Saturday, 27 August 2011

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



The third mecha in Engine Sentai Go-Onger's hefty mecha line-up, Seiku-Oh is the combination of the engines Jum-bowhale, Toriptor and Jetras, and is piloted by the Go-On Wings (Go-On Gold and Silver, who were also my favourite characters in the series). Toriptor is Gold's engine, Jetras is Silver's, and Jum-bowhale does not have a pilot. This candy toy comes in 3 boxes - one for each engine. However it should be noted that because of Jum-bowhale's size, his wings are included with Toriptor and Jetras rather than his own box.

While the candy toys require a varying amount of paint to look semi show accurate, out of the ones I've come across so far Toriptor is by far the one that needs the most paint to look even remotely good. The red wraparound stickers are poorly cut and don't cover half as much as they need to, and the helicopter rotor blades look plain stupid in gold plastic with single silver stickers stuck on. I'm not entirely happy with my finished Toriptor, but adding red, white, black and silver paint to him has made him look far better than he would have otherwise. Jetras on the other hand doesn't need any paint to look good, and Jum-bowhale only needs a spot of blue and black paint if you really want to add it, and would probably look just as good without it. The stickers on my release of the toy are extremely poor, nearly ripping when taken off the sticking sheet and having incredibly poor adhesive. The toys themselves are pretty good, if a bit static. While Jetras doesn't really have any particular features, Toriptor includes spinning rotor blades and Jum-bowhale's wings are hinged.

On the subject on Jum-bowhale, the sheer size of him is extremely impressive for a one box candy toy, towering over any of the other releases I have (except perhaps Kishamoth, but Jum-bowhale is far wider than him). To transform the 3 engines into Seiku-Oh, Jum-bowhale's head is removed and the tail is split apart to form the legs. After bringing the figure upwards the wings are rotated to form the shoulders and the whale head is attached to the torso. Toriptor and Jetras and stretched out and form the arms of the robot.

While very accurate to the show model, I've always found Seiku-Oh to be a bit lacking. The body is made up of entirely one robot, and the arms don't have any visible hands or features, and simply look like vehicles attached as arms rather than have any sort of proper transformation. Seiku-Oh's legs are of a very strange design, but still maintain a great amount of posability. Posing the arms is a bit more difficult due to the limitations of the shoulders, but even then you can get a pretty good variety of poses out of it. Toriptor and Jetras can also be attached to the Engine-Oh candy toy (as shown below), and the figure also includes instructions to make Engine G9 using Engine-Oh and Gunbir-Oh.

Seiku-Oh is certainly the weakest of the 4 Go-Onger mecha, and its definitely reflected in this release. Combined with the poor sticker quality and extra amount of detailing Toriptor needed, this is certainly one of the weaker candy toys Bandai have put out in recent years.


2 comments:

amauryons said...

Wow....
It is so wonderful toy.

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Anonymous said...

Do you have any size comparisons between this mini pla figure and some BoA retrofires? I'm doing some custom work and want to see if its worth the money to buy parts from this figure, in case they don't fit. Thanks!