>>7088922Air Small Packet is pretty good, too, I'd spring the extra $4 or so for it. SAL isn't always a horrorshow but it can go wrong, and do you want to risk that on a $200 toy over $4?
Speaking of which, my own Dinobot arrived today. I picked ASP myself, which I had forgotten, but it takes only a say or two longer than EMS would've. Here's some quick thoughts:
I haven't bought much non-MP Transformers lately, mostly focussing on 3P stuff, but this is just another example of how ahead of the curve Takara still is to 3P. A company like FansToys could do something this complex, but Takara makes all the little steps interesting instead of tedious like Fanstoy's recent offerings; the engineering on this toy is just really intriguing. Note that I don't mean its fun; maybe it will be fun after a few tries. Its like the quote from Jurassic Park goes,Takara was so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. Which seems harsh, because I will say, at the end of the day it truly feels like a labor of love. If we only ever got this Dinobot as a BW MP, it would've been worth it. So even if some of the torso transformation is a bit finicky and getting everything tabbed together in beast mode is annoying, its still respectable for what it is. When Generations dinobot came out, I thought it was the best we'd get for replicating the transformation, concessions like making the dino legs the robot legs, and the arms coming from the torso;
I really like that it feels like a satisfying update of the toy and show character, more so than Cheetor, or even Primal, who I feel took ore from the show at the expense of some of the things that made those original toys fun. It helps that Dinobot's '96 toy was a crappy raptor anyway, but this one has enough call backs to the original toy(granted, a lot of it is due to parts where the CGI model was faithful to the toy). In a lot of ways it feels like how Soundwave felt, just a solid package.
