DX Tensou Gattai Gosei Great

This toy appears courtesy from HobbyLink Japan.

The Gosei Angels are beings who have secretly defended life on Earth for thousands of years, lead by Master Head. While human in appearance, they are usually not seen as they move among us. The road between Earth and Gosei World is Heaven’s Tower- a massive structure which hangs upside down from the clouds. Unfortunately, an empire of aliens, called Warstar, has chosen Earth as their next target, and they have destroyed the Heaven’s Tower in a preemptive strike! Now isolated on Earth, five Gosei Angels-in-training must learn to cooperate with each other, and bring the powers of their three tribes, Skick, Landick, and Seaick, together in order to defeat Warstar, as the Tensou Sentai Goseiger!

Headders are life-forms that appear as the flying heads of animals. When united with a robotic body, they become mecha known as Gosei Machines. The Goseiger each have access to one default Headder, representative of their tribes, but when needed, the Gosei Machines can combine into gigantic humanoid warriors to fight the minions of Warstar. When not in use, all Headders reside in a stone-like statue form on Headder Island.

The five primary Headders used by the Goseiger are the:

Dragon Headder (Of the Skick Tribe, controlled by Gosei Red)

Phoenix Headder (Of the Skick Tribe, controlled by Gosei Pink)

Snake Headder (Of the Landick Tribe, controlled by Gosei Black)

Tiger Headder (Of the Landick Tribe, controlled by Gosei Yellow)

Shark Headder (Of the Seaick Tribe, controlled by Gosei Blue)

While usually of giant proportions far larger than a human, a summoned Headder can also attach to the barrel of a Gosei Blaster, which increases its destructive power.

Gosei Dragon (Headder attaches to a passenger jet airliner)

Gosei Phoenix (Headder attaches to an F-15 jet fighter)

Gosei Snake (Headder attaches to a high-speed passenger train)

Gosei Tiger (Headder attaches to a bulldozer)

Gosei Shark (Headder attaches to a submarine)

Aside from all five Gosei Machines having wheels, and the separated Headders having movable jaws, the only posability is in Gosei Dragon’s wing joints, and Gosei Snake is articulated in four different points to allow it to swing back-and-forth a bit.

“Tensou Gattai!”

COMBINE – Gosei Great

The only posability is in the shoulders, which ratchet around in 45-degree increments. The Dragon Sword can be gripped in either hand, and it can be stored on the back when not in use.

A single Gosei Card is provided, which can be used with the Gosei Power Kaihoki Tensouder.

Victory Charge (Activates Gosei Great’s finishing attack, this Gosei Card is shared by all five Goseiger) (#013)

Paint applications. Selection of materials. Structural integrity. Flexibility of joints and connection points. These are all things that you never hear about from me. Why? Because they are always done well for a Super Sentai DX robo toy. These are reliable standards which (almost) never falter. Frustratingly, these are the only good things about this toy. There is so much that is bad with this toy and the thirty-five year legacy it has behind it that I don’t even know where to start! Surely in my video I will bash the hell out of it for a good 10-20min (as I usually do), but here it would take up way too much space. So I shall narrow down to just the most irritating… if I can even categorize it that way. We did the whole animal-heads-on-vehicle-bodies mecha for a whole year in 2008 with “Engine Sentai Go-Onger”. It was very puzzling, and had no appeal beyond that one year. (Some liked it, some didn’t. All agreed that they were light-hearted enough to not take them seriously.) So, why are we doing this again? Really, if you don’t watch the show (I certainly don’t, except for episodes specifically related to these reviews), you wouldn’t know they were. With Gosei Snake you get little green windows and articulation(!), but all of the others fall flat on their faces. Why did they even bother in the show??? (That’s a phoenix? Really? How so, exactly?) Other than little MADmobile-like pods that double as ventral fins, Gosei Shark is by far the most malformed and misshapen of the bunch. Transformations are exceedingly simple… which, if you regularly follow my reviews, you know I get bored with very quickly. The most complex you get is Gosei Snake, which just requires a bit of twisting until it snaps in place and that’s it. Since I don’t count folding away landing gear on flying or floating mecha, Gosei Phoenix, Gosei Shark, and Gosei Tiger all take exactly one step before combining with the others. Gosei Dragon is the worst offender, though, because the majority of it is parts-swapping, which I also hate. The only “transformation” involves rotating the robo head around and flipping up those puny-ass angel-wings-for-ears. (Are you telling me that, for all the articulation-less heads we’ve had throughout the years, those ears couldn’t have been designed to be molded in?) I will tell you something funny now… It’s always fun for me to be able to open up a brand new toy and try to figure out how it works and transforms while referencing the instructions as little as possible. Unless there are hidden switches, I usually get them right. For this toy, I never opened the instructions. Not once. I didn’t even glance at them. That is a sad trend that is increasingly frequent with Super Sentai as the years go by. The combined form is no better. The feet are enormous, the Dragon Headder makes the chest stick out way too much (just like the robos in 2003’s “Bakuryuu Sentai AbaRanger” did), those wings are very awkward appearing above the arms (as opposed to behind them, as traditionally happens), and that giant Dragon Sword hangs equally-awkwardly off the back. (Is that really a sword, by the way? Actually, I don’t know what the hell to compare it to; it simply is, and that’s just not good enough.) Also, usually the first lead Super Sentai robo couldn’t fly unless an upgrade occurred later on, but here it’s a built-in feature. (Yawn!) The limb-swap era which began in 2003 has spelled a major shift is the design of Super Sentai mecha, focusing on having to buy multiple accessory mecha that incorporate a special gimmick of their own, and forcing increasingly-simplified designs into the rest of the line. (I don’t count the Power Animals from 2001’s “Hyakujuu Sentai GaoRanger” as part of that since it was cool then, and they were far from being simple toys!) The more complex transformations, details, and aura of past designs have been washed aside in favor of making more and more toys per season in the name of profits (and yet always under the guise of expenses in manufacturing and marketing). In general, if the arms of the first hero combining robo, such as this one, can separate at the shoulder in order to combine, then chances are it will be a limb-swap series. (There have been two years of exception, but those were years of dread and impending doom, I remind you.) So, in addition to the theory that limb-swapping may be used again in 2010 (oh, come on!), there is a new gimmick which has surfaced: the Headders. How is it, I ask you, that Bandai and PLEX felt that removing the heads of animal mecha would make for a good gimmick? I can understand customizing the Gosei Blaster in regards to role-playing by swapping out the five main Headders on the barrel. (Matter o’ fact, I kind of like that part.) What has me worried sick is all the extra Headder mounting points on this toy… of which, not counting the three on the Dragon Sword, nine have yet to be used! You would think that the Headders on the five Gosei Machines here would have unique mounting points, but no, they too utilized the same points, bring the grand total for just this one toy up to 17! Subtle, this gimmick will not be. So, again, how is swapping the heads of animal-mecha a good thing??? Oh, and by the way, I thought this was going to be the year that Super Sentai used trading cards as its primary cross-pollinating gimmick for the series? So, you’re telling me, Bandai and PLEX, that we now have two collecting gimmicks to keep track of in one series??? What, in the name of Hell, is going on over there!!? I realized that, as I was typing this review up (and no doubt when I shoot the video) I was getting anxious; a frustration and impatience the likes of which has been building ever since 2003 but has remained unanswered. I believe that I am reaching a limit of patience. One of my favorite franchises ever has tumbled carelessly down a road which it cannot seem to escape from. I fear that, sometime in the future, I may have to walk away from it. The loss of any childhood enchantment and fantasy is often crushingly sudden. Though this probably sounds overly dramatic and pathetic, I think the DX Tensou Gattai Gosei Great may spell the beginning of the end of this particular one, and there may be nothing I can do to stop it.

[NOTE: Video was re-uploaded in 2014 to remove copyrighted material.]