Name: Dinoking
Series: Japanese Generation 1
Allegiance: Destron
Function: Dinosaur Gestalt Warrior
Alternate Mode: N/A - Gestalt comprising Doryu, Gairyu, Goryu, Kakuryu, Rairyu & Yokuryu.
Thanks to heroic decepticon for loaning me Dinoking for this review
COMBINED ROBOT MODE
Height: 14cm Width: 10cm
A very short gestalt, Dinoking is dwarfed by even the smaller combined robots such as Menasor and Raiden. Basically, he's the same height as Hot Rod. He's actually a repaint of Monstructor, with different shells for the components.
The Dinoforce have have a rather unified colour scheme, since every component consists of two colours and all share white. The end result of this is that Dinoking is metallic charcoal (torso, add-on pieces), pine green (left arm and leg), cobalt blue (head, right arm and leg) with a gold and red painted chest. The white is common across the torso and limbs. His face is silver with red eyes. It's more unified than Monstructor, if a lot duller. I really like the metallic charcoal colour - it's far more interesting that black, and under good lighting it works really well.
Since he's a small gestalt consisting of six toys, it's not really any surprise that this is a very stocky and bulky robot, which is unusual for gestalts, which are often lanky things. He holds together surprisingly well, thanks to a combination of dedicated connecting pieces (the groin for example) and some engineering on the individual toys which is purely for Dinoking's benefit. Some of it, like the blocks on Kakuryu's arms, really hurts the components, whereas other aspect like Kakuryu's socket into which Rairyu fits, doesn't hurt at all. Of course it's the obtrusive stuff that leaves the impression.
There's not a lot of play value, his arms swing and that's it. Of course, the play value is in the combining Pretender set. While he's smaller than the other gestalts, Dinoking's poseability isn't inherently worse - worse than some, equal to others.
Looking at the combined form, it becomes obvious that a lot of the individual flaws come back to the limitations needed to make this combined form work. Considering how small it is and how bad some of the components are, I'm not so sure the sacrifices were worth it. While the robot form is decent, the colours don't really work and gestalt that looks up to Grapple isn't terribly impressive.
VARIATIONS
None that I'm aware of. Given the rarity of this set, any variants would be extremely limited & very pricey.
OVERALL
The smallest gestalt released in G1 and probably the most expense now. Dinoking has better colours than Monstructor, and much stronger individual Pretender shells (since Takara built proper animals around the robot lumps, while Hasbro just decorated the lump shapes as monsters with varying success). This _is_ a fun set despite his unimpressive size, but given that he'll cost around 3 times what the already-pricey Monstructor will cost, I'd not recommending him unless you're a completist of Victory or have sufficient funds that he wont hurt your wallet - 5/10
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