#ganbaruger

close up of giant robot hands are great.

Moderoid Genki Bakuhatsu Gekiryuger / Chou Miracle Gattai Great Gambaruger

Here we go! I originally decided to pick up all the Gambaruger kits because I was curious how much cheating they’d have to do to achieve a posable Great Gambaruger. You know how much? A LOT. Kinda turns me off going for the anime accurate transforming or combining Moderoids in the future, but I’m glad I got to experience this for myself rather than just relying on photos.

The Good: This was an interesting build, quite a bit going on when it comes to jointage and transformation components. They did a good job of giving both of Gekiryuger’s modes decent posability. It’s transformation is also pretty accurate to the original toy, losing a few parts when going from Dragon to Fighter for screen accuracy, but not many.

It’s also capable of transforming into Great Gambaruger without that many adapters. It still requires a few, but you can for the most part replicate the toys’ combination, with a lot of extra parts to help achieve anime accuracy.

And this isn’t a good or bad thing, just something I find funny: it comes with so many tiny runners. It literally goes from A-to-Z, then has to do ZA, ZB, and ZC, and there are still 3 parts that come off-runner (the two waists and sword). It’s kind of ridiculous seeing them all laid out, especially because there aren’t that many pre-applied paint decals or different colors.

The Bad: The cheating is a big, but understandable thing, but it leaves a ton of extra parts lying around, even before exchanging bits for anime accuracy. I managed to fill a Ziploc with them.

An issue both Gekiryuger Fighter Mode and Great Gambaruger share is balance; they don’t have great heals, and are both back heavy. Great Gamba’s Anine heals fix this issue, but but he teeters a lot without them. There are also quite a few weird connections and joint mechanisms you have to take apart where I worry they might break if transformed too much.

Also, that sword guard is too big.

The Details: I mostly stuck to the stickers, and there weren’t that many areas to panel line, though I did where I could. There were also a handful of spots where I used black fill or painted a part black, but it was just, like, the dragon head and the cannon barrels.

Overall, it’s fine. I was expecting the cheating, but I wish it wasn’t as much, or wasn’t required as much for Great Gamba when it tries to mimic the toy. Still, if I wanted to track down the DX, it’d probably cost me somewhere around $500, so this is a welcome alternative.

Moderoid Genki Bakuhatsu Gambaruger

After a month of Sentai knock-offs, let’s get back to some model kits! Again, I don’t have a lot of knowledge about the Eldran series, but I do enjoy me a good Super Robot. And I enjoyed Raijin-Oh, too, so I was hoping this would be a similar experience.

The Good: This thing does a lot, and there’s a lot to talk about. There are three modes, so we’ll start with the Animal Modes since that’s what you’re encouraged to build. Go Tiger, being the team leader, has the most love put into it. With a complete replacement for its lower half, it tries its hardest to be screen accurate of all the Gambers in both Animal and Fighter modes. Though its standard legs can still form a toy accurate rear end.

Mach Eagle is surprisingly good, too. It has just enough movement in the wings, and since its legs are formed from Gambaruger’s arms they have a lot of articulation. King Elephant suffers the most in Animal Mode, but is still a solid block of pachyderm.

Again, Go TIger has the best individual Fighter Mode. Fully posable arms and legs, good range in the head and waist. He also has the option of having the toy accurate cannons or tiger head on his back, which were not present on the animation model.

Mach Eagle’s Fighter Mode has a good range of motion in the legs for the same reason as its Animal Mode. Its arms don’t have elbows, but do have a good amount of range in the shoulders. King Elephant also lacks knees and elbows, but has good hips and shoulders to compensate.

When fully combined, Gambaruger is a very solid piece. Raijin-Oh has some stability issues when it comes to its backpack and shoulders, but those types of problems are much more minor on this release, and are not in any areas that would cause it to fall apart. Forming a cohesive figure that combines from several others feels like the overall goal of this line, whereas Raijin-Oh was a little more focused on a cohesive transformation.

The Bad: And Gambaruger lacks a cohesive transformation. This thing cheats like a delinquent high schooler. And I understand this is too maintain screen accuracy, but I feel Raijin-Oh was able to accomplish screen accuracy and a complete transformation much better than here.

Ignoring the swappable waist, Go Tiger’s neck has to be swapped out between modes, and when you go to Fighter Mode, you can only store either the cannons or tiger head on its back, and not both like the toy its trying to emulate. Mach Eagle is the only one that stores all its parts in both its modes (you have to attach the front of its waist, which stores on its tail). And King Elephant does not have hands.

And if you’re trying to go from the three separate robots to Gambaruger, you still need to add or remove a bunch of parts, even if you avoid the screen accurate ones.

And there’re so many leftover parts. Granted, they made a weird spear thing out of a bunch of them, but it’s only comprised of about half the parts.

The Details: I actually wasn’t planning on painting Gambaruger. I was going to put the stickers on and be done with it, adding panel lining to the few points I could (like the horns). But the stickers weren’t great and started peeling very quickly, so I ended up painting a lot of the details on (not much more than the stickers, though). The ones I did use were the red ones on the tips of the wings (because I felt paint would scrape off if I was pulling them in and out), and all the yellow ones (because painting yellow on black sucks).

I painted the black on Go TIger’s forearms, his waist, and his knees. I painted Mach Eagle’s wings red, and tail blue and red to match the stickers, then added black on the top of its shoulders and in its wing guns to add some pop. And I put a little black inside King Elephant’s trunk. As for the accuracy parts, I painted part of the new backpack component black, and painted the front of the new waist piece.

Overall, this is definitely a give and take over Raijin-Oh. Gambaruger has a very solid combination and is very screen accurate, but at the cost of a cohesive transformation. If you don’t mind the cheating it does, I think you’ll enjoy it, but if that kind of thing bugs you then you might want to try Raijin-Oh first, or look elsewhere.