TigerLance + MilNeedle / Kishiryu-Oh Five Knights
I’m actually really glad to get more Kishiryu. While I like Tyramigo, just having the few plugs, Triken, and Ankirose doesn’t do a good job of showing off the customization aspect of the Ryusoulger line. With TigerLance and MilNeedle those options open up drastically, and I’m happy to see how grand the potential for this line is moving forward. At this point I can only imagine what people will be able to make by the end of the series.
Kishiryu-Oh Five Dragons
The Good: The increased size, and additionally parts count, of TigerLance and MilNeedle do a lot for the aforementioned customization aspect of the Kishiryu. With each coming with seven parts compared to the previous releases four, just one of them alone opens up a large number of combination possibilities. This is by far the biggest draw of the line, an amount of interplay between toys that is exponentially higher than any other Super Sentai release to come before it.
It also helps that TigerLance and MilNeedle are more complex than Triken and Ankirose, as they have new varieties of parts as well, such as ones that transform or ones that can be held instead of mounted. That complexity is reflected in their size, too, as they scale much better next to Tyramigo than the diminutive blue and pink Zords. And you have to remember that with all five Kishiryu together you have six different canon Megazord combinations with five unique head sculpts.
Kishiryu-Oh Heavy Armor
The Bad: But I have a lot of issues, not with the toys themselves (mostly), but with the canon transformations. None of the three are very intuitive to combine, partly due to some parts like TigerLance’s legs and MilNeedle’s back spines having specific orientations to them. There’s also the fact that none of the three forms you can make with these two use all of their parts, either dropping half each of Triken and Ankirose or half the overall parts count to make Five Knights. And don’t even get me started on Five Knights because it is a very bad combination. Because of the giant T-Rex shield it becomes very front heavy and has a tendency to fall forward, especially if you also have him raising his sword. My recommendation would be to use some of the leftover parts to create a counterbalance on its back to prevent it falling if you want to display it like that.
And one last issue I have relating to the parts is the knees. See those knees right above here? Doesn’t that look good and like it should naturally fit there, maybe for a future combination? Nope. Those are not flush to the legs, meaning that positioning them like this stresses the connection ports. You can still put them on the knees like I showed with Kishiryu-Oh Heavy Armor, but I suggest you do not display them like the above unless you want them to either break or not connect anymore in time.
Kishiryu-Oh Go-Style (specific Kishiryu on a single limb only)
The Ugly: Now, The Ugly does not specifically relate to these toys, but to the longevity of the line as a whole. I have noticed a little looseness as I was messing with these guys and putting these combinations together. Now, nothing has broken, and all my connections still hold, but this continues to raise the concerns I’ve had about how long these connections will hold out before they end up breaking and this toy looses all that fun interplayability I mentioned upfront. Hopefully it’s nothing and things continue to work fine for many years, but I’ll certainly keep posting about anything I notice as I review more of these in the future. (I’m pretty sure I’m going completionist this year.)
Overall, these might be the most interesting Super Sentai toys they’ve made so far. They make me excited for what we’ll have by the end of Q4 and what we’ll be able to put together. The canon combos are weak, but that’s nothing to stop you from creating your own combos that are much stronger.
