About two weeks ago now, our friends at Palladium Books and Ninja Division released their vision for a fully-transformable YF-4 to the world. Because I really don't have time to write what I really wanted to write tonight (and I didn't see that anyone else had posted this on Tumblr), I am presenting it to all you lovely people today. I don't hate it, though I see why some people do. I often harp on the current designs of Macross mecha designer Shoji Kawamori as being too Transformers-like insofar as lots of parts move for no particularly good reason other than making the robot mode less vehicle-like -- which, to me, just results in robots that are a lot harder to doodle in notebook margins and toys that can't be properly engineered on the first go. Ninja Division's design seems busy in much the same way, except that it winds up feeling a lot more cluttered and the Guardian mode lacks the accidental-feeling elegance of many of your other, better GERWALK designs. I suspect that a lot of the clutter and busy feeling of it, though, is a result of this design having to legally be so completely different from another, very similar design floating around out there.

The bits I do like are the very Alpha Fighter head and the way the legs and the Guardian mode's backpack kind of remind me of the Logan. I really dislike, however, the way it looks like VF-1 forearms are hiding behind the top fronts of the engine cowling. Again, a bit too "Robots in Disguise," and I don't know if it's just the angle, but it doesn't even look like they would fit where they have to go in the transformation. In any case, it makes the design look like one of those knockoff toys that uses parts from another, different, official toy to create an altogether new design -- which I guess is sort of what this is, given that the completed version of this airframe already has a proper transformation into something far less VF-1-shaped. (The only thing this has going for it over the official Kawamori/Big West VF-4 Lightning mecha design, as far as I'm concerned, is it doesn't have that weird blank panel thing on the front of it where the nosecone folds down and becomes a large chunk of the robot's abdomen. For some reason that whole element of the transformation has bothered me since I first saw the design in the VF-X Flight Manual, though for the life of me I couldn't tell you why.)

I just hope that if Ninja Division is willing to design and tool an odd beast like this, that means down the road we'll be getting game pieces for other bizarre, little-seen mecha. I'm hoping for some Sentinels Destroids, Z-series Battlepods, and if I'm really, really lucky the Centaur Hovertank from The Malcontent Uprisings.