Dave's Car Robots Rant: Gigatron (D-001) Well, I've had enough time to play with the other half of my purchase from wizzywig.com, so here's the review. CAPSULE: Well, he's a sixchanger, he's poseable, and at least some of his modes are pretty good. However, some parts tend to fall off, his ankles are weak in robot mode, and his Gigabat mode plain stinks. Overall still a pretty good toy. Recommended. 2980 Yen (about $27.60), $45 plus shipping at Wizzywig.com, $50-$60 plus shipping most other places. RANT: DESTRONGER: Gigatron Function: Dark Emperor of Destruction Altmodes: Bat, Dragon, Jet, Car, Demonic Hand A god of destruction who rules the Destrongers, the elite forces of the cosmic devils [known as] the Destrons. As a top Destron soldier, he has participated in numerous battles over the years. Under those severe conditions, he gained the technology for his sextuple transformations. [Translation courtesy of Doug Dlin.] All stats are 10. Gigatron comes boxed in robot mode. The box is a bit bigger than it has to be to hold the toy, possibly to compete for shelf space. Takara continues to follow Hasbro's lead, as Gigatron is held down with five twist-ties and bound by four rubber bands. Now, if you were to hold a contest for the best transforming toy with more than three intentional modes, the list of contestants would be pretty short. Sixshot and Quickswitch, plus Japanese recolors Sixknight, Greatshot and Shadow-Maru. Add in Sevenchanger from one of the Brave series and that's more or less it before Gigatron. All of the previous multichangers were essentially bricks, maybe with movable arms and neck. They also tended to stretch it a bit for some of the modes. Gigatron is highly poseable, but does fall prey to the second flaw of the multichangers. [OOPS. Forgot about four-mode Optimal Optimus and his upcoming recolor.] Gigatron's instructions cover both sides of a 12"x16" sheet of paper, with little cramped diagrams to cover six transformations. Like Sixshot's instructions, the designers walk you through a tour of all six modes in one order rather than trying to cover all possibilities. So, if you want to transform directly from robot to car, you'll have to figure it out for yourself or go through several intermediate transformations. Fortunately, most of the modes are simple enough that once you transform through the sequence once or twice you can easily get to any mode from any other mode. UNfortunately, the instructions seem to rely more heavily on text than most, there's a few tricks I'm still not sure I've figured out and which I suspect are explained in the text. I'll point out a few of the less obvious ones that I've worked out as I go. Gigatron's main colors are black and slightly sparkly purple with a fair amount of translucent red, chrome gold, non-chrome gold and non-chrome silver. There's a bit of chrome purple on the wings of his helmet, and some metallic blue and green on his chest over the non-chrome silver. The outer two panels of his wings are translucent violet, and his robot eyes are chrome red. Gigatron's main weapons are a pair of missile launchers that use the marble-shooter (Cyberjet) style of launching. You push down on a button and the missile pops out, but not very far. The launchers can be joined together as a staff in robot mode, held as swords, or mounted as either launchers or exhaust trails in other modes. Fully opened, Gigatron's wings measure 15" (40cm) across. Furled, they're 8" (20cm) across. Rather than give these measurements each time, I'll just say what state the wings are supposed to be in. And, while I'm covering common stuff, let's look at a couple of frustrating pieces. The robot feet are dragon heads, and there's a cover on each foot to conceal the dragon face. These covers are just snapped on rather than held on by metal joint pegs, and they tend to snap off during transformation or casual handling. Continuing with the feet, the ankle joints are very weak for such a large toy, being just ball joints with a fair amount of freedom. This hurts the stability of the robot mode, although no other mode depends on these feet for standing. Finally, the dragon mode's tiny little T.rex-ish forearms pop off their ball joints very easily and are a real pain to put back on, especially in modes where they're partly covered by other pieces. Gigatron Mode: This is the robot mode. He stands 7" (18cm) tall at the head, but the wings rise over his shoulders to add about another inch to total height. His wings are generally furled. While his shoulders and hips at first look like large ball joints, they're actually ratcheting universal joints of pretty good stiffness. Elbows and knees are also ratcheting joints. Upper arms and thighs have swivel joints for added posability. Wrists are swivels, but the dragon feet hanging off the forearms get in the way of moving them if they're holding a weapon. As mentioned above, the ankles are ball joints, and there's two hinges to each foot. To get any real stability out of the ankles, though, you have to pose Gigatron standing with knees bent so that he rocks forwards as far as the ball joints will allow (you can also put one leg forward so the ball joint rocks as far back as possible, but this is less stable). The head turns, but the big wings on the helmet constrain this some. In this mode, his Predacon-style Destronger spark crystal is rightside up and clearly visible. He has a bit of kibble in the form of his jet cockpit hanging down his back...it's important to have its sliding joint base in the right position to lock his wings in place. Overall, this mode looks very nice and is quite poseable with only minor kibble problems, but the ankles are a serious problem. Gigabat: Wings extended, he's a mere 5" (13cm) from foot to the top of his head, basically a block of spare parts with wings and a cheesy looking bat muzzle folded up over his face. Unless you have really long fingernails, you'll need a tool of some sort (the missiles do okay for this) to fish out the bat muzzle, which seems to have been inspired by Animorphs Tobias. In this mode, the launchers mount on the top of the wings. Gigabat is the clear loser mode of the batch. He's even more blocky than Mindwipe, and Mindwipe has the excuse of being a Headmaster. Gigadragon: If they were to have made this only a triplechanger, you can bet Gigadragon would have been one of the three modes, at least judging from Galvatron. Robot arms become lower legs, the stubby forearms mentioned earlier come out, and the robot legs become twin dragon necks/heads. From snout to tail tip, Gigadragon measures 12" (31cm) long, and wings are extended. It's an okay mode, although the weak legs and top-heavy construction tend to make it a bit unstable. When transforming to this mode, you have to flip the wings around to a new configuration, and there's a rather stiff short joint that needs to pop up as part of this. The main pain of this transformation, however, is the stubby forelegs. They need to be unfolded via rotation in a cramped space, and the stiff elbow joint is a LOT stronger than the floppy shoulder joint, resulting in the limb popping off half the time. And as easy as it is to pop it off, it's that much harder to get it back ON. Gigajet: 10" (26cm) long, wings extended. This is a mode that simply doesn't know what to do with the robot legs. They sort of fold over the top to act as engines or something, but this is a case where the stiff ratcheting joints make it almost impossible to get the legs into the right position. You also have to know that there's a double joint in the knees, one that causes the main knee to pop away from the shin so that the legs can be folded double. And this also ratchets. While massaging the legs into position, you stand a really good chance of popping the foot covers off, and putting them back on requires undoing the work you've just finished of positioning the legs. Argh. The robot arms fold down to the sides to become the rear landing wheels (there's wheels on the forearms), and the nosewheel stores in the robot's chest. The robot arms don't really peg into place and kinda flop around a bit, unfortunately. The launchers plug in ahead of the shoulders, though, and help restrict the arms' movement. The result, if you can actually get everything in the right place, looks pretty neat. But it's quite frustrating to get to. Gigaformula: 11.5" (29cm) long, 5" (13cm) wide car, no wings. Like Sixshot's car mode, it's basically "there's four wheels, so it's a car." The rear assembly involves pegging together the robot arms and legs (and using that extra knee joint) and a lot of massaging to get the ratchets to all line up. The front wheels are on the wings, but I can't seem to get them to fold into the right position. I suspect this is something where reading Japanese would help a lot. Hmm, lemme try again...AHA! There's a peg on the nose section that plugs into a hole on the wing piece and holds it in the right position. Once you figure out all the pegging and mangling and stuff, you're rewarded with a fairly nifty looking Batmobile-ish car with almost NO ground clearance (doesn't help that the front wheels scrape in their own wheel wells). It's fairly stable and looks good, but it doesn't really roll very well. Still, once you do succeed in getting it into this mode, it's pretty clear that you've gotten it right. Gigahand: Okay, for those of you wondering what the deal is here, giant, flying demonic hands seem to be a feature of Japanese folklore. Maybe not a real common one, but this mode isn't simply the result of some Takara engineer getting a hit from some really good weed. Fully opened, the handspan is 11" (28cm). The robot arms and legs all form fingers, and the cockpit/dragontail becomes the thumb, which is more or less opposable. The wings just sort of sit there furled to the sides, and the launchers become jet exhaust for this thing's ability to fly around grabbing people. I did some estimations, and if this hand were actually a component of a human-proportioned combiner team, the complete toy would be between 7 and 8 feet (2.1-2.4 meters) tall. As with the jet, the robot arms aren't really fixed in place very well, and as a result the fingers can splay apart in weird ways. Bad-weird. However, the Gigahand does have one gimmick all to itself. You lift up the codpiece of the robot mode and it becomes a lever. Crank the lever and the Gigahand's fingers all curl down as a group. Start with the fingers posed correctly, and the Gigahand can grab a hapless Cybertron and crush him! For those who are wondering, the Gigahand is poseable enough to replicate most hand gestures. Including the Gigabird. And you get to choose if he's a right hand or a left hand, the thumb will position either way. Oh, and I just checked, it can hold Shockwave and even pull the trigger. Overall, the Gigahand is weird in a good way, and a rather creative altmode of a sort we haven't really seen before. Talk to the Gigahand! Dave Van Domelen, "What is the sound of one Gigahand crushing?"