FansProject Saurus: Dinoroku

Here I sit at 5.22AM, the second day back from our European vacation, apparently at the point in jetlag where time means nothing, and I fall asleep at 8PM and awake at 4 AM. Maybe some writing will help me out, or at least, help me get my brains back in working order.

Dinoroku is the FansProject take on Victory’s Dinoforce commander Goryu, and is the final entry in the Saurus team. Dinoroku is a green reworking of the previous figure, Dinogo, but despite its being just a repaint, it is remarkably different in the details.

 In general, Dinoroku and Dinogo are pretty identical: they transform (mostly) the same way, except that Dinoroku does have regular feet, not the strange sled like ones that Dinogo has; they both transform into monsters of some nondescript type, although Dinoroku is more of a lizard or reptilian beast than the more canine or wolf-like Dinogo; they both come with an unintelligible weapon that will form a part of the larger, combined Ryu-Oh blaster. But again, this is not merely a repaint. The transformations are the same, but most of Dinoroku is different parts: it has a completely different torso than Dinogo, the legs are different, the shoulders are different. Transformation is the same, yes, but that is more or less to be expected. But the amount of differences truly makes this figure a fresh experience that truly does not feel like a retread.

The head is really nice, but different from the general heads of the team. Kind of a mixture of Dinoichi and Dinosan, Dinroku has a visor and mouthplate. The visor is a light, metallic-y blue that looks good, and a white helmet. The caliber of the heads over the course of the full Saurus set has been a little hot and cold, with Dinos –ichi, -go, and –roku all being good and strong while –ni, -oni, and –san have been solid mehs. Regular, more standard robot feet do help Dinoroku stand better than the sometimes tricky to balance Dinogo, and once more, ratchets in the hips and shoulders afford a range of movement that is rather good. The colors are surprisingly nice, certainly much better in hand than in most of the advertising images. Two different greens, a brighter and more pleasing on the forearms and chest along with a drab, olive on the legs and upper arm parts, provide some differentiation on the body, and the white, as has been the case with the entire team when sporting this color, is clean and strong and bright. Some red accents really pop.

Dinoroku also comes with an enormous, two part ax that Ryu-Oh will wield, and it is pretty huge, continuing the trend of Third Party combiners carrying humongous melee weapons. It is far too large for Dinoroku to hold, although it is supposed to reference the ax that Goryu carries in Victory, and it is better left out for now. We’ll come back to it when we take a look at Ryu-Oh in combined mode.

The monster mode is where the real differences are visible, even though it is the same general monster that Dinogo is. The beast head is once again reptilian, and very obviously so, with some pointy teeth and a slimmer, narrow profile, opposed to the blockier, more rectangular beast head of the predecessor. The green paint really helps to instantly sell this as some kind of reptile monster as well. Consistent with the rest of the set, the colors are all pretty matte, lacking the glossiness and shininess of plastic that most other figures have. (Although, as I look around right now, I sort of notice that the Hades figures are not very glossy, and my recently acquired TFC Seacons are not either . . . and it makes them seem less like . . . toys. –mr) The monster mouth opens nice and wide, and does look sufficiently menacing. The arms end in three separate claws, and the monster feet are basically what you’d expect monster feet to be. The beast is short and squat, but kind of endearing at the same time that it is trying to be frightening. It is moderately poseable, mostly in the arms, as the legs don’t allow for a whole lot of movement due to having really only a hip and an ankle for joints. A Cybertronian Cotton Hill, if you like.  Once again, the combiner port is mounted in a large block that swings down on the back of the figure, and provides some weight to help balance the figure in monster mode. This is a really good engineering idea. The eternal struggle of What to Do With the Combiner Port is solved by giving it a job to do in the base figure. It isn’t simply covered up, which also is a very effective strategy in individual figures, but it serves some purpose, even if it is mostly a happy coincidence.

If there is one true fault in the monster mode, it is that the monster head sits in a place that is not quite on the body, and not quite in front of the body. Viewed from the side, it is clear that the head does not attach to the beast shoulders, and a pretty sizeable gap between the back of the head and the rest of the body is present. It is noticeable, but it should not be something that ruins a figure, and in the case of Dinoroku, it is does not. But, it is a much more pronounced gap than that of Dinogo, whose beast head was at least longer in the snout and more solidly squared off in the back. Dinoroku’s head, being more triangular and sloping by comparison, does not look as good being this separated from the rest of the body. The block which houses the combiner port can be flipped up to fill in this empty space, but that doesn’t really look that great, as well as causing the figure to become top heavy. Again, this issue is lesser with Dinogo, as the monster head is a bit larger so it fills the emptiness a little more effectively, and this is not like a figure breaking problem for Dinoroku, but it is a weakness. Fortunately in the both figures’ cases, the robot heads turn around 180 degrees before the fold down into the shoulders, so while you can see the robot head in monster mode, you don’t see the robot face, which would have been a pretty big issue.

As the figure that ends the Saurus set, Dinoroku appears to be in pretty short supply, or rather limited availability. This goes for Dinogo as well. This one was ordered from TFSource back in October, and upon completing the order, the TFSource website updated to state that there were no more copies of either figure in stock. Fortunate for me, as I got the last two figures needed to complete Ryu-Oh, but these figures were released in the Fall of 2016, and never seemed to make much of an impact anywhere, or have that much of a presence anywhere at various etailers. The story is old by now, but the first four Saurus figures were all purchased at TFCon 2016, and regularly appear on the sale page at the previously mentioned TFSource. I’d been waiting for a year to see if Dinoroku and Dinogo would appear on that sale page, as well as occasionally searching eBay or other online shops and finding one, but not the other, and hardly ever both. It’s almost like they were underproduced, or that the first four were overproduced, or something. This could be a problem for anyone who is still in the hunt for the rest of the Saurus team, as the true value of these figures, given their abstract alt modes and overall generic robot modes, as well as niche status as Japanese-only characters, winds up being their ability to combine. Also somewhat odd, although more or less understandable, is the apparent cancellation of the remaining dinosaur Pretender shells that were being made to “complete” the set. A few of them were made and reached distribution, and while they were definitely a cool idea, and the ones that were realized were pretty nice looking, they were really not necessary, and were essentially the same price as the individual figures. They don’t do anything, other than afford you a Pretender shell to put the Saurus figures in, and given their prices, would essentially amount to buying the entire set of robots twice. If the figures came with these shells, that would have been awesome; but I understand why that was not possible on FansProject’s end. But the overall look is that FansProject gave up on this set. They stopped (apparently, as it has been some time, and no word of new shells has come around) making the dinosaur shells, and –roku and –go are apparently in short supply. This is a shame, as the Saurus figures have been very good on the whole, and initial images of them way back when garnered a fair amount of excitement, and even some hopes of a Monstructor team repaint. For the spring of enthusiasm to dry up so relatively fast and completely is unfortunate. Even more unfortunate will be people not obtaining these last two figures due to scarcity and ending up with 4/6s of a combiner, so if you are one of those people who are waiting around for a sale or something on these two, as I was, don’t wait much longer.