u/Galaxy_Dive

After originally skipping on the re-issue, satisfied with Alternative Destiny LiveRobo, watching Liveman gave me an itch for the super minipla Live Robo… and luckily, I was able to find it together with Live Boxer for a steal.

Here it is, about 95% painted. I only used one sticker on each component - Aqua Dolphin was the red “Liveman” sticker on the side (which isn’t molded into the plastic), Land Lion it’s the logo on the center of its skirt armor, and on Jet Falcon its the red stripe on its back (since the white outline wasn’t really molded in).

The painting was all pretty simple with a touch of finesse - the details on the chest and shoulders were easier than they look to get exact given how nice they were molded, and I’m pretty satisfied with how the striping on Falcon’s wings turned out. The only “added” details are Land Lion’s claws. I think it would be possible to spruce it up some more, but the look of the show miniature is heavily dependent on awesome weathering lol. And lion’s head is understandably sized for Live Robo (with the darker mane like the DX toy had), so it looks a little small in lion mode.

As one of the earliest super minipla kits, it has some limitations… notably no ankles, relying on simply pivoting the front of the feet. And its feet are pretty small so it’s kind of hard to stand in many poses, which is why I just have it on an Action Base here for simplicity.

The Chojuken isn’t pictured, though I painted its hilt and guard the proper colors, because I must have accidentally swept it up with other parts while tidying up and now it’s in one of multiple different bins or small piles lol. It will have turned back up by the time I paint and build Live Boxer.

I figured I should put together Wild Tousai King and Wild ZyuohKing at some point, so here they are.

Eventually I’ll go back and paint my ZyuohKing, Kirin, and Mogura. Wild King’s head there’s nothing you can do about, I’m pretty sure it’s hollow plastic underneath it (like the back of Lion’s mane/the “3”).

Wild ZyuohKing’s just kind of wonky because you have a double-stacked robo… but the same tiny little arms as ones half as big. It looks nicer with weapons in hand as they obscure how weird the arms look.

Wild Tousai King, on the other hand, I think looks pretty nice - but a lot of the heavy lifting is done with the thing being 80% Tousai ZyuOh lol. In general, I’m not a big fan of this era of Sentai’s super gattai that just kind of stacked everything a mile high, but this kind of keeps it within reason by only adding a single set of cube sandals. And even though you have a lot of cubes in this formation, it spaces them out well. Bonus points for actually using everything, too (even if the back’s kind of a mess lol).

Wild Tousai King’s also a big boy. I threw in a few comparison shots at the end - everything’s so big though it kind of warps the perspective since they’re hard to get close to each other. But it towers over the examples here, where Grand Liner and Great Icarus are really the only things coming to mind that would be bigger.

(edit: Oops. Mogura got folded over on Wild Tousai King. I thought it was while posing and only like that it one shot, but must have happened when first setting it down after transforming because it's like that in most pics lol)

So while I can’t do Hyper Gosei Great, I did use parts of a junk Datas Hyper for my Gosei Green-based Gosei Deep kitbash that allows me to do something similar. I just had to fiddle with the overhead leg position some since the Wonder/Dragon torso as the connection point instead of Datas’ back legs puts them a lot further back.

The Hyper Header on the cluster is replaced by Green’s Dolphin header and then I just use the Hyper (here Orca) header as the head, opened up as it would normally be for Datas Hyper as Gosei Deep uses it as a closed conehead.

 
I guess I can thank Goseiger’s relative lack of popularity wedged between two hyper-popular seasons as the reason why I was ultimately able to get my hands on so much of something so old all for pretty cheap lol. I was definitely not a fan of the header concept back in the day, but the minipla has made me appreciate them more.

While I originally only really intended to do a single negative cube robo, buying a small lot of Zyuohger minipla not only left me with two more duplicate cubes, but since it also scored me my first Cube Gorilla, it left my Cube Condor orphaned. So the solution was to just use the duplicate shark and elephant as additional nega-cubes and pair them with Condor.

I had briefly considered options for more extensive modifications to make them more unique animal choices, but the cube animal design makes them really hard to work with, so ultimately I didn’t have that in me lol.

While I was most concerned with matching them with the other nega-cubes - hence I used the same metallic purple that’s not a terribly close match with Condor (though honestly only particularly apparent in the cube totem) and stuck with gunmetal instead of silver, I did use a lot more purple on these two so they would match Condor a bit more.

The lot also came with another Cube Komori, and besides already having that, I have cube owl still in a box, so decided to paint this dupe bat metallic red. I technically now also have a dupe croc and wolf, but dunno lol. Again, if they were a bit easier to work with, I’d do something like create alternative arms for Tousai ZyuOh that could double as weapons on its shoulders or something, but possibilities there are limited. A brick robo would be another possibility if I had another torso cube.

I’m technically not 100% done with these - black lion is still missing its numberplate on the back of its mane. It’s honeycombed hollow plastic designed for you to just put the sticker over. I have since bought some plastic modeling sheets and my test use for those will be measuring and cutting out two rectangles to glue onto there so I can paint it black and draw on a “-3”.

I grabbed DieselOh around the start of the year and had started to paint Tanker and Car Carrier prior to my recent shipment arriving. Now that I’m finally starting RV Robo, I may not get to Diesel Ressha all that soon, but here are these two in the meantime.

The thing to note is that ToQOh does have elbows, but they are on the forearm halves of Yellow and Pink Ressha. The lower segments of both Tanker and Car Carrier have *knees* so they don’t really bend the way you’d want them to as forearms, while their back halves don’t have any joints at all. I think this is a problem unique to these two (as they are primarily legs for DieselOh) and the other aux ressha minipla have elbows.

I should page our resident scale expert, because it’s funny how small the ressha feel compared to most other minipla. I finished Tanker Ressha at about the same time as Tousai ZyuOh and it’s just absolutely tiny compared to that. But, because of the design of the ToQger mecha (and the point in time when these minipla were produced the solution for needing to fit more parts in a box was to sometimes just make it a bit smaller), even compared to something like Kiramager’s Jouki and Express (visible in part when I posted ToQOh back in the spring), they feel a little undersized individually.

And here’s the final set of aux headers. I think I may have posted a partial Seaick Gosei Great back when I did my Gosei Deep custom, but now I have an actual Sawshark header to go along with them.

Out of the three, I think I like these guys the most? The limiting factor of Landick is that since Snake and Tiger are nice and bulky, Sai and Tyrano lose some of their impressiveness. And then I just ranted about Skick yesterday lol. I think Seaick benefits from having Sawshark be its “big” one with the fancier moving parts (as opposed to the head unit). Manta’s a neat design use of letting it make the pirate cap shape, and Hammerhead feels cool - the only real downside is that the movement gimmick on Hammerhead is a little wasted, since it’s basically only there to compact the head in for Hyper.

Also recently got my hands on the Skick Brothers box and painted all three.

These are definitely the weirdest of the aux headers for me.

Taka/hawk is an interesting case since it’s the only one of any of these headers that actually transforms! The (aux) headers all have moveable parts, but Taka is the only one that appreciably changes its silhouette at all. But Taka is also… kind of weirdly large. Obviously overall volume-wise, you have something real big like sawshark and the other two heads (manta and stag) take up a lot of space… but Taka just kind of feels too big for the animal it is. It’s most notable on the attempted “Another Skick Gosei Great” formations when you try to use it as something other than a head.

Ptera is fine. There’s a t-rex header, so it tracks. The head both turns down and opens up to reveal the gun.

Crow is… I like the choice of a bird that Sentai hadn’t ever used before (aside from being on the 100 Power Animal list)! But (despite the Landick Brothers all being different colors and the Seaick Brothers sharing key colors with some minor variability), they opted for the Skick Brothers to have an extremely uniform color scheme. White and red. And a white crow just kind of feels wrong lol.

Been a bit under the weather, which has kind of caused my eyes to glaze over every time I peak inside my RV Robo box lol. So I’m holding off on building that and V-Rex until I’m feeling better and have just been poking at some simpler projects the past week.

I’ve had my hands on a full Tousai set for awhile now; I originally grabbed one to use the legs for a kitbash (and have, though that project’s been stalled out for awhile). I had wolf and gator painted for awhile (don’t remember if I ever posted pics of them and ZyuohKing 178 here). I had been on the lookout for the boxes I had been missing, wound up with another cheap set.

By virtue of being bulky, as well as having a bunch of easy to paint gold pieces that pop real nicely against the black plastic, he does look nice. There’s a lot of Tousai ZyuOh that kind of makes it one of the more shameless “I’m just here for the ensuing clusterfuck” of sixth mecha, but at the same time it’s still a pretty weird and unique design. And though he barely sort of qualifies since the design mashes up like a dozen different things, he was sort of the first time Sentai did a truck and trailer in *ages* (almost 30 years since the first two second robo were both trucks and trailers) so that counts for something.

These are the multipurpose auxes for my recent Mercury Winger kitbash. The first is Mars Seeker, a drone jet equipped with an AWACS radar unit, which can be deployed as a shield for Mercury Winger. Its sister unit is the Mars Launcher, which is equipped with a high-yield cannon for Mercury Winger.

If I say that these are built on top of Robo Universe arms, it probably makes their future use apparent lol. Beyond that, the canopies are from a Kotobukiya kit. Launcher’s cannon is also Kotobukuya, with wings from a 30MM kit. Seeker’s shield and wings are wholesale from a build divers gunpla add-on. With Mercury Winger using DonMomotaro Alter hands, both the shield and the cannon are adapted for use with Patranger Alter parts.

After finishing the last component for the second robo, it’ll be onto my ambitious carrier idea.

Since I’ll be getting my hands on a Skyick Brothers box, I decided to go ahead and build and paint my Sai and Tyranno Headers (having done Stag back when I got a Gosei Ground). These are actually some of my oldest acquisitions, but like what I used Wonder’s headers for, I was originally holding back on these (particularly Sai) for possible kitbash use.

So here’s Landick Gosei Great and Another Landick Gosei Great (as well as Another without Headers being thrown off).

Despite the fact that the Headers are pretty decently sized, Landick seems a bit odd in that, since the Snake and Tiger headers are nice and beefy so they make good feet, they kind of overshadow Sai and Tyranno a bit.

For Sai, beyond the obvious yellow, I went with the usual metallic black I use on treads etc for those and the drill, since the suit prop isn’t a pure black. Tyranno’s color is a bit inconsistent; its orange in the CG but us also randomly pretty reddish. The suit prop is a kind of copper-orange, so I went with a metallic orange that’s pretty close to it (though I am actually now noticing that the first spine on its neck should be orange too, so will touch that up lol).

Recently got in the Pladelu Drill and Crane set. Considering the limitations of Infinity’s aux vehicles, it probably worked out nicely that suruga-ya didn’t have this in stock at first and I wound up getting the more premium Dolnado between Saber/Laser and this lol.

The Good: The plastic color is a real nice green. The size of these should be appreciated; compared to recent sentai auxes, even these simpler arm parts have all been pretty bulky.

The Not So Good: Again, only one color per, so all the black etc is painted. No movement besides the swivels. Gone is the extending crane of something like the Trigger Machine. This (nor Drill) doesn’t include a new lightbar for the right side of the chest. Only Saber did (and I guess because that’s the only one without any other sort of chestplate being added?). I’ve wound up with extra Saber, so will probably use its extra chest insert to paint whatever assault mode configuration I like the best, whether it’s one of these stock ones or a kitbash I do. The pre-assembled head that came with the Cosmo Gavarion itself was beautiful. Everything since, not so much. But Crane’s head is easily the worst of the bunch. There’s a dot of black paint on the little crane overhand and that is it. The face is completely smooth, which means you’re forced to use a (bad) sticker on what I think is probably the coolest Cosmo Gavarion face. And to top it off, you either have to be careful/lucky putting it on or take the pre-built head apart to get the sticker on well.

The Ugly: You’ll notice the only shot of Cosmo Gavarion &C with the chestplate on is it laying on its back. Which is because the peg is… too small? I haven’t really looked into the issue I’m having much. I watched a youtube vid or two where it seemed to work fine. I’m curious if anyone else here has Crane. Otherwise when I have a chance I’ll try searching around on the Japanese side some to see what’s up.

As I wait for my RV Robo, V-Rex, and more to arrive soon, I’ve (just about) finished up the start of my next kitbash project. It’s a bit of a vaguely 80s-inspired jet robo called Mercury Wing, comprised of Wing 1 (Red), Wing 2 (Blue), Wing 3 (Yellow), Wing 4 (Green), and Wing 5 (Pink).

Part of the project was to see how viable the Robo Universe frame was for kitbashing… and short answer is, not very. There are some very specific ways you could probably leverage the Robo Universe parts, but at the end of the day how they’re basically a skeleton for you to put parts over is really limiting. I wound up kind of throwing in the towel by not using the arms (replacing them with a lightly modified OG Gridman Thunderjet) and being crafty with the moveable parts on Black Daizyujin’s legs to just use them as the basis of very blocky throwback jets. The way I was putting together the puzzle pieces also made it so it was hard for me to work in the fifth component and I had to go in a direction that I’m nominally not much of a fan of, using one component primarily as a weapon - but I supplemented the pink jet as being “necessary” by working both the robo’s feet and head into it.

I still have a bit of touching up to do as I also consider any final tweaks, but I’m pretty happy with how it came out. It’s a bit uneven across each component, but I mostly hit on the intention to do a sort of Bio Robo thing where the jet modes feature a decent bit of white while the robo itself is mostly black - I’m not quite sure I hit the balance of balancing the black on the robo with the 80s blue, I think maybe the chest could have used some more black in the end (especially with how its sternum isn’t visible in jet mode, I could maybe paint the gap between the engine intakes black). And while I think the head looks cool, it’s admittedly a little big - I’ll have to keep that in mind for the future, it’s assembled from a Kotobukiya MSG option parts kit that’s basically mixing-and-matching head parts that I nominally intend to use more of.

GaoGuardian has gotten me really excited to get back to some sort of animal-based project lol, but I’m not done here yet. As I start building and painting recent SMP acquisitions, I have some support jets that make a secondary robo plotted out, as well as some ambitious plans for a carrier robo that I can hopefully pull together. But it’s also entirely possible that you’ll see another black version of an older minipla or something before those lol.

No V-Rex yet (won’t be shipping it in from Japan until RV Robo’s out), but I do have another big boi in the meantime. Assumed that I’d never get my hands on a Lion HaOh because they tend to be incredibly expensive… until I scored one for less than half of the cheapest price I ever saw one going for.

Given all of the plastic being used for the sheer size, he is, at the end of the day, a pretty damn hollow brick. Color separation is… okay-ish. About on par with the Ninninger line in general. Pretty sticker dependent, with a handful of pieces left to be the wrong color. Mine, as always, is painted to favor the show suit in model, which meant just a bit more black over grey and darker treads.

At ~9” tall, LionHaOh is about the same size as Jet Garuda, but about twice as wide lol. He’s 2” shorter than Grand Liner. I think he’s also about the same height as V-Rex, or maybe a little shorter?

Despite being so big, he’s barely big enough. It’s a bit of a pain to get Shurikenjin inside, you need to position the arms (and parts of them, like Dragomaru’s head) just right. GekiatsuDaiOh is a bit more slender and easier to get in (though the attachment point on its back is a bit more finicky). A couple pics of HaOh Gekiatsu DaiOh will come later. When I built my GekiatuDaiOh, I was confused why there was a second face that went on the back of Genbumaru’s face, and now I realized why lmao. I never painted it or put it on (it may have been included on an orange runner? I forgot). So I’ll have to dig up where I put that and paint it.

A recent acquisition inspired me to get around to destickering and painting my Bison King. Unlike the rest of my Ninninger kits (which I all painted while building), this one was acquired secondhand, already built.

As usual, the gold paint really makes everything pop. Aside from a small thing or two, there actually weren’t really any details to add not covered by the stickers (the biggest thing was just painting the Bison Rifle and the backplate/ATV engine their proper silver color).

I opted not to paint Rodeomaru’s face. Way too small for something that’s not visible most of the time. The other sticker left is BisonKing’s chestplate behind the bison head - because the plastic beneath it is a hollow honeycomb.

Giving the kit another appraisal, Rodeomaru’s small size is one of the only real flaws. Because of his sizing for BisonKing, he looks tiny riding the ATV mode. BisonKing of course shares the same flaw as everything else in the line of not being able to move its head. The legs have more articulation than Shurikenjin (especially since the way the feet sort of give him some ankles), though the flip side is the minipla not really having actual upper arms limits what you can do there a bit.

I forgot to take a pic of King Shurikenjin with the Bison-Drago Sword, but that’s included with Bison King Drago. This was the era of the super gattais I like the least, where things just stack together into a monstrosity lol.

Here’s the new Pladelu Gavarion Dolnado, fully painted.

The Dolnado itself looks really damn nice. Definitely closer in quality to the Cosmo Gavarion itself, as opposed to the auxes so far (I’ll grab Crane and Drill eventually when I see them cheap). Like everything else thus far, if you are relying only on stickers, there are going to be a few parts without the full/correct color detail, but I think overall, it’s the most “accurate” Pladelu Neo to date. My only general gripe is two years ago, this would be a minipla with killer articulation in terms of neck movement etc.

I always go for the show suit in terms of color choices. Dolnado, however, is CG-only. Everything on it is basically gold, but it kind of varies because Toei’s CG is inconsistent depending on the lighting it’s being rendered into lol. So I let the DX/weapon prop inform me more here, where there’s a bit of a separation between gold and yellow. I went with a more neon yellow than usual (that actually matched the color of the stickers included) since I felt like it paired with the blue plastic and the vibes of the original Gavan’s Dol pretty nicely. Express is coming next with plenty of gold, anyway.

Despite how good Dolnado itself looks, it unfortunately emphasizes all the problems with the Cosmo Gavarion. As Type KI, the Dolnado parts are way too heavy for the left arm. You are also left managing the tail, shoulder-grip, and backpack wings whenever you want to try and move the arm. Any adjustments to the arm will almost assuredly make the arm (or Dolnado’s tail) fall off, and fixing it runs a high risk of making the backpack fall off and/or the Gavarion’s hips explode (I should probably just glue the hips shut, I think that would solve all those problems without any real drawbacks).

And while the combined Type Dolnado ship mode looks cool (that was the last thing I took photos of, I forgot to put the chest plates back on over the back of Dolnado’s legs), the weight balance is a mess. Dolnado is positioned forward and there’s way too much weight from the Gavarion behind it for it to stay level. I think I just need to find something small to use to prop up the underside of the Gavarion to keep it level.

With all the odd shapes and sizes of the Cosmo Gavarion ship and these later robo modes, the Pladelu would have really benefited from some proper action base compatibility. A peg hole here and there like some of the Sentai minipla featured would go a long way.

Finally decided to get TimeRobo Shadow Alpha together. This wasn’t ready to go when I finished Shadow, as I still had to paint the Pro Divider - it’s an orange-y plastic, like the DX, but I wanted it yellow to match the show prop (shhh, technically I should have painted the helmets yellow, too, but the dull gold plastic is a lot closer than the orange).

Alpha’s hips popping off a couple times when putting it together had be in no mood to transform it into Beta, so I’ll do that another time lol. I usually don’t leave super gattai on my shelf (Super Galaxy Mega being the exception), but this is nice enough to leave for awhile. I’ll probably do the same with Beta for a bit before diverting back to TimeRobo Alpha and Time Shadow being displayed.

The steal among the cube animals 1-6 lot that I bought a little while back was that it included a cube gorilla, who is typically quite the pricy monke. So, while the rest were marked for black customs, gorilla got destickered and a proper paint job.

Some of the recent posts inspired me to fiddle with my Gaoranger SMP. They’ve been on my shelf in their base configurations forever now.

The ability to swap stuff around like this is one of Gao’s stronger appeals, and this does kind of push me a bit more to wanting to grab a dupe or two with the reissues. I think that’s going to mostly depend on the pricing. But the other thing that’s always been a bit of a nagging issue for me with wanting to customize power animals is, whether you are abiding by the official list of 100 power animals or just doing your own thing, a good handful of the components are kind of inflexible for kitbashing.

Gaoranger already has one less pair of legs than it does torso + arms (even if you’re going with centaurus, lion’s still in two places at once) and while bison and rhino are really unique designs for legs, the problem then becomes that you’re pretty damn limited with what you can turn them into lol.

Finally finished my Time Shadow. Well. Mostly. No TimeRobo Shadow yet; the Pro Divider’s orange plastic is to match the DX toy. I’m going to paint mine yellow to match the show prop and may well paint the helmets to do the same.

And here’s my painted Pladelu Saber. I do like this more than Laser, but it needed more paint (including more detailing). Some minor sticker use again - I cut out the wing stickers, the purple on those is surrounded by steel (which the DX is colored, but the series and suit are more silver. The silver canopy details are also freehanded on.

In addition to the purple plastic, the chest plate swap was white plastic.