[Tokumonkey]

Quote:

Originally Posted by OptionZero

What gets me is how the suit designs are quite good and unique, but this mecha design is soooo lazy

I don't consider the mecha itself to be a lazy design. It's going for a very specific aesthetic, but from what I've seen of the suit (and that nifty articulated version), I think I like it.

The toy, on the other hand... I don't know that I'd apply "lazy," yet. There might be some cool combinations heading our way. I just don't like the look of the toy in its combined mode. The lack of legs, the lack of articulation, the imbalanced profile, the 2 and 3 blocks just sitting there doing nothing... These bother me.

What I like are aesthetics of the cube animals. Cube Eagle seems weakest to me, but that's the cube that does the most, so I'm inclined to give it a pass. Lion, Shark, and Elephant appeal to me as nifty Minecraft critters. (I'm not yet sure how I feel about Cube Tiger's animal mode.)

I'll also give it this: Zyuoh King, in my opinion, improves a little on the transformation. The feature I liked best on ToQ-Oh was how the opening train doors revealed the face. It looked good on-screen and translated perfectly to the toy. Shurikenjin's face-reveal felt a little weak to me by comparison (although I thought the overall design was strong.) The twisting face reveal of Zyuoh King is kinda cool, and I expect it'll look great on the show.

Gekiatsu Dai-Oh is an interesting comparison. That mecha was almost wholly designed around its combined mode and chest gimmick. I hated the design in part because there was close to no transformation for the limbs. However, it had moving legs and knees. In Zyuoh King, we've got interesting animal modes, a couple of which involve a significant amount of transformation, in addition to the cube mode, but we got these at the cost of the middle and lower cubes doing anything in combined mode. Hm.

I really want to see the first major cube transformation (the one we've only seen in shadow) before I fully pass judgment on this mecha. On its own, I'm not fond of it, but I'm hoping they did something clever (and relatively rare) in planning something pretty cool for later combinations.