If you've been following my twitter feed, you'll notice that about 45% of my tweets have been me yelling about my excitement for this line. Battle Beasts were a fondly remembered part of my childhood, and though I'm disgusted by the tripe MiniMates is going to force on us with their crippled offerings (what else do you expect from a company that's gone on record as stating the line has nothing to do with the original, they just wanted name recognition), Beast Saga has got the nostalgia center of my brain buzzing and my creative juices flowing.
One order of multiple random crystal figures and various single figures later, and I'm 8 years old again yanking Raioga free of his card bubble with as much enthusiasm as Pirate Lion.
If you're a fan of the Glyos Armorvor figures, know that Beast Saga figures are only a little bit shorter than them, so they display pretty well together.
As expected, I couldn't wait to get some shots of these little guys interacting with Transformers.
They look like they're right at home, whether it be commandeering the Shark Ark...
...cruising around my desk on Deep Dive..
...or filling up my desk with nostalgic goodness.
This isn't to say they aren't without their share of problems.
1.I hate the legs being molded in a squatting position and being so short. I get that it's the style, but some proportionate legs would be a Godsend for these guys. I thought the bodies being designed to accommodate the cubes would cause funky body shapes, but overall it works better than I thought it would-it's just the legs that hurt me to look at. The Elephant is particularly distracting, with his gorilla arms and ultra stumpy legs. Yikes.
2.Since the weapons are made with the same material as the figures but are thin, serious bending and droopage is happening. Not the best choice on Takara's end.
3. The Shields are useless. The plate on a stick design makes them look awkward and weird when being held by the Beasts. a simple 'L' shaped handle would have fixed that and allowed them to hold these like actual shields, but as they are, it looks like they're threatening you with spiky metal pies.
4. This is much more of a personal gripe, but I can't say I'm a big fan of how some of the animal sculpts look a little too much like actual animals. Don't get me wrong, I want the shark to look like a shark and the Elephant to look like an elephant, but I've noticed that some of the Beast Saga figures look like someone grabbed an actual animal and cruelly stuffed them into armor. The original Beastformer line managed to balance realistic sculpts with character, so they looked much more like anthropomorphic characters than Beast Saga guys do.
Regardless of these nitpicks though, I love 'em, and can't wait to see what else we'll be getting in the future. I hope to see some repaints that are pleasant throwbacks to the original series.
Like so:
I know this is usually for Transformers related digibashes, but I'm also a fan of Masters of the Universe as well and the most recent Snakemen offerings got my creativity abuzz. I'm awaiting the arrival of my Snakemen two-packs and can't wait to start swapping the heck out of those heads and creating even more snakemen for King Hsss to command! Though there are a ton of common swaps I'm going to do right away (you *have* to plunk a snake head on King Hsss's body and do some Kobra Khan swapping), I'm looking to branch out into a more... unique approach. Attach whatever story you like, Serpent's Ring gone haywire, occult arts manufacturing snake clones, Serpos gone haywire, I don't think it really matters because so many of the Masters and Villains look great when they're sporting scales. Snakemen Digibashes ahoy!
