Toybox REVIEW: Engine Sentai Go-Onger mini-pla Kyoretsu-Oh

Dinosaurs are awesome. And trains are pretty damn awesome too. So by that logic, dinosaur trains must be something pretty damn special. The final mecha in the Go-Onger line up - Kyoretsu-Oh, the "Powerful King of Trains is made up of the three ancient engines Kishamoth, T-Line and K-Line and primarily piloted by Go-On Red. This candy toy assortment comes in 4 boxes - 2 for Kishamoth, and one each for T-Line and K-Line. This review is of the Hong Kong release of the figure (much like my earlier Engine-Oh review) and so any quality issues I stress may not affect the Japanese release - but in this instance they will affect my overall rating at the end of the review.

Being made of 2 different boxes, Kishamoth is obviously the largest and most complex of the 3 ancient engines. At twice the length and about 3 times the mass of the other 2, Kishamoth has an impressive level of detail for a candy toy - complete with moveable tusks and a retractable trunk. While smaller and far more simplistic, K-Line and T-Line are also excellent for their size - although mainly for the robot mode, having moveable jaws in engine mode is a nice little touch. What's great about these figures is that they need barely any paint to look good - other than K-Line's tusks and horns (which look much better painted gold, but there are stickers if you'd prefer) the stickers nicely cover all the excess detailing, and the wraparound stickers are too cumbersome for once.

As well as being able to combine together in robot mode, the 3 train modes can also attach (as trains would) to create a larger train, with T-Line and K-Line serving as the carriages. It's not much to look at, but at the same time its a nice little extra and accurate to the characters' appearance in the show.

To combine the 3 engines in Kyoretsu-Oh, Kishamoth requires quite a bit of parts swapping and moving about (which is well illustrated in the instructions), while the other two fold out to form the legs (with the jaws fully opening to create stable feet). In its combined form Kyoretsu-Oh's huge mass really help make it look the strongest and most imposing of the 4 Go-Onger mecha. With articulation in the head, shoulders, elbows, waist, hips and knees, the figure is also capable of a wide variety of poses that other versions of the mecha can only dream of. Its somewhat disappointing that there is no weapon for Kyoretsu-Oh nor do his hands have any articulation, but at the same time he didn't use any weapons in the show so its accurate in that respect. The waist joint on my figure is a little loose, but other than that the figure is nice and sturdy due to its size and maintains any pose I put it in.

As this is the last release in the Go-Onger candy toy line, also included are instructions to make Engine G-12. As I currently don't own Gunbir-Oh, I can't comment on how that form looks, but you can draw your own conclusions from any google search.

I really like Kyoretsu-Oh. I don't know if its just because its a love of both dinosaurs/prehistoric animals and trains combined, but the figure itself is excellent and lacks any of the problems I found with my Engine-Oh candy toy. The only real problem is that without any definitive weapons or hand posing, action posing is a little thin on the ground for the figure. Still, it looks absolutely fantastic in both modes, and is definitely worth a place on anyone's Power Rangers/Super Sentai shelf, with or without its Go-Onger buddies.