the most egregious of all is the entire pinched and truncated forward fuselage... it looks awful, and I highly doubt having it shot in color and with paint apps will make it look significantly better.

Bandai did a wonderful job with their interpretation of the YF-19/VF-19ADV, but their YF-21, to my eyes, is an eyesore that manages to look no better, and in some respects worse, than the old Yamato 1/72.  I'll stick with my gorgeously sleek and well proportioned (I personally prefer a deliberate emphasis on fighter mode aesthetics even if it compromises battroid) 1/60 Yamatos, thank you very much.

[Chronocidal]

It's hard to tell if they've made any changes, but the things that stuck out to me about the painted prototype still stick out as being very obviously wrong and completely off-model from the lineart, so at this point I'm just assuming that Bandai's doing their usual thing and deciding they know best.

Also.. It actually looks like it has swappable feet for battroid mode.  Where was that feature when they made the garbage feet on the YF-19?  

[lechuck]

I like it and will pick one up, and with WWM this should be a relaxing pre-order phase.

I'm glad there is a company that acknowledges YF-21 as three mode mecha in total and not just a future fantastic fighter jet with some type of half hearted bonus modes tacked on.

[Graham]

I'm hoping Bandai milk the mold and later give us a VF-22S Max and Milia 

[MKT]

So its not only the toe and heel have separate articulation, the toe has an extension feature as well. Hopefully everything won't become an over-engineered mess like the 171. 

[recon]

1 hour ago, Graham said:

I'm hoping Bandai milk the mold and later give us a VF-22S Max and Milia 

Given their history. They will milk the molds like nobody business

[Lolicon]

Sales figures will determine whether or not Bandai does any sort of mold milking. 

[lechuck]

3 hours ago, Graham said:

I'm hoping Bandai milk the mold and later give us a VF-22S Max and Milia 

Don't forget Gamlin's -22S, greenish-grey with yellow stripes for the win!

[Mog]

Still no Gerwalk pics. 🤨

[M'Kyuun]

Maybe it's the angle, but the forward fuselage looks a little foreshortened between the back of the canopy to the intakes. The forearms look a bit too skinny as well. The elbow joints are still inaccurate and kinda ugly. Overall, though, the battroid is more proportionally appealing than the Yammie with its too-skinny legs. I'm thinking any hope of their having fixed any of these or other criticisms since 2019 is false hope at this point. It does a lot of things I like, but it still has its warts. All things considered, I'm still interested.

[ValkAddict]

Does the cockpit/nose seem much shorter in fighter mode than before? Maybe it's just me.

[Shawn]

Anyone know the magazine source yet?

found: "The scans of the articles in the Figure Oh and Hobby Japan magazines dedicated to Bandai's DX Chogokin line have been published online. "

suspect it is the current issues

[PsYcHoDyNaMiX]

9 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

It's hard to tell if they've made any changes, but the things that stuck out to me about the painted prototype still stick out as being very obviously wrong and completely off-model from the lineart, so at this point I'm just assuming that Bandai's doing their usual thing and deciding they know best.

Also.. It actually looks like it has swappable feet for battroid mode.  Where was that feature when they made the garbage feet on the YF-19?  

It looks like the bottom half of the front foot might slide forward and backwards to accommodate the transformation. 

 

nvm it was mentioned already lol 😅

Edited September 23, 2023 by PsYcHoDyNaMiX

[Chronocidal]

2 hours ago, ValkAddict said:

Does the cockpit/nose seem much shorter in fighter mode than before? Maybe it's just me.

It's not just you.  From a top-down perspective?  The best summary of what they've done is like they've taken the YF-21's planform, and hiked its pants up to its armpits.

Everything ahead of the midbody is compressed forwards, with the back end becoming overly chonky.  The nose is definitely shorter, because it doesn't look like they're using any sort of trick like Yamato did to shorten the nose for battroid.  

The arms are also wayyyy undersized.  The biceps look incredibly wimpy, and the lower arms could have been made much beefier with all of the room in the back end.. but they just didn't.

I'm still going to try and grab at least one, because of course I am, but the overall impression I get from this?  It's not like they improved battroid at the cost of fighter mode (or the nonexistent gerwalk that we still haven't seen), it feels more to me like they decided "Screw it, make all the modes equally bad."  

The only improvement they made is to the legs.  Between the skinny, undersized arms, the redonkulous backside, Liefeld-level torso chonk, and lopsided aircraft stretching, I don't think any mode actually looks better than the Yamato.

[Robin-11]

Anyway, still no news or pictures about super/fast parts...i have a feelling they will be sold separetely a while after the release of the toy. Hopefully.

[valhary]

OMG that's awful what the hell bandai the Yamato looks so much better this thing is closer to the Yamato 1/72 than the 1/60

Edited September 23, 2023 by valhary

[PsYcHoDyNaMiX]

Calling it now... Bandai will release this, it'll sellout and then they'll do a 2.0 in a few more years after milking the variants* lol. 

Edited September 24, 2023 by PsYcHoDyNaMiX

[26662]

16 hours ago, Graham said:

I'm hoping Bandai milk the mold and later give us a VF-22S Max and Milia 

"Shut up and take my money!"

[MKT]

When I first saw the scans, I thought it could be a whole new mold. But turns out it is the same sculpt as what they exhibited previously though, with very minor differences:

There was some discussion on the Battroid backpack shortening feature when it was shown in one of the more recent exhibitions. As it turns out, the one in the exhibition was mis-transformed, and the backpack wasn't pushed up as far as it should be. With a higher backpack, this should also allow the leg belly plates to have a bit more backward angle.

 

 

I noticed the arm cannons in Fighter have a slightly different sculpt too. Not a really a notable change, but a difference nonetheless. It just shows that Bandai have continued to iterate on the mold, but only on minor stuff but the overall sculpt should be pretty final at this point.

[Reïvaj]

Well spotted, MKT. In fact I can see several little differences here and there, some of them kind of interesting, most of them very minor. Notice for example the hood and te intakes. 

[twich]

I am very excited for this coming out and I hope that we get this soon and that they also go ahead with the VF-19 Kai Fire Valk for Macross 7's anniversary.  If they invest in that mold, we might see a VF-19F and VF-19S and then who knows what they might give us.

Twich

[scand]

18 hours ago, ValkAddict said:

Does the cockpit/nose seem much shorter in fighter mode than before? Maybe it's just me.

Yes, it looks stunted. Not visually appealing at all.

[Alex GS]

Nice to see the YF-21 is getting more love, in this case  a model kit 1/100 that soon it will be available for PO and this is from Bandai as well, the POs for the DX YF-21 should closer now, still wouldn't mind if Bandai halt the DX release of the POs so it could fix that goddamn cockpit being so short, I mean just look at this model kit, in my opinion it looks spot on in all their modes, is really head scratching that Bandai is able to deliver this design in a much smaller scale and can't do that in a bigger scale.

 

[recon]

21 minutes ago, Alex GS said:

Nice to see the YF-21 is getting more love, in this case  a model kit 1/100 that soon it will be available for PO and this is from Bandai as well, the POs for the DX YF-21 should closer now, still wouldn't mind if Bandai halt the DX release of the POs so it could fix that goddamn cockpit being so short, I mean just look at this model kit, in my opinion it looks spot on in all their modes, is really head scratching that Bandai is able to deliver this design in a much smaller scale and can't do that in a bigger scale.

 

Its puzzling also why the HG ver has better proportions and beefy arms as compared tp the DX ver. Maybe different teams i guess and the designing the DX YF-21 is the gundam team

[rematron]

Are we sure the model is perfect transformation? The cockpit and nose cone look very different from fighter/gerwalk to battroid. 

[Sanity is Optional]

6 minutes ago, rematron said:

Are we sure the model is perfect transformation? The cockpit and nose cone look very different from fighter/gerwalk to battroid. 

The model is absolutely not perfect transformation, it's a parts-former.

Which frankly is a godsend, given how much anime magic the YF-21 uses as fuel.

[Anasazi37]

7 minutes ago, rematron said:

Are we sure the model is perfect transformation? The cockpit and nose cone look very different from fighter/gerwalk to battroid. 

It's definitely a partsformer

[rematron]

I’d take the Yamato YF-21 over a parts former any day. For me, if it’s not perfect transformation, then what’s the point?   But, it’s great for people that don’t care.  To each their own. 

[Chronocidal]

The insane part? Despite being a partsformer, it still uses the same arms in all modes, and they don't suck.  Seriously, Bandai.. the arms on your DX SUCK.  They should be SO MUCH BIGGER.

I don't want to rant, but it's almost insulting to see how good that 1/100 looks compared to the DX.  They didn't screw with the details, they didn't ignore the lineart, they didn't do their usual Bandai "we know better" shenanigans with the design, it just looks like it should have always looked.

It's like we're back in the v.1 DX VF-25 phase again.   

Kind of sad.. that one actually sort of puts the YF-19 fighter mode to shame by comparison.

Edited September 26, 2023 by Chronocidal

[MacrossJunkie]

Yeah, my biggest gripes too are the extremely short fuselage like the Yamato 1/72 YF-21 and the tiny twiggy arms. At the very least, it should have big beefy Popeye forearms to resemble the Q-Rau. Not the emaciated noodle arms the DX has going on there.

I feel like whoever is designing this toy has no love for the YF-21 and what we're getting is the result of that.

Edited September 26, 2023 by MacrossJunkie

[Lolicon]

32 minutes ago, MacrossJunkie said:

I feel like whoever is designing this toy has no love for the YF-21 and what we're getting is the result of that.

When Gundam fans design Macross toys... 

[PointBlankSniper]

1 hour ago, Chronocidal said:

Despite being a partsformer, it still uses the same arms in all modes, and they don't suck

I see arm looking things in the big yellow "exchanging parts" box of the point 1 image. the ones for fighter and high maneuver mode look significantly flattened, thinned, and shrunken compared to the ones for gerwalk and battroid. It's pretty obvious how squashed it is in fighter mode out of all the completed formms in the point 2 image too...

[MKT]

Being a partsformer, its interesting to see the stylistic choices for each mode. Fighter looks stellar, and perhaps even more so than the HG YF-19 which has the huge feet sticking out back. Battroid also looks good, it reminds me of a cross between the more sterile line art accuracy of the GNU-Dou & the exaggerated sculpt of the Revoltechs.
 

2 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

The insane part? Despite being a partsformer, it still uses the same arms in all modes, and they don't suck.

The graphics do look a bit confusing at first glance, but looking at the renders a bit closer, I think the arms in Fighter are different parts from Battroid/Gerwalk? 

Edited September 26, 2023 by MKT

[Chronocidal]

42 minutes ago, MKT said:

The graphics do look a bit confusing at first glance, but looking at the renders a bit closer, I think the arms in Fighter are different parts from Battroid/Gerwalk? 

45 minutes ago, PointBlankSniper said:

I see arm looking things in the big yellow "exchanging parts" box of the point 1 image. the ones for fighter and high maneuver mode look significantly flattened, thinned, and shrunken compared to the ones for gerwalk and battroid. It's pretty obvious how squashed it is in fighter mode out of all the completed formms in the point 2 image too...

You both might be right, but the thing that's throwing me is just how beefy the arms look, even for in fighter mode.  They don't really look any different, just like they're straightened out and plugged in behind the shoulder mounts.

The diagram is not really helpful, since it doesn't really indicate which parts are shared between modes, and it doesn't show the shoulder/intake plugs at all when going to fighter, only that you remove them for the high speed mode.. which is dumb, because those parts weren't even something that were discarded for that.  

Edit: Yeah, I don't think it comes with more than one set of arms.  There are more pics in the model forum thread, and this lists the extra accessories.

This one really does make the YF-19 look half-assed by comparison.

Edited September 26, 2023 by Chronocidal

[Froy]

1 hour ago, Chronocidal said:

The insane part? Despite being a partsformer, it still uses the same arms in all modes, and they don't suck.  Seriously, Bandai.. the arms on your DX SUCK.  They should be SO MUCH BIGGER.

It seems the legs won't go inside in fighter mode. It has plenty of room to accommodate the arms.

The biggest problem with the 21 is to cram the bulky legs inside a very thin fighter belly. 

Even at the stage of development it is the fighter mode is an absolute chonk.

Edited September 26, 2023 by Froy