Dave's WebDiver Rant: W-05 Gradion And, thanks to eBay, I finally have the Big Guy himself. CAPSULE Gradion: Big robot, big train. Robot is pretty poseable, train has some nifty features. Transformation is reasonably complex. However, there's a certain amount of floppiness involved throughout this. The videogame aspect is pretty primitive by console standards, and you really need the weapon figures to give it enough variety to play for more than a few minutes. Recommended, but that does not factor in the large price. 7980 Yen ($64.45 by 6/26/01 conversion). RANT W-05: Gradion Vehicle Mode: Locomotive Fighter Mode: Web Knight Weapon Mode: Not applicable Elements: All four (steam is water plus fire becoming air, metal is earth) This comes in a large box: 17.5"x12.5"x4" (45cm x 32cm x 10cm). It's twist-tied and rubberbanded down to a cardboard tray just like the other WebDiver toys are, no window on the box to show the toy. The premise is that Gradion, with the help of various weapons/allies, fights through a ravaged virtual reality against viral attackers or travels through infected nodes avoiding traps. In addition to the figure are the sword, "shield" (the front part of the train mode) and a 3 meter RCA-adapter cable for plugging the toy into your TV or VCR. I only had a 2-plug VCR, but the lack of the third plug didn't seem to have a significant effect. Fighter Mode: Gradion stands a foot tall (30cm), with half an inch of that being a crest that is lowered when you plug in an ally. It's a bit leggy, but otherwise well-proportioned. The head can turn, and lowering the crest raises a face mask to completely armor Gradion's head. The arms have full poseability, and the knuckles and thumb are also jointed so the hand can open and close. The wrist turns, but only about 90 degrees total. The waist swivels around, the hips have strong ratcheting universal joints, the knees have a double joint so the legs can fold 180 degrees, and the ankles are very floppy. There's heel spurs that pull out to compensate for the hollowness of the heels, correcting a common problem with the larger Takara transforming toys. I refuse to try to describe the color scheme. It's a riotous mass that might blend in at an explosion in a G2 Transformers collection. The dominant tones are purple/dark blue and gold, however. Here's a quick run-down of his visible weapons. He holds the Granblade, which transforms from sword to gun. Missiles are mounted on his forearms, but they are solid blocks and do not launch or remove. Miniblasters are molded into his shoulders (I know they're weapons because he fires them in the game). Plus he carries an unwieldy shield that his hand is not strong enough to hold up, and comprises much of the front end of the train mode. The shield can clip onto the back as well, and acts as a sheath for the Granblade. On his chest are clips for the various partners, and a button that is held down when a partner is clipped on. On his back, inaccessible if the shield is used as a backpack, are the game controls. Four directional buttons and a single fire button that is molded to look like four buttons. The on-off button is recessed a bit so that you don't accidentally activate it. While turned on, a green LED in Gradion's chest is lit up. Shutdown takes a few seconds, so it may not seem to go off right when you push the button. Batteries are inserted by lifting up the head and then lifting another panel under that...I actually had to check the directions for how to insert the batteries, oh the shame. The game cable plugs into the back of Gradion's right hip, and it terminates in an "RCA" style end, with white, yellow and red plugs. One video, two sound. I was able to get away with just white and yellow for video and mono-sound. Transformation: The instructions are a bit unclear, but if you go by the theory of "move everything that can move, bend everything that can be bent," you'll be most of the way there. }-> If you transform it while it is plugged into the TV, you get a nifty montage of transformation animation. However, if you take too long, it may freeze, as it did for me (maybe it was the transform/reverse transform I kept doing to the arms that crashed it). The shoulders are VERY stiff in transformation. It's difficult to get Gradion's head completely tucked away, I've already got some paint wear on his helmet from rolling the train along. Vehicle Mode: 13" long (33cm), 4" high and 4" wide (10cm), it's a futurized classic steam locomotive engine with a game pad on top of it. The nifty feature mentioned in the capsule is the middle set of wheels, three on a side. They're linked like steam engine wheels, with bars that slide back and forth as the wheels turn. Nifty chugging-along look. Once you get the head out of the way (which I still can't completely do with consistency) it rolls freely. The wheels aren't all the same distance apart, so it can't actually run on rails. And now...the games! As mentioned earlier, you can get animation of the transformation sequence by transforming the toy while the game is on. I haven't tried transforming during a game, I suspect it would either be ignored or cause Bad Things to happen. If you activate the LED in one of the other figures and point it at the receiver on Gradion's chest, you get to talk to that character, more or less. Its stats show on the screen, and its mouth (mouths in the case of the doggies) moves while lots and lots of Japanese scrolls along the bottom. Once you've read its story, you get to play a little game with its image. It's one of those slider puzzles with the missing piece. The image is broken into 9 pieces, one is removed, and the rest are scrambled. Then, using the arrow keys, you try to unscramble the image. Hitting the fire button at any time will quit out of this. Cerberion and Orthrion each have two options in this section. By pointing the "turret" LED towards their beast heads, you trigger the individual figure stats and story (you also need to have it in this direction to get any weapon going in the fighting game). If pointed towards the weapon tip, however, you get Golem-on with the appropriate head. If you hit fire while in the train mode, you get to play the train race game. Level 1 is a tutorial level, so even if you can't read the instructions (or don't have them), you get told how to work the game. Each level after that gives you 60 seconds to reach the end. Fire button is the throttle, and only the side to side buttons work for movement. There's only three tracks to be on, and big Evil Microchip traps block one or two of these tracks at a time. It's kind of like the trench sequence in the original Star Wars arcade game, but with no shooting, and in third person viewpoint. Hey, I'm 30, I get to make dated references like that. In level 2, the red evil chips are fixed on location and visible coming onto the screen. In level 3, purple chips start randomly falling, giving less time to dodge them. I quit at the end of level 3 (it's not terribly exciting), but I doubt it gets too much more complicated after that. Maybe the chips jump sideways. Over in fighter mode, you get a pretty basic shooting game. Again, level 1 is a tutorial, although it doesn't cover add-on weapons. Every fight is essentially the same. Gradion is on one side of a crevasse, an evil Deletros virus (thanks to Doug Dlin for the name) is on the other. There's three colors of Deletros, representing higher levels of toughness. They shoot four different kinds of shot (straight, v-shot, wobbly shot, stronger straight) or don't shoot at all in level 2. At higher levels, the Deletros can vary their shot type, earlier they only have one. The Deletros moves back and forth, while Gradion can move side to side or forward and back a little. When hooked up to an external weapon, however, Gradion can only move side to side. After killing a certain number of Deletros, you go on to the next level. Your health level does not seem to regenerate significantly during the game. You get a free pause when adding or removing an external weapon. Without externals, Gradion has two weapons. Little energy blasts fired from his chest are the basic weapon, and it takes forever to kill even a wimpy Deletros with this. If you raise his right arm, a power scale around his health bar starts to rise. You can't fire at all while it rises, and if you jostle the arm you have to start all over. Plus, you have to re-crank the arm each time, you can't just leave it in this mode. Once the power bar fills, you can fire a single burst of missiles (the forearm missiles) that does a decent amount of damage. Any weapon has a chance of hitting incoming shots and overwhelming them. If you plug in a helper, the game pauses so you can push the button and send the LED signal to Gradion letting it know which one is plugged in. You have to let it know again at the start of each round, as the game assumes you took the round break to swap weapons. Taking advantage of this, I found a nice trick to keep from having to futz with the helpers while playing. Shark-on's clip is part of his shield, so you can put that on Gradion without putting the rest of Shark-on on. On. Er...anyway, this lets you just beam the relevant weapon onto Gradion at the start of the round, and you can pull the shield back a little to trigger a change during a round. Most of the figures don't have to be transformed at all to use this trick. When a partner is plugged in, you can ONLY use that weapon, the other weapons are offline. Oh, and forget about using the GranBlade, you need to buy the 3800 Yen kid-sized GranBlade toy in order to use it in the game. One key to using these weapons is to wait for the power bar to fill up before hitting the fire button to restart the game after the weapon addition pause. You can dive right in, but then you have to dodge while powering up. W-01 Jagua-on: This weapon is a sort of energy machinegun, a more powerful version of the default weapon. However, it only uses up power slowly, unlike the other weapons, so you can just fire short bursts and not run down to zero on the power scale. You can move while firing this, making it a decent utility weapon. W-02 Shark-on: A big water cannon. It's all or nothing, and you cannot move while firing. It's strong, but you need to have good aim and timing to use it effectively, and it regenerates power slowly. W-03 Griffi-on: This fires a pair of homing energy spheres. The closer you are to the Deletros when you fire, the more likely each is to hit, and the more quickly they do so. There's no power regeneration on this weapon, but you can't fire again until both shots have either hit or drifted off screen. Obviously, this is a weapon for people who prefer dodging over aiming. W-04 Garyuun: Okay, the ultrabeam fired by this cannon can probably wipe out any Deletros if the Deletros is on-beam the entire time. Most of the ones I could hit were vaped before the beam had been on a quarter of its total time. However, it fires a second or so *after* you push the button, and you cannot move while it fires. Hitting anything after level 3 takes more skill and more luck than I have. A good weapon for those who enjoy the challenge of hair-thin firing margins. W-06 Phoenic-on: Flamethrower, natch. When you hit fire, you get several seconds of flame blast as the power bar goes down. You can't do short bursts like with Jagua-on, however. But unlike Shark-on, you can move while it fires, letting you hose down the enemy. It's a pretty strong attack, holding the flame on a foe for the entire time can blow any of them up, but you'll usually only get part of the blast on target due to dodging. A very nice weapon. W-07 Cerberion: The buzzsaw blade launches at the Deletros, with very minor homing abilities (mainly, if it hits it follows the target for a second or two). No power regeneration involved, you just can't fire again until the blade comes back to you. The blade seems to hook to the right more often than to the left, but that may just be chance. A weird weapon, not necessarily very effective. Note that you need the turret of Cerberion pointed in the right direction to activate the weapon, as Golem-on does not provide a weapon. W-08 Orthrion: The drillbit launches as a missile, which slams into the Deletros and keeps drilling until the enemy can step aside or is destroyed. A new drillbit emerges from the launcher as the powerbar rises, and it regenerates very quickly. A very direct weapon, but strong and quick. And that's all for the games, for now. If I get anything else that triggers weapons, such as W-10 Doragon (Drag-on?), I'll discuss its game effects in the review for that toy. W-11 and W-12 are add-ons to a new guy, W-14 Daitalion, who himself forms a big missile platform for Gradion. He's almost as big as Gradion, but with no game built in, so he's "only" 5980 Yen. Overall: Webdiver is an expensive line to get into, and nowhere moreso than with Gradion itself. It's certainly a novel idea, but Japanese inflation makes the toys too expensive for anyone on a real budget (it's 123 Yen to the dollar, but a toy that would be $10 in the U.S. is 2200 Yen in Japan, around 18 bucks). Worth getting if you have money to burn, however. Be warned, I was lucky in getting it on eBay for effectively shelf price. Otherwise, you'll be paying airmail shipping through hlj.com or markup anywhere else. Dave Van Domelen, very glad the cable was 3 meters long, since he can't comfortably get closer than 2 meters to his TV, thanks to clutter....