Aquarion: The Blog's First Toy Review

One of the main reasons I started this blog was to have a consistent place to save all of my toy reviews, so I guess it's about time I got to it.

My first review is of the toy of Aquarion, unfortunately I know almost nothing about the cartoon. This particular version of the Aquarion toy, is supposed to be the "military" version, while the standard one comes with swords and and bow and arrow, the military version uses more conventional weaponry, namely guns, big ones. The only difference between the two toys, aside from the accessories, is the paint scheme, as far as I know. The original Aquarion is more brightly colored, with lots of red, and emerald green.

Judging from the box it would seem that this is part of the Soul Of Chogokin line from Bandai, however despite having a lot of the same design aesthetics, Bandai chose not to actually brand it as part of the SOC line.

Styrofoam's always nice to see in a toy box for some reason, but even more interesting is that this particular tray is double sided, so you have to flip the tray over in order to get access to everything.

Here are all of the contents from the box freed from the styrofoam prison. Important to note, at the taking of this picture, I had almost no clue what half of this crap did.

Aquarion is formed from three separate air/spacecraft, each of which is capable of forming either the head/upper body, the mid section/backpack, or the legs.

First we have Vector Alpha, attaching the gun to the front is optional. I do believe this is my favorite of the three ships.

Then we have Vector Omega

And Vector Delta

Just a comparison shot of all three ships side by side.

The first robot we'll see is called Aquarion Alpha, on account of Vector Alpha forming the head.

In order for Omega to properly stand as the feet, it's necessary to install these spacers, which mimic the look of the knuckle guard on the fists.

The completed Omega Legs! Yes, it does look that odd in person.

Alpha's upper body form.

And Delta's backpack form.

The fun comes from combining them, first off, Omega's got a hatch on top of his head that opens to allow a post on Alpha to plug in.

Incidentally, I think this might be the only form in which you can make a bot with only two of the ships. Even though it's not "complete" until you use all three.

Delta snaps onto some pegs on the back of Alpha, and here is where we start to see where this toy is very flawed.

It certainly looks very cool, but it's completely incapable of standing on it's own, fortunately they've included a stand that will keep him upright... with some effort, this severely limits his poseability. With the stand, he will stay up, but you have to be very careful around him, or will go ragdoll on you.

His floppy bastard status is further supported by the ridiculous large rifle that you can attach to his right arm, which you can't do anything with, on account of it being too heavy for him to support.

Delta can also be opened up, and shiny plates attached to create this weapon stance, frankly, it's a pain to setup, and I think it looks kind of ridiculous.

Here he is actually holding his rifle, and using the Delta backpack weapon. For reference, I'd say he's about 10-12 inches tall to the head here.

Next up, we'll do Aquarion Omega.

Here is Delta as the legs, notice how chicken thin they are? Just wait until we're finished.

Alpha pack.

And the Omega upper body.

Combined is this ungainly thing with too long legs, and too short arms, also easily the most unstable form, whenever I looked at this form wrong, it fold in half.



This form's supposed chose of weapon includes the two smaller guns that are normally mounted on Vector Delta.



And Aquarion Delta rounds out the three basic forms, this features Alpha as the legs, and Omega as the pack. This would be my favorite of all three forms, if not for the fact that the Omega pack constantly falls down.


Technically, the military Aquarion has two more forms, one called the Assault Walker, which I didn't bother to transform it into, on account of being too frustrated, and thinking it looked too silly, and this one called, Armageddon.

As you can see Armageddon is essentially a spider with the gigantic cannon on top of it, I like spiders, so I find this form to be very neat, and huge, unfortunately, it's still not very stable, having a tendency for it's feet to slide out from under it and drop it's belly to the ground.


One thing I want to point out is how detailed the head sculpts are for all three Vectors, they really look very cool.

The last accessory to show off is some kind of super extendo punch.

I don't think you're necessarily supposed to use all eight segments at once like I did, but it looks so ridiculous that i just had to take a pic of it.

I was really disappointed with Aquarion, I'd heard that he had some definitely stability and loose joint issues, but even so, I wasn't prepared for just how fiddly he is. As such, he's not really a good display piece, since he can pretty much just stand at attention, and his play value as a figure isn't all that great, since he's just bound to fall apart.

I've heard that he's a lot of fun if you just want to fiddle around with something, and try all the different configuration options, so I'm going to leave him on my coffee table for awhile to see if he grows on me, but as it is, I'm seriously considering just flipping him back on ebay.