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J-Box Fuku-Bukuro 2013 Lucky Bag
Happy new year, everyone!
Just got my Fuku-Bukuro 2013 Lucky Bag ~ J-List Best Seller Snack Pack in. 
I’m pretty happy with the snacks I received, especially the Anata ni Oku-Ringo (Apple Gaufre) (center of top pic), as I had ordered it and it went out of stock while waiting for something else to get back into stock. Ended up cancelling it and the other item to get the Snack pack sooner. So, what did it contain?
Top pic:
- Anata Ni Oku-Ringo (Apple Gaufre)
- Oreo Soft Cookies
- Kit Kat Yokohama Edition (Strawberry Cheesecake)
- Kit Kat Petite Bitter Chocolate for Adults
- Pocky (just 1 box, despite the link.)
Bottom pic:
- Frito Lay Healthy Soy Milk Corn Snack
- Frito Lay Takoyaki Puff Snack
- Salad Pretz
- Ume Kaki No Tane
- Meiji Petite Assortment
- Morinaga Green Tea Carmel (1 box)
- Yubari Melon Carmel (1 box)
- Konpeito
- Black Black
- UHA Puccho Cola flavor (1 pack)
- Morinaga Ramune candy (1 bottle)
- Morinaga & Mister Donut Koeda Ball
- Mentos Mandarin Orange
- unknown UHA candy. (Can’t find it on J-Box or UHA’s site.)
- unknown Kracie candy
Quite a bit of stuff! I might try to do some little snack posts if I remember.
Transformers Prime: Thundertron
Transformers Prime: Robots in Disguise
Voyager class: Thundertron, Star Seeker ($19.99, Target)
Here’s a guy I’ve been looking for a few months now. Thundertron is considered part of the Aligned Universe, being featured in the novel “Exiles”. Of interest, he’s one of the few Non-Cybertronian Transformers, forming another faction, called the Star Seekers, Going so far to sporting a new faction symbol. Additionally, he’s a space pirate that turns into a lion. Rawarrggh?
Packaging:
Thundertron is stored in a plastic blister pack with paper ties, and rubber bands, Be mindful on the sword, as it was held in by a paper tie that I didn’t notice until right before getting ready to remove it from the blister.
Robot Mode: (As packaged)
Once we get this pirate of his packaging, he’s already in robot mode.
He’s pretty impressively designed, his appearance doing well to invoke a fearsome pirate. His articulation is fairly decent, but his claw shoulder guards are a little fiddly. However, there’s something off about him…what is it? He has two feet! What kind of self-respecting pirate has both feet?
His left foot simply pegs onto his peg leg. Removing it gives him that pirate look we’re used to. Surprisingly, his balance is fairly decent without the wide foot base. His foot becomes an additional weapon, which can peg on his left arm or store away on his back.
His main weapon, a light up battle blade according the packaging. The sword carries a neat design with the hilt consisting of the battery pack, and additional claw. The blade, looks to be heavily based off Optimus Prime’s swords from the Micheal Bay films.
Unfortunately, the nifty design of the blade is overshadowed by the incredibly weak gimmick execution. The battery pack will flip the sword into place, and activating a useless LED gimmick. Once you let go of the battery pack, it will revert to it’s folded away mode. The Only way I managed to get it to stay in place for photography was to wrap a rubber band around the battery pack and have Thundertron hold the band.
As with the arm guard/claw, the sword can store on his back. (as well as on the arm guard, if it’s already stored away.)
Finally, I’d like to take a few moments to talk about his head:
When you transform it, you gotta be careful to not pop his head off the balljoint, as I had a heck of a time getting the socket back on the joint. I ended up disassembling to get it back in the socket. Additionally, his translucent blue mohawk was a neat design idea, I think would of worked for his beard as well, as opposed to being a minty-teal.
Transformation:
This guy gets points from me, as to transform him into his lion mode I had to break out of his instructions to figure out how transform his forward pair of legs. It took me about 10 to 15 minutes to figure out how to get them, even with the instructions. (at least on my figure) It’s hard to tell the lower arms could fold backwards for transformation, which is where I was getting stuck.
Lion Mode:
In his lion mode, he looks fairly impressive, but that’s just about what all he can do. 0 articulation in the head, forward legs are pretty much locked into place due to the transformation. His rear legs have decent articulation in the hips, but I would of liked to seen balljoints in the knees so he could go for wider stances.
Final thoughts:
Overall, despite my complaints, I really enjoy the figure being part of my collection. He’s quite nice looking, and if you’re a fan of pirates or lions, I can’t see why you’d pass him up.
Happy thanksgiving!
Wanted to be sure to wish those that celebrate it a Happy Thanksgiving. If you don’t celebrate it, happy Thursday!
Sangokuden (SD) Gundam: Kan’u
Kan’u (ZZ Gundam, based off Guan Yu)
The kit consists of: Comic/Assembly Instructions, four sprues and a decal sheet
Assembly:
Kan’u:
Armored up!
Finally, we have ol’ “Ogre Beard” armored up. Fitting of his name, his armor has quite the ogre/oni theme to it. He looks down right intimidating. One thing to watch out for, Bandai designed Kan’u's visor to be placed in one of two modes. One is raised up to show off his eyes, and the other covers them.
With the kit finished, the three generals of Yuushu and brothers in arms are assembled!
They make quite a fine looking team.
Building hiatus!
Welp, looks like I’m back to building a backlog again.
After I built Chouhi, I decided to take the weekend to myself and get some chores taken care of, so I spent most of Sunday cleaning. (so nice to see wide areas of floor again!) and then “finished” it Monday and Tuesday. Still have a bit more cleaning to go, I think. Wednesday, I went and saw “Wreck it Ralph”. Really enjoyed it, so if you get a chance to see it, I recommend it.
Additionally, I was pretty distracted by the new additions to PSO2, yesterday and today (Thursday and Friday.)
That said, it hasn’t just been chores and gaming. I’m still being pretty creative, as I’ve started to practice drawing again. Will be interesting to see how this goes, as it’s been 10 years since I’ve actually drawn anything. I might also be adding paint onto the kits I’ve built currently and for future ones, as I picked up some supplies to help me with my paints. Will most likely spend this weekend getting those set up.
Sangokuden (SD) Gundam: Chouhi
Sorry bout missing the 1st day! Go me! Had the post all written up, got ready to to work on this guy here and forgot to post it. Still trying to hammer out a good format for these posts.
Next up in the Sangokuden line is Chouhi (Zeta Gundam, based off Zhang Fei).
Chouhi:
The kit consists of: Comic/Assembly Instructions, four sprues and a decal sheet
Assembly:
Assembly goes smoothly. Snip and file, assemble. Bandai changes up the assembly order to keep things interesting, instead of just following the order of Ryuubi.
To my surprise, he’s quite different than Ryuubi in this form. Several elements of the Gundam Zeta can be seen in this mode, though, I think the boots are 100% Hyaku Shiki.
Armored up!
Here Chouhi is all armored up. He looks quite striking with his primarily red armor, and channelling a little bit more of the Hyaku Shiki with the ‘gold’ armor elements. While he looks pretty decent without paint apps, I think some extra would really help the figure a bit more. Additionally, you might want to break the glue out on Chouhi’s armor. The left shoulder armor, right wrist spikes and forehead crest all come off with relative ease, so it might be better to glue them down.
Sangokuden(SD) Gundam: Ryuubi
Here we go! Starting the big modeling marathon. I’m opting to start with the line I actually have nearly complete, Bandai’s Sangokuden Gundam. Based off China’s Three Kingdoms period, it revisions the Gundam line as characters in the time period. It was popular enough to influence the SD Gundam: Brave Battle Warriors, which in turned received it’s own line of model kits consisting of reissued Sangokuden models along with new models.
We’re going to go in order, so we’re starting with the hero of the line, #1 Ryuubi (RX-78-2 Gundam, based off Liu Bei.)
Ryuubi Gundam
The kits consists of: Assembly instructions/comic, four sprues, and a decal sheet.
Assembly:
Ryuubi’s assembly goes fairly smoothly, as the main assembly points are the head, torso, shoulders and feet. The rest is a mixture of single pieces, polycaps, and armoring, finished with decals.
Ryuubi:
I have suspicions the majority of the Sangokuden Gundams will look like Ryuubi under their armor.
All armored up! I think it’d look better painted, but the chrome decals do look quite nice, even if there’s some wrinkling on the areas where it’s stuck to raised areas.
As the SD kits usually, he’s fairly lacking on articulation, but the design of the figure does give him quite a bit of character despite not being mass articulated.
Thursday’s hunt & a review: Transformers GDO Hot Spot
Still hunting Transformers Masterpiece Optimus Prime, so I stopped by Toys R Us this morning to see what they might have in stock. No Optimus Prime, but did manage to find something just as hard to find. (At least, it is at the time of this post.)
Transformers Generations (GDO / TRU Exclusive)
Hot Spot (Voyager, $22.99)
As the figure was originally slated to be a China exclusive, this packaging stands out from the typical Transformers packaging being printed in both English and Chinese. He’s also named Protectobot Hot Spot to get around trademark/copyright issues with “Hot Spot” on it’s own. (Just as soon as I became used to him being called Hot Zone.)
Opening the box up, we get to see what all Hot Spot comes with.
Instruction manual and a “water” missile. It’s been a while since I’ve been into a Voyager toy, so let’s see how to get the toy out.
Ugh. Tape and ties. Luckily, all we have to do is cut the two plastic tabs wrapped around the cardboard, lift the blister up, and snip the paper ties. No mess.
He’s got a pretty nice form, not quite accurate to his G1 design, but still quite nice. However, he still feels a little bit like a rag doll when it comes to his legs like his mold cousin, Solar Flare Grappel… He still holds poses quite nicely.
His transformation is quite smooth and not tricky at all. Though, the rear side panels don’t quite lock into place as well as they could.
Hot Spot’s vehicle mode is quite a treat, as for the most part quite a bit of the robot mode is hidden away in this form. Additionally, if you don’t like to keep the cannon armed with the water missile, it can be stored between the arms.
All in all, a good update to the original character. Highly recommend picking up him on sight.
Happy Halloween!
Happy Halloween everyone! Looks like I spoke too soon about stores being light on new toys.
Managed to find Nickelodeon’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” Metalhead figure at Toys R Us for $9.99 at Toys R Us. Then went to Walmart, forgetting what I went in for, but found a Dark of the Moon Starscream for $3.50, Transformers Prime Sgt. Kup, Rumble, and 2 Vehicons for $15.something. $15.47 a piece. Yuck. The whole “Look! New toys!” thing took over and I couldn’t resist. blargh.
Gonna try and turn out some reviews of these guys tonight, and if not, we’ll be doing some pictures instead. Starting tomorrow, I’m planning on doing a big modeling push for November, and possibly December.
Plan is to get out 1 to 3 model kits per day, depending on the complexity and frustration of pre-build (photograpy & scanning), building and post-building (more photography and clean-up) processes itself.
That said, these will not be painted kits, as most of my painting equipment is stored away and will probably need quite a bit of TLC before being paint capable again.
Please look forward to it!