So, after much anxious waiting, the Target near my house finally got in the summer sets.

Bye-bye, gift card.

I saw Takanuva's enormous box sitting up high on that shelf and snatched it without thinking. After giving a sad goodbye to Tahu and Bitil reassuring them that I would return one day soon, I made way for the check-out. After the guys' last two softball games of the season, I headed home, checked my e-mail, watched an episode of Mission Impossible from the second season with my father and sister, went down in the basement, and promptly opened the gargantuan boxen (What? You've never listened to Brian Regan?). It was quite the awesome build.

I was up until 2AM.

Anyways, I'm not doing a full-fledged review, like on the front pages. Just saying what I feel like.

First off, I've never had a titan set before. The biggest set I ever got was the Boxor. The only villain I have is Antroz, unless you're counting Bohrok/Va. Secondly, I noticed while building Takanuva that the style of build is much like what a lot of members who frequent the BBC forum would call "custom". I never got that. Any MOC at all is going to be custom because they're customizing the look of the pieces to their liking. The only difference is how they choose to do so. From what I see, there's what MOCers call "custom" and then there's a "simple" build. I disagree with this. Since LEGO obviously uses this "custom"-style building in several sets, namely titans, it's not really anything "custom". I believe that the two style of MOCs should be referred to as "canister-style" (as opposed to "simple") and "titan-style" (as opposed to "custom").

Opinion of appropriate terms aside, Takanuva is easily one of my favorite sets.

Let's take a look at the first picture.

The first thing I thought after building Takanuva is that his mask actually seems smaller than the box makes it appear. It almost looks too small. Unfortunately this picture doesn't quite seem to capture that. Anyhow, I think I might have preferred the mask slightly larger. On the other hand, any bigger and a normal-sized Toa figure probably would look ridiculous with it on. So I'm basically content with the mask size.

Second picture.

The second thing I most noticed about Takanuva. Whenever I saw pictures his armor and mask appeared black to me. Not so. It's actually a really dark grey. It definitely looks better than just straight black would have. Also of note. I've never had a problem with the red axles and blue pins. They've never really bothered me. But after building Takanuva I must say this is the first time where I've been somewhat disappointed by it. Probably because the red and blue is on white. That's what makes it stick out enough to get to even me. The upper body is covered in little red spots where as the blue pins can easily be seen on the boots/feet/whatever in the third picture. And as long as we're looking at this picture we can make note of the so-called "custom" boots. I do admit that those curved gray pieces and the black pieces holding on the Mahritoran blades are some-what of an eye-sore, but only if you're really paying attention. I never had any of those blades so that's cool to have now.

Moving on to the fourth picture, for a quick note. I think it's really cool how the Takadox heads were used as shoulder armor. I think it's absolutely perfect . . . ALMOST. That barraki's face just seems a bit too distracting to let it look like real shoulder armor.

Now for the fifth (some-what blurry) picture. While I was building Takanuva, it almost started to look like he was going to have two extra limbs. But as I found out at the end, these extra Av-Toran limbs are used to help hold up Taky's massive arms. I'm guessing this has been done on other titans. You can also see that the same idea was used for Takanuva's bulky legs.

To sum it all up, Takanuva was a very interesting build. Good fun to do.

As we gaze at picture six, we can see that Takanuva easily dwarfs his high-flying orange buddy there. He's also got the altitude advantage on my best MOC. I had to make sure that Takanuva's knees were bent a little just to fit him on my shelf.

But as long as we've got Pohatu out, I'll mention that, when you look at this blurry eighth picture (No, I didn't forget a picture. I just skipped it.) you'll see that I actually found it much more satisfying to attach his Midak Skyblaster to his backside instead. I think it looks far better this way. However, I only do this because I have no Av-Toran to attach. I'm sure good ol' Solek (I want Solek more than Photok) wouldn't fit too well.

So, that's all I have to say about Takanuva. Now, go build that MOC of me that you were told to do. Just don't make it "custom". Make it "titan-style". B)

<brk>