[Tokumonkey]

The first Zenkaiger minipla set showed up this week, and I've had it built for a few days. I'm kinda torn.

As expected, the hero and animal modes for Zyuran and Gaon are... not good. I was actually surprised by how bad the beast modes look. It's clear these have only been photographed from VERY specific angles. The candy toy folks weren't able to work their usual magic with these, so they're missing some articulation you'd expect: the arms for Zyuran and Gaon are on a swivel, with no elbows. Oof. The tyranno fore-claws aren't articulated in any way; they're just solid pieces of plastic. In their beast modes, getting the upper and lower teeth to line up is surprisingly difficult.

Since I knew those modes would be disappointing going in, my opinion of this set was always going to be based on the combined ZenkaiOh form. Fully put together, it's good, although with flaws. Also, the "good" is somewhat qualified; it doesn't look its best without box 5's replacement parts: they make the feet practical, remove the arms sticking out of the chest, and give the robot a sort of waist (more like an ab twist.) The whole thing has, for the most part, the kind of articulation we've come to expect from Sentai minipla. The left and right sides hold together better than I'd have expected given how few pegs are involved.

Where the articulation fails is the head: it's got good up-and-down movement, but the big side-horns run up against the teeth on either side, so left-to-right movement is very limited. The elbows run into a similar problem to last year's Kiramajin minipla, where the elbows face the robot's sides, but with the added challenge of the giant gauntlets/legs limiting what you can do.

Once we get to the arms, we arrive at my biggest problem with this release: the shoulder connections are very loose, so the arms to fall off frustratingly easily.

The gattai has some elements of proper, interesting transformation (rarely seen in recent Sentai!) and parts-forming. It's a shame, then, that this combined mode fails an important test: I find I don't much want to transform it. Neither of the other modes it can assume is appealing. From what I've seen, it looks like the DX mecha is *much* more fun to transform, and doesn't appear to involve much parts-forming.

That lack of interest in transforming it, though, gave me a little freedom. Box 5 eliminates the need for the chest-arms, and I pulled the arms of the back off because they were pretty much just unsightly kibble. What I'm left with is a surprisingly cohesive (for recent Sentai) robot.

It's not terrible. I'm interested in seeing how the ZenkaiOh VrooMagine turns out, and I'm very curious as to whether there will be any decent combinations that include more than two at a time.

If you decide you want to pick it up *and* you want decent individual robot versions of Zyuran and Gaon, I'd recommend picking up the whatever-they're-calling-Yudo-this-year.