First reported here almost 1 year ago, the Yamato / Toycom YF-19 transformer's American release is currently pending the working out of some legal issues. Yamato released their YF-19 to the Japanese market at the end of July.The toy's packaging consists of black window-box with a colorful head-on shot the '19 in flight, side panels show the toy's features and various transformation modes of Battroid, Gerwalk, and Fighter. Opening the box, Instruction diagram, decals, and a preview flier of the Japanese Macross Plus Movie Edition DVD and Macross Plus PSX Game Edition sit on top of another cardboard panel and the plastic the main figure, cannon and extra hand sit in.
Out of the box in Battroid mode, the size of this figure, weight, and extreme detail are pretty impressive, there is alot of metal used in the toy and it shows.
The figure takes a few seconds to articulate correctly for standing upright. and due to all the metal once this figure loses it's balance it can take a pretty hard fall. Our review model had some serious paint scratches on the right lower leg and chipping in some areas like the joints where there is movement.
Transforming the figure for the first time is a time-consuming process, the instructions, while in Japanese are visually straight forward, the problem we encountered was taking care with the delicate nature of some of the plastic joints. Some internet reports have told of how easy it is to break a few of the plastic pieces such as the hands, Toycom is working to correct some of these delicate areas for the American release.
The transformation from Gerwalk mode to fighter was the most difficult, the main body of the fuselage, air intakes and wing units must be fit together tightly to complete the fighter transformation. It took some heavy forcing to snap all these sections into place and several times the forcing would unsnap the tab cover behind the cockpit.
Transforming the toy a few times loosens up some of the stiff joints and reveals some paint rub on various taps such as the pair on the front of the chest plate.
The cannon takes some care when inserting into into the optional hand with the extended trigger finger. Forcing it inside will make it nearly impossible to remove and most reports we've read say forcing often yields a broken hand. without breaking the hand.
The YF-19 from Yamato / Toycom is a very complicated and delicate transformer, it's also an incredible figure, and is just as good to look at in any of the modes as the Studio Half Eye kit release. This is one awesome toy and it along with the YF-21 and VF-11B are sure to move quickly off of store shelves once it hits the US.
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