Lazengann

Height: 12cm to top of head, 14cm to top of horn.

Articulation: 34 points total- Revolver Joint neck; 7 points each arm: Revolver Joint shoulder, Revolver Joint elbow, swivel wrist; Mid-torso Revolver Joint; 7 points each leg: double-jointed hip, Revolver Joint knee, Revolver Joint ankle. (Note: Revolver Joints have three axes of movement and are counted as three points each for the overall Points of Articulation count.)

Colors: Molded black and red. Painted black, red, light gray, dark gray, yellow (Eyes).

Accessories: Torso parts, Drills x2, Jetpack parts for Gurren Lagann, Stand, Extra Hands x4.

Author: RAC

(more...)

I'm not sure how long I've had this figure now, but I've been meaning to review it pretty much forever. After the joy that was Gurren Lagann itself, I snagged this for a relative song on eBay. Lucky I did, because Kaiyodo stopped giving Revoltech quite as wide a distribution shortly thereafter and Revoltechs from Gurren Lagann got scarcer and more expensive.


The Figure

Where Gurren Lagann is supposed to look like a goofy `70s Super Robot, Lazengann is sleeker and nearly monochrome, more like an Evangelion. As befits the creator of the Beastmen, it also has a horn and tail. Despite Lordgenome being a gigantic hulk of a man, his Gunmen is actually fairly sleek. Which makes a certain amount of sense for a man who seems to fight largely hand-to-hand. What little red it uses is mostly in the hands, with the rest being used to line the various ports on the figure, ports which presumably can sprout drills the way that Gurren-Lagann can. Not sure how else to say it: it's a mean-looking robot.


The Head

Unsurprisingly the head looks a lot like Lagann- and as the Parallel Works music video revealed, it essentially is a Lagann. As with GL, the face is pretty clean, particularly for the size. The horn is thicker and more dangerous-looking than on, say, Eva-01 or a Zaku. The neck joint is pretty flexible, but because it's a sculpted piece wrapped around a double Revolver Joint, it's difficult to control the direction it moves in. The head never quite wants to face straight ahead no matter what I do with it. The head kind of tilts to either side, but doesn't swivel. It tilts front-to-back quite well, though.


The Arms

Lazengann lacks any kind of ostentatious shoulder armor, so the joints are bare Revolver Joints, and the shape of the upper arms and torso gives them a superb range. The slender arms mean that the figure can come very, very close to crossing its arms correctly. That is remarkably rare. The shoulders have an almost 180-degree arc of elevation, and both axes of swivel are technically unrestricted. "Technically" because the axes, as is standard on Katsuhisa Yamaguchi figures, are both at weird angles.

The elbows have only one effective axis of swivel- the forearms aren't really worth turning, but you can turn the entire lower arm to good effect. The Revolver Joint acts as a good single-hinge joint here, allowing you to fold the arm into a decent V. The hands are one of the few places I have a problem with this figure. I understand that Lazengann's slim arms couldn't accomodate even the smallest of the Revolver Joints, and I'm used to Revoltech wrist swivels being at funky angles. But there's a couple really, really bad decisions here. The hands mount on tiny, delicate pegs, and these pegs are on the arm side, not the hand side. Break one and you're boned. Secondly, the peg itself is mounted on a separate piece that begins just above the drill-port on the forearm, and this has come loose on Lazengann's left arm. Since I don't know what kind of plastic Revoltechs use and how it'd respond to glue, I have it held in place with nylon plumber's thread-seal tape stuffed into the socket. It works, and if you do it right it's invisible.


The Torso

In the show, it's treated as a surprise that Lazengann has a second face the way Gurren Lagann does. (The eyes very cleverly play on Lazangann's Evangelion looks; those robots have a pair of armor plates in approximately the same location as Lazengann's torso-eyes. Here, this is accomplished by the inclusion of two separate pieces for the midsection: one without disturbing needle-teeth, and one with. These are attached by a small loop around the socket for the upper-torso. That upper-torso joint is, like a lot of Hasbro figures, the only midsection joint you get, with no waist. It takes some adjusting to use it as a swivel effectively, but the front-to-back tilt is great. You can get some nice hunched-over poses out of it.


The Legs

What skirt armor the design has is small enough that it's all molded into the torso. Even if it wasn't, there wouldn't be room for the big Revolver Joint, so it's back to the older-style paired cut-joints. Naturally these aren't as good as Gurren Lagann's hips, but they do reasonably well. The knees are single joints, but because of the angle of the joints they fold perfectly. The swivels that go along with that aren't as useful as they are frustrating because you don't particularly need or want a lot of swivel in those locations. The feet use both swivels really well though, with the lower half of the Revolver Joint allowing for as much side-to-side tilt as you ever really need. The clicky part of the joint gives enough range that it can point its toes; altogether you can manage some really nice, low fighting stances.


Accessories

-Drills

Lazengann has a drill attack just as Gurren Lagann does, but its drills sprout from the body like tendrils and look more like the variety you'd buy in a hardware store. You get two sets here, a single and a double. The double is designed to fit around the elbow joint, and the single plugs onto the tiny hand post, and then you plug the hand onto a new tiny post on the drill. This is a spectacularly bad idea- let's take a peg that's too small anyway and apply a ton of potential leverage to it! Again, no problems so far, but this is not a part I intend to use a lot.

-Stand

It's the same as Gurren Lagann's, which is good because that's a pretty nice stand. For the longest time I thought there was no place to plug in the stand without removing the tail; turns out the socket for the stand is in the tail itself in one of the red spots. It holds securely, and if you're careful and creative you can put the figure in a slew of different airborne poses. It also comes with the sorter strut for the stand that came with Mazinkaiser, but that's nowhere near as useful or versatile.

-Jetpack Parts

The pack and fin parts of Gurren Lagann's jetpack are here; you'll need the ever-scarcer Revoltech Enki to finish the Gurren Wing. It fits GL's back pretty snugly, though. I need to go ahead and finish that soon.

-Extra Hands

Six hands total: two fists and four open hands. One set of open hands have the last two fingers curled a little more than the others; maybe they're meant to be the ones for the drill attack? I really have no idea. They're very attractive, bright red and nicely clawed. But the way they attach is SO DUMB. On top of which only the fists really want to stay on for me. That might be for the best too, because by "nicely clawed" I mean "painfully pointy."


Closing Remarks

The thing with Revoltech figures is that they're designed to look very dynamic, to be as interesting as possible on your shelf in whatever action pose you want. They don't do neutral poses well, so its inability to look straight ahead isn't as big of a disadvantage as it might initially sound. Lazengann is a great figure, an Excellent figure in that style, and even the potential problems with its wrists aren't enough to bring it down. Just be careful with those things, okay?

-RAC