Other Stuff Monthly #3

I'm not sure how to write well about toys, so you'll have to forgive me if this post isn't great. But hopefully it's something I'll get used to and figure out over time, okay? Anyway, this post is about a figure from the 1994 anime series Haou Taikei Ryu Knight. The series is a fantasy mecha show, that occasionally throws a bit of wild west stuff in there too. It's nothing spectacular, but it's decent enough. If someone had dubbed it into english and had it broadcast in the US or UK at 6am, I'm sure it would've been a cult hit that a few people remembered and loved to this day.

The protagonist party in the show all fit into typical RPG classes, like knight, mage, ninja, and most pertinent to this post, priest. They all also have giant robots called Ryus, that are thematically appropriate to their character class. What I have in this post is the Ryu Priest Baurus action figure, accompanied by a smaller, unarticulated figure of its pilot, the priest Izumi. Getting Izumi out of the way, in terms of toyeticity, he's kind of superfluous here: nicely sculpted and painted, but unarticulated and not to scale with his mecha. Thinking like a kid, though, if you had a bunch of the other figures, having the pilots with them, even in this form, would add a lot of between-battle play value.

Onto the main figure: it's pretty good! I'm missing a couple of pieces (the big tall priest hat, and a part to attach unused weapons to the figure's back), but it's not too big a deal. It occupies a space between model kit and normal action figure, which I guess must have been a common trait for kids' mecha shows in the early 1990s, as I remember having, when I was a kid, a Samurai Pizza Cats figure that I later learned was an imported and repackaged Japanese toy. So the figure comes mostly pre-assembled, apart from weapons and a few details, and it can also be dismantled to a certai extent, too.

You might expect this hybrid approach to result in great articulation, but while there are some points you wouldn't have normally seen on regular action figures of this period, like in the middle of the feet, there's also some weird omissions of joints you'd think would be mandatory. The most glaring of these is the lack of elbow joints, especially since the figure comes with multiple weapon options (a large club, two smaller clubs, and a shield), that can be health in either hand. Speaking od which, the hands are pretty interesting: they're in a weapon-holding position that similar to what you'd see on Gunpla. The difference is that this toy is skewed towards a younger audience, and towards play more than display. So the hands are made of a slightly flexible rubber/plastic, making it easy to change what they're holding.

How do I end a review of a toy? I don't know, I guess I'll just say that I really like the squat, cute mecha designs of this series, and they do make for great-looking toys. I also think that as a kid, the lack of elbow joints would have annoyed me, but not enough for it to be a deal-breaker. That's all I've got, really: it's a pretty good toy, but it definitely could have been better.

Dragonball Z (Plug and Play)

So, back in the mid-00s, there were a lot of these licensed plug and play joystick things, usually shaped like a character from a show they were based on, and more interestingly, containing one or more completely new 2D games! Though there's recently been talk of a lot of plug and plays actually being famiclones, with brand new, officially licensed Famicom games still being written because of them, as far as I can tell, these Jakks Pacific ones aren't famiclones. The games are too colourful, the sprites are too big, and so on.

This one was shaped like Shenron, and contained three games, all of which vary in both quality and thematic appropriateness. We'll get the worst and least fitting out of the way first, with "Kamehameha Assault". This is Dragonball Z-themed Pong. You pick one of five characters (Goku, Vegeta, Piccolo, Cell, and Buu), then you hit a green energy orb back and forth while also shooting energy blasts at each other. Each of the two characters has some of the Dragonballs behind them, and every time one of them gets hit by the green orb, it goes over to the other character's side. When one character has all seven, they win. It really is just fancy pong where you can also shoot each other a bit. It's definitely not fast or exciting enough to be considered a Windjammers-alike.

Next up is the most thematically appropriate of the three games, and while it is better than Kamehameha Assault, it's not by a great amount. Its name is Buto-Retsuden (fighting fighting legend? Am I reading that right?), and it's a fighting game. The roster is the same five characters as before, and it looks and feels like a poor imitation of the Super Butoden games. Except there's no special move inputs, beyond, say, forward+attack. Also, all the attacks, even the supers, do a pathetically tiny amount of damage and the fights feel like they last for hours. As a result, I never even managed to finish a credit of this, win or lose. By the halfway point of the second fight's first round, I was losing the will to live every time, and just quit.

Finally, we've got the best game of the three, and while it doesn't fit the theme particularly well, it's pinball, and basing pinball tables on things no matter what they are is a grand old tradition dating back to colonial times, at least. Also, the ball launch mechanism is Goku charging and firing a Kamehameha, which is a nice little touch. It clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Devil Crush, with the basic structure being a three-screen-tall main table, with entrances to seven bossfight bonus tables hidden around the place, and enemies marching up and down the place waiting to be smashed by the ball. Of course, every time you beat one of the bosses, the ball turns into a dragonball for you to take to goku up at the top of the table. Get them all to summon Porunga (since this table is set on Namek, during the Freeza arc) for lives and points and such.

Pinball isn't a spectacular game, but it's not awful, either, and it's a lot better than the other two games on here. Whether or not it's worth the price of admission depends on how much that price is. The going rate on ebay at the time of writing seems to be £10-20, which is far, far too much. If you see one of these for a pittance in a charity shop, though, the pinball game will give you half an hour's fun before you put the stick on a shelf, where it will at least make a fairly nice ornament forevermore.