FansProject Saurus: Dinoni

 Once again, as another semester winds down a young mans’ thoughts turn to writing articles about toys he bought months ago and didn’t have time to write on before. One such figure is the second in the FansProject Saurus set, Dinoni, the 3P rendition of Victory’s Dinoforce member Yokuryu, the Japanese version of G1 Pretender Monster Wildfly.

Dinoni is a nice figure, lanky figure that gives every impression of a flying robot/monster. He will serve as an arm for the combined Ryu-Oh mode, and thus is a Deluxe sized toy on its own. With Dinoichi I’d mentioned that that figure was as tall as a Deluxe but stocky, more along the lines of the 2007 Classics Optimus Prime, which apparently is a Voyager. But Dinoni is slender, a true Deluxe sized toy. In robot mode, the legs are real long, which does make the torso seem a bit short by comparison. I don’t think this is an illusion or a trick of the light or anything: the torso is short, and the length of the legs draws attention to this. He is decently poseable, as the arms have a double jointed elbow and a ball jointed shoulder. The hips are ratchet joints and a knee is present due to transformation. A ball jointed ankle attaches the foot. The waist has a ratchet joint, but this is to serve as the elbow for the figure in arm mode for the gestalt form, but more or less doubles as an ab crunch. The head is on a ball jointed neck.

The head sculpt is sort of perplexing. I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. It is a pretty generic robot face, yellow under a blue helmet. It’s nice, but nothing special. Sometimes I look at it and marvel at the niceness of the actual face, and how expressive and characterful it is as a face. It’s not bad by any means, but it’s not really memorable either. The yellow of the face really jumps out from the otherwise while and dark blue color scheme, and is a good yet sparse infusion of any color. The monster head is a good one: some kind of monstrous bird, the beast mode head has a pointy beak with an opening mouth that flips up over the robot head and folds down into the robot mode chest. A fairly standard arrangement, nothing new by 2017, but it sits nicely on the chest. The head in monster mode does not connect to the rest of the body, and while this does allow it to pivot up and down a little bit, it does make the monster mode look a little disconnected.

Correct, obviously. Looks just like a real bird.

The monster mode also sports a pair of large, thin, white wings that are really poseable themselves. The wings fold in half during transformation, but unfold and are on swiveling ratchet joints, giving them a whole range of movement. They can be laid flat, or positioned in all manner of flapping poses, in both modes. The swivel joint allows the wings to be positioned both parallel and perpendicular to the ground, giving a lot of character to a robot that, as good as it is, is really in need of some kind of character. Unlike Dinoichi, Dinoni is sort of just a robot, not nearly as interesting looking as the larger team member or as nice as the other arm figure. The robot arms fold up into the monster claws, really just like hook-type appendages, like what Gigan has. The robot legs folds over the thighs to form the rear of the beast, and the waist joint allows the rear half of the monster to fold downwards a bit, making the creature long rather than angular, something I didn’t realize honestly until I was taking pictures. For the first few months I’d had him, I kept transforming Dinoni like this:

 

Wrong! Hilarious, but wrong.

Which ends up being something like an evil chicken rather than a real flying monster or dinosaur type of animal. When properly transformed, the beast body is long and the legs are stubby, so a bit of balance and slight ratcheting are required to get him to balance and stand properly.

The robot is armed with a rectangular and rather nondescript blaster.

I’ve mentioned in a previous article that, apparently, 3P companies cannot produce a sliding part, and so arms and legs fold over for transformation rather than extend; no parts pull downward from the alt mode to form calves while revealing thighs here. Dinoni’s rear beast half swings outward to reveal the thighs and calves, and the monster legs fold over and rotate around to fill in the gaps behind the calves. The transformation is simple, and none too surprising, but it is very satisfying. The change between the profiles of both modes is quite something, as the monster is a fairly squat rectangle that turns into a thin and lean robot. Each of the Saurus members so far has had a “wow” moments during transformation for me, and for Dinoni it comes in the form of the monster legs and how they conceal themselves in the robot mode.

In terms of paint, Dinoni is a little bland, being blue and white and that’s it. Like Dinoichi Dinoni looks flat and unglossy, like he missed his opportunity to get in the clear coat line at the factory, and the plastic has that dry look to it. I’m still not opposed to this look, as if all six team members share it, then at least there will be visual continuity across the entire set, and that’s good. I suppose that I’m just so used to figures having some kind of finish on them or gloss to them that a figure without that seems real strange; Dinoni is not aided by the blandness of his color palate either. Overall, Dinoni is one of those figures that exemplifies the nature of existence for combiner team member figures: you need him. As good a figure as he is, for his poseability and fun of transformation, you need him if you’re going to form Ryu-Oh. He’s not anything extra special or flashy or terrific, but he is necessary. There is one other figure out of the four Saurus guys I currently own that falls into that same category, and while I honestly don’t mean it as an insult to the toy, it is, compared to a figure like Dinoichi, a figure that you need to form the big guy. But this is nothing at all new, having been a syndrome plaguing combining figures since the dawn of time. Hell, the G1 Pretender Monsters were literally all members of this club: if I want to form Monstructor, I need all six of them.

Polly wanna kick your ass.

For his ease and pleasure of transformation, Dinoni is a figure I reach for fairly often. For his poseability, Dinoni is a figure I look at regularly and think “if I were any good at posing toys, that one would be capable of great things.” For his monster mode, Dinoni is often a figure I pass over in favor of better team members. Another one of my TFCon 2016 bargains, Dinoni for a good price of, say, less than $50 is a good buy; but for whatever its original retail cost was, I think about $70, that’s a bit steep. But I don’t imagine that anyone who’s buying these is really after them for the individuals, but rather is after the full Ryu-Oh combiner. Still, Dinoni is a solid figure, and is certainly not a loss, despite my pretty lukewarm write up on him. He’s just not as good as the other figures on the team.