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Trijhak

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Ekimu, Lava Beast, and Storm Beast arrived in the mail today.

 

Ekimu's Magical Growth Spurt is a pretty good set. He finally got rid of that impractical hammer-gun and replaced it with a hammer, in addition to mounting his shield to his forearm so he can wield his hammer two-handed if he so wishes. Hammer is a pretty creative and clever arrangement of pieces that creates a shape one mold probably wouldn't be able to replicate. Also, the transparent blue is excellent him. He's like the Toa, but also a bit different, probably because he uses both gear functions and is mostly transparent. Also, the Umarak mask is pretty cool looking although it's puzzling why it appears in the set.

 

Lava Beast, well, visually, IMO, Lava Beast is the least cluttered-looking of the monsters - no immediately obvious function parts and no ball joints or cups that don't do anything. Biggest downside is the lower legs, which really could've been done better if they were done more like Storm Beast's lower legs, which look significantly better. The blades on the arms also have gears to them which give them quite a bit of friction when the ones that swivel, well, swivel. Also, the new armour piece works the best on Lava Beast, IMO.

 

Storm Beast is more about the function than the look, although the function's parts don't really stand out that much, fortunately. Storm Beast also has significantly better lower legs than Lava Beast. Storm Beast's function is a good idea in concept, however it's not as good as people thought it would be - it causes the arms and tail to flop around a lot, and they won't stay in place if raised, not to mention it doesn't work 100% perfectly - when you pull the tail down, for instance, there is a good chance one arm will be slightly lower than the other. Also, the colours are pretty decent and probably the most eye-catching blend of the beasts. Transparent lime, dark blue (let's just call it that because calling it metru blue is outdated nonsense), and transparent blue go together quite well.

 

However, the jaws of the beasts are pretty bad. They're more or less fixed in place unless you want to pop the mask of, which you probably don't because few masks fit the beast's heads with the jaw attachments. Not to mention that you can already see the lower jaw of the transparent lime head - so it looks there's this weird, out-of-place gunmetal thing attached to the sides of their heads. It puzzles me why LEGO didn't repurpose the 'masks-pop-off' function of pressing down on the eyestalks to open and close the jaws, as there was a perfect opportunity for it.

 

Ekimu > Lava Beast > Storm Beast

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I agree, The jaws are awful. They bled in like nothing's there.

 

However, there is a system fix that is very simple for the beasts to prevent them from moving their mouths. If you look at Quake Beast's instructions, there are two small parts in between the connectors for the beard jaw. If you attach two t-bar system pieces to these, you can effectively lock the entire head in place.

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I don't see how people think Lava Beast looks OR functions better than Storm Beast. He has the single worst color scheme of all three beasts (Trans. Fluor. Reddish Orange and Black was already an overused color scheme and throwing three other types of orange and a measly amount of Trans. Brown into the mix only makes it that much worse) and his build may be slightly more well-armored than the others but is neither unique nor particularly effective. Storm Beast at least augments his somewhat bare-bones build with a fantastic color scheme and a great function.

 

I do agree with you that the jaws are a bit of a disappointment.

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I don't see how people think Lava Beast looks OR functions better than Storm Beast. He has the single worst color scheme of all three beasts (Trans. Fluor. Reddish Orange and Black was already an overused color scheme and throwing three other types of orange and a measly amount of Trans. Brown into the mix only makes it that much worse) and his build may be slightly more well-armored than the others but is neither unique nor particularly effective. Storm Beast at least augments his somewhat bare-bones build with a fantastic color scheme and a great function.

 

I do agree with you that the jaws are a bit of a disappointment.

*Trans. Black

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I don't see how people think Lava Beast looks OR functions better than Storm Beast. He has the single worst color scheme of all three beasts (Trans. Fluor. Reddish Orange and Black was already an overused color scheme and throwing three other types of orange and a measly amount of Trans. Brown into the mix only makes it that much worse) and his build may be slightly more well-armored than the others but is neither unique nor particularly effective. Storm Beast at least augments his somewhat bare-bones build with a fantastic color scheme and a great function.

 

I do agree with you that the jaws are a bit of a disappointment.

*Trans. Black

 

Nope.

 

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I don't see how people think Lava Beast looks OR functions better than Storm Beast. He has the single worst color scheme of all three beasts (Trans. Fluor. Reddish Orange and Black was already an overused color scheme and throwing three other types of orange and a measly amount of Trans. Brown into the mix only makes it that much worse) and his build may be slightly more well-armored than the others but is neither unique nor particularly effective. Storm Beast at least augments his somewhat bare-bones build with a fantastic color scheme and a great function.

 

I do agree with you that the jaws are a bit of a disappointment.

*Trans. Black

 

As pointed out above, the color Bricklink calls Trans-Black is officially called Trans. Brown. I may not be an expert on everything but I know my colors.

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I don't see how people think Lava Beast looks OR functions better than Storm Beast. He has the single worst color scheme of all three beasts (Trans. Fluor. Reddish Orange and Black was already an overused color scheme and throwing three other types of orange and a measly amount of Trans. Brown into the mix only makes it that much worse) and his build may be slightly more well-armored than the others but is neither unique nor particularly effective. Storm Beast at least augments his somewhat bare-bones build with a fantastic color scheme and a great function.

 

I do agree with you that the jaws are a bit of a disappointment.

 

A colour scheme being overused doesn't make it bad, the transparent brown doesn't really stand out all that much - it blends in with the black mostly, and as I've said, Storm Beast's function isn't as good as it seems.

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I don't see how people think Lava Beast looks OR functions better than Storm Beast. He has the single worst color scheme of all three beasts (Trans. Fluor. Reddish Orange and Black was already an overused color scheme and throwing three other types of orange and a measly amount of Trans. Brown into the mix only makes it that much worse) and his build may be slightly more well-armored than the others but is neither unique nor particularly effective. Storm Beast at least augments his somewhat bare-bones build with a fantastic color scheme and a great function.

 

I do agree with you that the jaws are a bit of a disappointment.

 

A colour scheme being overused doesn't make it bad, the transparent brown doesn't really stand out all that much - it blends in with the black mostly, and as I've said, Storm Beast's function isn't as good as it seems.

 

The color scheme being overused doesn't make it bad, per se, but the use of four different types of orange certainly does. The Trans. Brown would certainly work well enough with the Black and Titanium Metallic if the rest of the color scheme weren't already so excessive. And even you did cut the Dark Orange and Trans. Bright Orange out of his color scheme completely, the lack of any contrasting accent color ensures that his color scheme would still be less dynamic and visually interesting than the other two Beasts.

 

As for Storm Beast, we'll have to agree to disagree. I find his function a lot more genuinely fun and dynamic than Lava Beast's mediocre blade-swinging function.

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There's barely a difference between the transparent dark orange and the transparent bright orange, though, and using multiple colours doesn't mean 'bad' - since they're all shades of orange, it really isn't as bad as it looks in pictures. Storm Beast itself has just as many different colours. and 'visually interesting' doesn't mean a good colour scheme - take Umbra, for instance. Several colours, yet not distributed well - and Lava Beast distributes its colours far better than Umbra does. Furthermore, are we really going to criticise sets for lacking a contrasting colour now? What about Lewa, who has green and silver but nothing contrasting? Or Tahu, who has transparent orange and gold? 

 

And I'd say Storm Beast also has a far messier colour scheme - there's barely any transparent lime apart from the head and claws, and there's no bright colours on the legs or tail to help them stand out or balance the transparent lime. Storm Beast would benefit quite a bit if it had transparent lime claws on the feet and the transparent lime bones from UtD, along with a transparent blue or dark blue recolour of the Glatorian Neck. Not to mention that the function is very restricted when going from side-to-side when you're not holding the tail down - to get a decent range of motion going side-to-side, you pretty much have to hold the tail down - the technic beam things sort of prevent the tail from getting too close horizontally when the tail's being held up.

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