[Paladin]

The thirty-sixth Super Sentai installment has officially begun!

"Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters" began last weekend and the initial response has been highly positive; the premiere episode features some excellent action scenes and effects work unlike anything Sentai has seen in recent years.

And naturally, with a new series comes new merchandise! Today I picked up the first release in Go-Busters' DX Mecha line! Instead of releasing Zords in a single box-set, Go-Busters Machines will apparently be individually released. This may lead for some interesting configurations but it makes the preorder systems even more difficult for collectors.

At the moment only Go-Buster Red's Mecha is available to fight off the evil space aliens. This is CB-01:



A massive super-car that launches off a building ramp to reach fights in time.


The Go-Busters are supported outside of combat by the Buddy-Roids; mechanical animal creatures whose origins have not been fully explained at the time of writing. Go-Buster Red's partner is one "Cheeda Nick" -



A cheetah-inspired robot who can transform into a motorcycle. This is the smallest piece of this first Zord set and looking at its "transformation" (folding the legs upward) I begin to suspect the design team picked up a spare Ranger Key & stuck it on a leftover Goseiger Header.

Nick combines with CB-01 to unlock the vehicles' full potential-



Doesn't do much for the Vehicle form but it does enable further transformations! With Buddy-Roid installed CB-01 can convert to Beast Mode!



A massive cheetah-shaped robot block. Its almost totally immobile but I'm still very impressed at the creativity of this design. We've had vehicles with animalistic qualities before but never animals that turn into Vehicles quite like this.

And Cb-01 has one final transformation!



Red Buster gets his own Megazord, the Go-Buster Ace! Consider this from a Transformers perspective: this single Megazord is a Triple Changer, Breast Animal AND (eventually) a Combiner!

Ace's giant legs prevent any lower body articulation but he does have some startlingly good movement in his upper shoulders (and even some ELBOW Movement, which Megazords almost never have!)

Go-Buster Ace does come with the traditional sword weapon, except the sword is attached to Ace's right hand on a ball-joint instead of a peg. This way the sword is integrated throughout the various transformations without having to be removed. Its another impressive detail but I have already noticed some faint stress marks around the ball-socket so I'll have to keep a close watch on this weapon usage.



The engineering of Go-Buster Ace is simply remarkable; for a long time now Super Sentai has needed something beyond the usual "stick five things together" setup for Megazords and Ace pulls it off with superb detail. Definitely a fun and promising start to this new series! Highly recommended!