Review: A Radical Departure
Packaging & Extras: (4/5)
The toy comes in a large box (37.5 x 24.5 x 17 cm) made of decently sturdy cardboard adorned with numerous pictures of the contents. There’s no flip-top lid, you’ll open the side and slide out the trays within. There are three interior plastic trays stacked on top of each other. The largest fault of the packaging is that it failed to deliver these toys safely to the customers with many (including me) receiving the toy with the head laser bent. The laser is detachable and should have been packaged separately. It also feels like there’s wasted space and the box could have been smaller. The first tray includes the toy as well as:
1) A battroid canopy cover
2) Intake covers
3) Pilot figure
4) 2 pairs of fixed posed hands
5) front and rear fold booster mounts (the fold booster itself was only included with the YF-19 Full Set)
The baggy with the intake covers also includes the thrust vectoring ‘nozzle flaps’ you’ll need to install to complete your YF-21 figure.
The second tray contains:
6) FAST Packs (2x skirts, 2x arm parts)
7) A pair of guns for all modes
8) A pair of guns that only work in fighter mode
9) A pair of pinpoint barrier punch effects with two fist mounts)
10) An interior shell to emulate the delimiter mode
11) A pair of side covers
The final tray includes:
12) The display consisting of a base, an arm, and adapters for every mode
This is a comprehensive suite of extras with the only glaring deficiency being the lack of a fold booster. There are also several items included that feel like they would make more sense on a smaller, cheaper toy. Fighter mode only guns? Side covers? Is this a DX toy or Hi-Metal R?
Charm & Collectability: (3.5/5)
This toy retailed for 35,000¥ and began shipping at the end of June 2024. At 33.5 cm in fighter mode (to the tip of the nozzle flap) and 26 cm to the top of the backpack in battroid, the toy is 1/60 scale. At 620 grams, the toy is also massively heavy (the G1 Jetfire or 1/55 Takatoku VF-1 you grew up with was 350 grams). It’s perfect transformation and, although Macross Plus doesn’t have a huge following in Japan, it’s an iconic variable fighter so all the elements are here that could make this a very popular toy among collectors. The damaged head lasers and the lukewarm reviews might quell demand.
Sculpt, Detail, & Paint: (7/10)
The pilot figure is well proportion and painted. The cockpit has molded details but lacks paint applications. While Yamato has been giving us white landing gear complete with white painted landing gear bays, Bandai continues to give us bare metal landing gear without paint. Beyond those two exceptions, Bandai has gone to great extremes to make this toy more visually dynamic with a plethora of painted on markings. The markings range from standard aircraft warnings to manufacturer names and new stripes. Purists may hate all the embellishments, but I enjoy them.
It’s been a long time since I reviewed a deluxe toy that was this poor of a representation of the line art in fighter mode. Bandai went full ‘reinterpretation’ to differentiate themselves form Yamato’s 1/60 toy which is still excellent despite preceding the DX by 16 years. There was room for improvement on the Yamato, a few gaps that could be filled; instead, Bandai threw out the blueprint and started fresh and made almost every aspect of fighter mode worse. The nose is too short, the tail is too narrow, and why is there an elevated section between the engines? The paint applications are there to distract you from how bad the representation of fighter mode is. The intake fans, which were too shallow on the Yamato, are somehow even more shallow on the DX toy. The guns on the arms should be concealed but instead are prominent.
Rather than the FAST packs covering up some of fighter modes sins, they add more of their own. The FAST packs are supposed to form a solid sled under the fighter, but Bandai’s reinterpretation has them only covering part of the bay covers and then hanging off the bottom of fighter toward the rear of the plane… it is truly awful. The arm parts, which ought to conform exactly to the tail edge of the wing, fail to do so. You don’t get any paint apps on the parts, not even the black trapezoids, and there are large marks where the bay covers were cut from their sprues. In GERWALK and battroid mode the FAST packs conceal the shorter than regulation side skirts.
Bandai used optional parts to improve the look of delimiter mode. The large shell that covers the bottom of fighter mode adds the appropriate details. Bandai’s interpretation of this mode is far thicker than the line art but looks more air-worthy.
Some elements of the rather poor fighter mode remain distracting in GERWALK mode, like the short nose and shallow intakes. In the line art, the arms and legs both grow considerably as they shift from fighter mode to GERWALK. The DX toy does an impressive job making the legs thick, but the arms remain slender and the hands look small. Bandai’s reinvention of the transformation leaves bay doors that are much smaller but the visual impact is minimal.
It must be acknowledged that the line art for the YF-21 contains some of the most blatant proportion shifting of any of Kawamori’s designs with the nose and cockpit becoming impossibly small (which also shifts the intakes inward), the legs becoming impossibly thick, and the backpack tucking together tighter than the plane ever could. Every toy will struggle to capture a percentage of the ‘anime magic’ the design employs. While prior toys accepted very thin legs to prioritize fighter mode, Bandai is the first to give us marvelously meaty calves. Unfortunately, even though Bandai shrank the nose of fighter mode far more than I would have liked, it still looks larger than the shrunken proportion of the line art. Where the DX let me down the most was the backpack, which remains large like it has on previous toys but adds more depth making it more wrong. With all the bizarre over-engineering of this toy, it’s hard to conceive that some of that engineering didn’t go into figuring out a way to fold the backpack tighter (and not need a separate brace). As a more minor quibble, I prefer Yamato’s (and Kawamori’s) slide out lower leg section to the rotating lower leg Bandai employed. The points where the lower leg pivots are always visible, and the lower legs can rotate enough to expose the gap between them and the upper leg. From a purely visual standpoint, the DX toy’s smaller nose, thicker legs, and superior paint give it a small advantage over the Yamato in battroid mode (an advantage that grows greatly when handling is also considered and diminishes greatly when one acknowledges the DX is not perfect transformation).
Design: (6.5/10)
This toy includes the following features:
1) Opening canopy with a removable pilot figure
2) Removable intake covers that reveal intake fan detail
3) Integrated landing gear – and unlike those frustrating Yamato rear landing gear, all landing gear on this toy lock in position
4) Guns that convert from fighter mode use to hand-held and are very secure when held in the hand
5) Functioning air brake complete with metal piston to hold it up
6) Firm attachment of the FAST packs.
7) Concealed anchor points for the fold drive – I complained that Yamato’s method left you with two tiny plastic plugs you’d have to take care not to lose… Bandai’s method leaves you with FOUR tiny plugs you have to take care of, and that’s not including the two more on the fold drive.
8) Delimiter mode – the toy can shed its limbs and achieve the final battle high-speed mode Guld used to collide with the X-9.
That’s really not an impressive list at this price point. I’m okay with the optional second canopy. It’s not an elegant solution but, with how small they had to make the cockpit after all the foreshortening they did to fighter mode, it’s probably the best they could do. Yamato didn’t do anything better so, in this instance, Bandai didn’t have any homework to cheat off. Let me air my grievances:
A) You need to use dummy gun pods in fighter mode to have some semblance of ground clearance while using the landing gear. If you use the transformable guns, the inside edges will drag on the ground. If you use the FAST packs, even the dummy guns drag on the ground and the toy sits on top of the transformable guns.
B) The guns (either dummy or converting) don’t attach well in fighter mode. Bandai returns to hoping friction will suffice on a vertical peg in a slot and their tolerances just aren’t tight enough. Yamato had the sense to add a peg to attach the front of the gun and never had this issue.
C) Bandai threw out Kawamori Shoji’s design and reinvented the YF-21. They moved the proportions around and changed the transformation. I would applaud their bravery and the attempt but the demerits for not realizing the failure during the prototype stage outweigh any kudos.
D) Not perfect transformation… really? First, there’s a locking pin. If an integrated solution couldn’t be figured out (and it seems bizarre one couldn’t be), then there should be a place to stow the pin after removing it. Next, needing a brace to hold battroid together and still have it look like it does? At least the YF-30 looks amazing, and I dinged it for needing braces also. To compound matters, the brace can be hit by the top of the leg during handling popping it free. AWFUL.
E) In a situation oddly similar to my Yamato 1/60 experience, the FAST packs seem to cause issues with everything latching together perfectly in fighter mode. I get more gaps when the FAST packs are in use.
F) The Delimiter Mode requires 2 side covers and a large shell that covers the underside of the toy. While that’s not ideal, the fact the shell needs to go on top of the rear panels (which Bandai created when redesigning of the mecha) is another obvious indicator to Bandai that their redesign was a bad idea but they ignored it.
The included display stand is unchanged from Bandai’s recent DX toys. It offers two arm positions to adjust the height of the toy but that’s all it does, there are no other height adjustments and no rotation or banking points. The stand and its adapters remain unattractive. I was surprised that Bandai went with only one rear peg for the connection of the toy to the adapter in fighter mode, allowing the front to simply rest on top of the adapter instead of locking to it like it does on some other toys. Since the one peg used is rather hearty, there’s probably minimal risk of the toy falling off, but it might get skewed and certainly feels less solid. The fighter mode adapter can be modified to accommodate the regular fighter mode, fighter mode with fast packs, or delimiter mode with a very quick change to the front pegged in parts. For battroid mode, the brace needs to be replaced with a brace with integrated display stand adapter.
Durability & Build: (7/10)
When Bandai made their Revival YF-29 toy, they had the sense to not install the head spike, instead, it occupies a space in the plastic tray AND they threw in a second just in case you lost one. The DX YF-21 thus represents a regression. Here, Bandai TRIED to install the head spike, but maybe it was installed by a careless robot, it was left entirely erect when the clamshell was slammed down, or, somehow the packaging was insufficient, but the result is frequently a spike with a big kink toward the top. It was easy enough to bend back into “close enough” position but it leaves a stress mark. I’m told heating it up will greatly reduce the stress mark but I expect better.
There’s also an odd weak spot where the vertical stabilizer attaches to the arm. I’ve seen one instance of the stabilizer being broken off entirely. On my toy, there’s a bent piece of plastic at the attachment point.
There are other manufacturing issues but most appear to fall within the standard 5% (or less) failure rate. The most prevalent other issue are overly tight joints with no accessible screw for you to loosen. These joints greatly increase the chance of breaking the toy when trying to transform or pose it. I also found the peg that holds the face on the toy to be too loose of a fit and the face often falls off when being angled.
Articulation: (9.5/10)
The laser on top of the head pivots forward and back while the head’s hood or cowl can rotate left right angle up (look down) to a small degree. Within the hood, the face of the toy connects via a ball joint allowing the face to angle separately in any direction which is a really nice step up from previous toys. There’s a pivot point at the intakes allowing you to move them up or down a bit. The shoulders allow full rotation and the covers conceal a (too stiff) pivot that allows the arm to move away from the body. A rotation point allows the arm to spin just above the bicep. Double-jointed elbows allow a fully 180 degree sweep of movement. Below the elbow, there’s a slight (about 10 degrees) left/right pivot at the forearm. Before the wrist, within the forearm, there’s a wrist-like hinge where the hand connects. The hand also has its own wrist and the two combined allow an excellent range of movement. The hands can also spin around at their connection point and the thumb and trigger finger are individually articulated while the other three fingers are one piece. There are no functional knuckles on the hand other than the ones where the palm and fingers connect. There is a waist joint but I couldn’t get it to rotate. Ball joints at the hip allow full forward/back motion with some angling. To achieve a wide stance, you’ll need to swing the legs forward from their battroid position to access the space between the nose of back of the toy where there’s space to move the tops of the legs inward. Just below the hips, there’s a rotation point for the legs. The knees are double jointed allowing 180 degrees of movement. The ankles have both a ball joint and a pivot point allowing the toy to point up/down, left/right, and to cock at nearly any angle. All of this articulation could have created a sloppy mess but instead the joints are stiff and hold the toy very well making the toy pleasant to handle and pose.
Total Score: (37.5/50)
This toy, at this price-point, following the excellent DX YF-19, is a tremendous let down. What I wanted was a Yamato YF-21 with more/better paint applications, improved joints, and whatever tweaks modern engineering could give us to inch slightly closer to the impossible, proportion-shifting line art. What I received was a radical new interpretation of the YF-21 that disregards the YF-21’s creator and only cares about having the thickest legs of any YF-21 toy at the expense of all the other proportions that matter. Of course, it’s not all bad. While the Yamato 1/60 toy handles so poorly in GERWALK and battroid modes that the stand feels necessary, the DX toy attains dynamic poses with relative ease (ignoring the times you’ll pop the stupid brace off of battroid). As much as people like to complain about me calling something that costs this much a ‘toy’, play factor is still a HUGE element of judging these toys and if you gave up on the Yamato because it wasn’t fun, this toy may be the replacement you’ve been looking for.