MetaGate G-01 Haiku

I have quite a few excellent Third Party figures in my collection now, with an increasing number based on movie characters, and in a loosely Masterpiece-adjacent scale. Considering the couple of Hasbro-produced, Deluxe class figures of Age of Extinction Drift that I own are less than stellar, the announcement of a Third Party MP-analogue version certainly piqued my interest... And the fact that it was to be a triple-changer, taking both his Bugatti Veyron and futuristic helicopter modes into account, seemed like a tall order.

Add to that, the creators, MetaGate, were previously unheard of, and suddenly launching themselves toward an eager - and frequently highly critical - fandom with such an ambitious debut project. There have been rumours - as there were with DX9's La Hire - that Unique Toys have had a hand in this figure's creation but, so far, there appears to be little or no concrete evidence of that.

However, it quickly became a figure I was intent on acquiring, and the recent sale of my Game Boy Color game collection gave me just enough breathing room in my finances to risk taking a punt on a stunning-looking figure from an untested company. I preordered from Iacon.Store at the start of September, and it arrived a little over three weeks later... so, let's take a look at MetaGate's inaugural offering, and see how it compares to the output of some of the more established Third Party figures.

Packaging:

There's no denying a certain Unique Toys feel to the box. For starters, it's remarkably compact - approx 20 x 16 x 6 cm (8 x 7.75 x 3.25") - with a dark, detailed portrait of Haiku/Drift and minimal branding on the front, with images of each of his two vehicle modes on the sides of the box, and nothing on the top or bottom. The back of the box features little more than an age recommendation and "Matters needing attention" in extremely poorly translated 'word salad' English and the original Chinese (which Google does a far better job of making readable!). The box is made of good, sturdy card with a matte laminate applied, along with Spot UV gloss over the three images and all instances of the MetaGate logo.

Inside the box, Haiku is packaged in vehicle mode, surrounded by his main accessories - two swords and two smaller blades - inside a plastic clamshell. The instructions - printed in full colour on surprisingly heavy paper - are in a plastic bag along with two sets of three small missiles, the vehicle mode's wing mirrors, and a couple of silver foil stickers to apply to those mirrors. When I first opened the box, I was a little concerned he'd arrived broken, because one of the wing mirrors dropped straight out... but it turned out the bag wasn't very well sealed, and it's perhaps more surprising that any of these loose components remained inside it than it is that one of them fell out.

As an extra precaution, there's a plastic film over the vehicle's windscreen, with what seems to be a QC sticker (the Chinese character translates as 'check')... Though I've seen photos suggesting it doesn't necessarily do a great job of protecting it from scratches.

On first impressions, MetaGate have done a great job: it's an excellent presentation box, very much on a par with companies who've been around far longer, albeit without the frills and textured laminates that some have applied. The one thing conspicuous by its absence is a collectors' card, which have been a staple in other Third Party MP-analogues.

Car Mode:

I have mixed feelings about the Bugatti Veyron. On the one hand, it's quite a distinctive, curvy vehicle, and it certainly looked good in the extended car advertisement that was Age of Extinction. On the other hand, the super-smooth body tends to look quite featureless, with all the character packed in to the very front and rear of the vehicle. I guess this is evidence of my clear bias towards the more angular stylings of the typical Lamborgini, but I don't find it to be so compelling a car as it seemed when Drift first appeared in the movie series.

Sculpted detail, by and large, is fairly minimal and, while certainly not perfectly accurate to the vehicle seen on-screen, it's about as good as anyone could expect from a fairly complex Masterpiece-analogue that doesn't take the easy route of turning most of the car shell into a backpack. The front grille is split into five sections - two on either side of the bumper, one front and centre - and each has a shallow-sculpted grille pattern. The central grille features a raised lozenge representing the Bugatti logo, but it's neither painted nor stamped with any text. At the back, the tail lights feature the bare minimum of a sculpted outline, and the Ettore Bugatti emblem is absent, for obvious reasons. The exposed engine detail is nicely done, and appears to be close enough to the real thing, given the necessities of being part of a transforming figure. It's not immediately obvious, but this vehicle mode does feature a spoiler - by default, it's flattened down at the back, and the only indication that it can be deployed is a pair of small indentations just in front of it, that are supposed to offer enough leverage to start pushing it up. I've found it requires a small tool, such as a flat screwdriver, or even a paperclip, and the spoiler only lifts up a couple of millimetres, nowhere near as far as it's supposed to - more or less level with the roof, going by photos of the real-life car.

Where the official Masterpiece Movie figures seem to take great pains to ensure vehicle mode is as unblemished as possible, the vastly more complex transformation of this figure has led to some defined panel breaks and instances where things don't line up perfectly. The front, in particular, looked very broken-up when I first got him out of the packaging, though this can be improved upon by squeezing him together. The back end features some more obvious mismatches, and there are some conspicuous slots in the body of the vehicle - the doors in particular - where things tab in for robot mode. The most egregious are the grey plastic hinge on the front of the rear wheel wells, and the metallic cyan flaps over the outer extremities of the rear bumper. There are a couple of instances of robot mode parts being somewhat visible in vehicle mode - his toes poke out beneath the doors, and parts of his backside are visible below the front bumper, both seeming to hand perilously close to the ground. On balance, though, vehicle mode turned out surprisingly well.

Paintwork is deceptively simple. Most of the car body has a coating of a very dark blue metallic paint, and then the bottom of the car, from bumper to bumper, and the frame around the front grille, is highlighted with metallic cyan. All the wheels are painted silver with more metallic cyan on the inner parts of the spokes and on the disc brake details behind the wheels. The tail lights are painted red, though the wide, central brake light is absent - neither sculpted nor painted - and the exhausts are picked out in silver. One feature I particularly like - and it took seeing this figure to realise how much I missed it on mainline figures - is that the entire front headlight sections are molded in translucent plastic, with the opaque blue and cyan paint applied on the outside, and a light gunmetal paint applied to the inside, giving the headlights themselves a very realistic appearance, despite the actual sculpted details being quite simplistic. It really does wonders for the figure's presentation, yet it's something Hasbro haven't been doing for quite some time. I dread to think what even a Human Alliance toy would look like, if Hasbro were to start the line now. The main downside on the paint job here is that it doesn't have the ultra-glossy finish of the vehicle in the movie... but I guess that would just end up being a fingerprint- and dust-magnet, so MetaGate likely made the right call. Where I don't think they made the right call is in the absence of black paint on all the car's grilles, front and rear, not least because the sculpt isn't especially strong, and leaving it the same colour as the surrounding car panels means they don't stand out as well as they should. On that score, the fact that the petrol caps and the engine details are unpainted is a huge disappointment... though it's not as if either were made especially prominent in the movie, so I guess they're easily missed.

The obvious downside of this vehicle mode is that there's nowhere to store the swords... but, to be honest, that always feels like such a Hasbro problem. It's a car... it doesn't need swords hanging off it. To be honest, I'd have much preferred it if Haiku had come with a small stand for his swords, which could be displayed alongside him when in vehicle mode... but I guess Metagate are assuming that most people will display Haiku in robot mode, wielding his swords. All that having been said - and I don't know that this was necessarily intentional - but the sets of three missiles, ostensibly for helicopter mode only, can be pegged into the vehicle via the smaller of the two slots on each side, located just in front of the fuel cap and behind the side windows. They sit at a strange angle - not really conducive to firing the missiles - but it's certainly an option, even if not deliberate.

'Helicopter' Mode:

Well, where should one start on this jumbled mess? It vaguely resembles the idea of a helicopter because it has rotor blades, landing skids, something resembling a cockpit canopy and a long tail. The way this has been achieved is certainly inventive, but the tail is disproportionately small versus the rest of the vehicle, and the rotorblades mount far too high because that's the entire hilt of one sword they're attached to... Would have been better if part of the hilt could detach, allowing the blades to sit lower, and closer to the vehicle itself.

But then, 'better' is such a relative term when the vehicle itself looks like an incoherent jumble of of robot parts. On one level, I truly do admire the effort... and it's not as if the movie CGI looked like anything other than robot parts reconfigured into something resembling a helicopter... but this really is just a robot with a stabiliser popping out of its backside, folded up into a yoga position, and attempting to cover its head in shame. The cockpit canopy doesn't even peg together - the two halves are supposed to attach to a piece of Haiku's right forearm via two pegs per side, each sitting at a different angle - and the rest of the chopper's nose is clearly just the robot's forearms and hands folded loosely together, with the thumbs hanging down, possibly intended to represent the guns Drift's helicopter mode had in the movie. The folded up sections of vehicle shell, from the bonnet to the roof, are visible in robot mode, but at least they're somewhat concealed by the arms, but in this form, the gappy inner parts of the figure are on full view, in the main body of the vehicle.

While the robot's primary weapons are put to practical use in this mode, the otherwise unused missile pods get their chance to shine... by attaching to parts of Haiku's ankle, unfolded from the lower section of the vehicle... But since these winglets fold out on their transformation joints, there's no natural stopping point for them in this form. They don't really look like winglets so much as bits that have come loose from the body and are just flopping around at the sides. Adding missiles to them just makes them look more precarious. The rotor blades mount in a socket that's set up to rotate freely, but the joint seems a little tight on mine, so they barely managed a single full rotation on their own.

Probably the best I can say for this vehicle mode is that it looks kind of like what a remote control model helicopter might look like if you removed most of its outer shell... And I don't foresee a time where I will transform Haiku back into this hopeless-looking alternate form.

Robot Mode:

While I've yet to find myself disappointed by any of the Third Party MPM-analogues, Haiku is in a league of his own in robot mode - a truly stunning achievement. While transformation isn't overly complex (with the exception of one or two details, which I'll get into later), the physical difference between his robot mode and his car mode is such that you almost can't see how the transformation can possibly be achieved based on robot mode alone. In terms of detailing, paintwork and proportions, he almost looks like one of the high-spec action figures from ThreeZero, or the statues from Prime 1 Studios. Upon closer inspection, elements of his car mode become visible, but they're incredibly well concealed.

In terms of sculpted detail, the designers have done an incredible job of using the inner faces of some car panels to add robot mode detailing and physical bulk via the most minor transformation steps. I've said it before, but the designers at Hasbro and Takara Tomy really need to start paying attention to the way the Third Parties assign dual purposes to vehicle mode panels rather than leaving them as wholly separate shell parts that then end up folded into an enormous and unsightly backpack. MPM Jazz makes for an interesting comparison because, to an extent, he did use the reverse of certain vehicle mode panels to add detail to robot mode... but even he wasn't so elegant as this thing. There are certainly similarities in the engineering of Peru Kill, but the level of detail is far more advanced. While the chest is comparatively simple, representing the vehicle mode's grille and some plain, segmented armour with a few hints of mechanical detail just above the waist joint, the backpack is covered with mechanical detailing that looks very much as though it could be part of a car or a helicopter. The arms and thighs feature the characteristic samurai-style armour of sode on the upper arms are sculpted to look properly segmented while actually being mostly solid parts (the upper part of his sode being separate from the lower to accommodate transformation). The forearms are appropriately asymmetrical, with the bulkier right arm featuring more mechanical detail and the slimmer left arm being mostly covered with smooth armour. The waist and pelvis - both front and back - are surprisingly well detailed, though his backside seems a little oversized due to the need to accommodate his helicopter mode's tail rotor. The haidate on the fronts of the thighs look every bit as good as his sode, though there's an interesting quirk of this figure's design, in that the armour on his right hip had fewer, larger panels than the left in Age of Extinction, and they only became more symmetrical in The Last Knight... I wonder if this means they're intended to re-release this figure with a new vehicle mode, based on the Mercedes-AMG GT R... I get the impression that wouldn't be an unwelcome move among the fandom. Given that the lower legs are made up of concertina'd vehicle shell panels, they look surprisingly cohesive and, while the level of detail is much reduced versus the upper body, they still managed to cram in quite a bit on corners, edges and inner faces. I'm not madly keen on the design of the feet, but they're certainly more accurate to the CGI than any of Hasbro's toys have been.

Paintwork is similarly awesome, certainly well beyond the likes of Peru Kill, and likely better than DX9's La Hire, if only in terms of the smaller details. His 'belt' and each of the segmented armour panels on his shoulders and thighs has the rim picked out in the metallic cyan paint, as does the faux-grille in his chest. The grille itself is painted gunmetal, while the area between the rim and the dark metallic blue armour appears to be painted with an even darker gunmetal, then his collar and the 'fastenings' either side of them are picked out in gold. Little mechanical details on the arms and legs are highlighted with copper, silver and gold paint, though there are some areas where paintwork is less than optimal. On the largely silver right forearm, there are some additional details highlighted with gold paint, but it either needed the gunmetal paint rather than the silver or, at the very least, a dark wash to make it look a bit more battle-tested. Similarly, the slimmer, armoured left forearm has a few nice paint applications, but there's a line of the metallic cyan that starts on the outer half, and then stops abruptly on the seam with the inner half. It seems all the more strange to miss details like this when both sets of knuckles are picked out with the metallic cyan. Other omissions include black paint for the faux-tyre details sculpted into the outer halves of each shin, and metallic cyan on the unique details on the ends of each of his sodes and haidates. These are minor quibbles, though, and could easily be to prevent wear on the paint through transformation. It has been noted by several other people who've bought Haiku that the Bugatti lozenge on his faux grille should have been painted red, but it was likely left unpainted for the same reason as the one on the 'real' vehicle mode grille.

As with the character's appearance in the movie, Drift's weapons can be stashed on his back, fanned out. Weirdly, I keep seeing photos of him with the swords attached hilt-up and, while it's certainly a bit fussy to attach them hilt-down - part of the back has to be flipped back into its vehicle mode configuration to allow space for the swords to peg in - the concept art and movie CGI make it fairly apparent that's how they're supposed to work. That said, I guess many people are working on the assumption that he'd reach back over his shoulders to grab them by the hilt, as is more traditional with swords. I was a little surprised to find that the two smaller blades - similar to those included on Hasbro's Deluxe class toys as a pair of tantos that he could actually wield in his hands - are just cosmetic detail accessories on the robot's back and additional blades for his 'helicopter' form. Given the way they plug into his rotor assembly, I'd have thought it would have been easy enough to add a couple of hilts into this package to make them functional as secondary weapons... but I guess they weren't in the movie, so why make them so on this figure? The swords themselves seem at once oversized and undersized - the hilts are massive to accommodate their alternate uses in 'helicopter' mode, while the blades seem comparatively short for their width. Their paintwork is fairly simple - they appear to be molded in a dark, gunmetal plastic, and silver has been applied along the 'edges' (none of which are remotely sharp!). Curiously, the way the tabs are arranged on the hilts, each sword can only peg into one hand - the one with the pommel only fits in the right hand, the one without only in the left. This is because, while there's a tab on either side of the hilt, they're offset, and the slot in the hand requires the tab to be toward the back, otherwise the bulk of the hilt can pop the thumbs off their ball joints. While his missile accessories aren't really intended for use in robot mode, they can be attached to spare pegs on his calves, if only to slightly reduce the risk of these detachable parts going missing.

Much as I dislike the overblown samurai motif of Drift's movie design, I have to admit this figure's head sculpt is an excellent interpretation of the CGI, from the flared helmet and its authentically-styled crests, to the detailed, multi-layered face sculpt and the tiny, protruding goatee. Even the back of the helmet is sculpted to give the appearance of layers of segmented armour intended to protect the back of his neck. MetaGate certainly haven't skimped on paintwork either, with a dense coating of gold over most of the front, and even on the small 'cat ears' protruding from the top of the head. The goatee and some of the raised details on the helmet's crests are overpainted with the dark blue, and there's a band of metallic cyan running down each side of the helmet. The face itself is sculpted with a fairly neutral expression, with the finely-detailed, metallic-cyan painted eyes narrowed in concentration.

I'm not going to sugar-coat this: I bought this figure after watching two different videos involving its transformation, and felt it didn't look overly complex... But I was wrong. Or was I? The issue is that there are certain steps - and I'm talking about the arms and shoulders, primarily - that have to be dealt with in a very specific way, and ideally in a very specific order, just to ensure sufficient clearance. However, the instructions provided - and even the videos, upon rewatching - do not clearly delineate the process. The printed instructions don't focus on the important details, and the videos invariably had fingers and thumbs getting in the way of those details. The shoulder hinges alone have to be manipulated into very specific configurations, with the two parts of each sode arranged in a particular way to allow the arms to fold together and peg into the rear of vehicle mode. The slider joint that positions the shoulders in either mode seems only to work when the array of shoulder joints is in the appropriate configuration, so it's very much a case of 'if the joint is fighting you, you've done something wrong'. I also had a fairly hard time with the backpack, since it clips together via a single, very delicate hook that doesn't reach its intended attachment point unless everything is 100% properly seated, and then still likes to detach itself at the slightest touch. While the legs work in a broadly pretty similar way to the likes of Peru Kill - and, in fact, I suspect Unique Toys' take on Lockdown might be one of the primary inspirations behind the engineering of Haiku - there are far more small parts making small movements, all over Haiku... For example, his raised collar made up the rearmost sections of his rear wheel arches, but they're so far removed from that configuration, it honestly looks like magic. The legs are particularly impressive, since the entire sides of the car essentially concertina down into the lower leg, with part of the side windows folding in and switching places with the top of the shin, which then clips over and around the folded up panels to secure them in place. What I find most impressive is how compact and slender the upper body is, despite it being bulked up largely by parts of the vehicle's bonnet and roof. Here, a blocky, squared-off torso has been avoided by adding hinges to the corners of the car's roof, and having them wrap around his waist or fold inside. I'm also quite impressed by the asymmetry of the way the arms and feet stow in vehicle mode.

Crap as the 'helicopter' mode is, transforming to or from that mode is substantially easier than either robot-to-car or car-to-robot... But, really, there's no reason to transform Haiku into his 'helicopter' form. It's abundantly clear that it's not just an afterthought, that it was a conscious part of the design process at every step of the way... but it's still rubbish, and MetaGate may as well not have bothered with it. I'm not sure cutting it out would have made a massive contribution toward reducing the fussiness of this figure, but it certainly wouldn't have made it any worse.

There are a couple of spring-loaded pieces, notably on the front and outside of the thighs and the underside of his left forearm, which add bulk during transformation... but there seems to have been an assembly error on one thigh on mine, meaning the side piece was jammed behind the haidate on one side, and had to be forced out. Even having fixed that, neither it nor the haidate move as freely as the correctly-assembled counterparts on the other leg. The sprung piece in the left forearm has a habit of getting stuck, because it seems to be only loosely held into its track, and rattles a bit within the forearm, so pushing it in sometimes results in it getting wedged in place. The only other thing to note is that one or two smaller pieces on the legs popped off their (unpinned) hinges during my first couple of transformations due to clearance issues, but they were easily popped back on.

Another common thread between this figure, Peru Kill and La Hire is that, as amazing as robot mode can be made to look in photos, its articulation is surprisingly not amazing. It feels like all the necessary joints are there, but they're either super-stiff or their range is negligible. Starting at the feet, we have ankle tilt thanks to transformation, as well as separately articulated 'toes' and foot spikes. However, great as 180° inward ankle tilt is, the forward/backward tilt is virtually nil because the foot and the lower leg mass clash instantly. He has double-jointed knees with enviable range, but the thighs can't kick forward or out very far because of the haidate. These pieces are spring-loaded to move out of the way (down the thigh) as the leg is swung forward, but it still butts up against his belt before even achieving 30°, and the legs barely swing any further backward. Add to this, he has an enforced A-stance because of the bulk of the inner thigh (the inside of the car's headlight sections). The waist is theoretically unrestricted, but I've heard some alarming clicks on one side because of the outer windscreen sections, wrapped around his sides, catching on part of his belt. He has an ab crunch which can be extended by unfastening the small belly panel, but its range is decent enough without. The shoulders are insane, with the transformation joints allowing some butterfly movement and 360° rotation (sword storage allowing). His arms can't quite lift 90° out to the sides, while bicep rotation is super-stiff and often splits the sode. His elbows are double jointed due to transformation, and he has extremely stiff rotation joints in the forearm, just below each elbow. The hands are pretty interesting, in that the wrist can tilt in and out, such that he can show his palms or cock his fists, as well as tilt down, allowing him to more effectively point his swords. The bulkier, silver forearm grants less of this movement than the more svelte blue arm, but that could just be the stiffness of the joint on mine. The hands themselves feature two knuckle joints each across all four conjoined fingers, along with a thumb that's ball-jointed at the base, then has a hinge. The head is on a ball joint attached to a short 'neck', mainly for transformation... but the back of the helmet features cutaways to allow it to sit back properly within his collar, basically immobilising it. Rock the head forward on its 'neck', and a fair range of movement is unlocked, but the flared helmet clashes with pretty much everything around it, and it doesn't take long for the position and orientation of the head to look unnatural.

On the subject of articulation, I feel it's also worth adding that a certain YouTube reviewer complained about the lack of wrist articulation on this figure... even while noting - as I have done - that it does have forearm rotation. Considering this achieves exactly the same result in terms of poseability (and would actually be more anatomically accurate, if one were to observe one's own arm while rotating one's hand) and there's a lot more tilting range than most figures offer, it's an absurd complaint. Literally the only problem with these forearm rotation joints is that they're too damned tight. Personally, I wish more figures had forearm rotation instead of wrist rotation, since the wrist tends to be a smaller, more delicate joint, which could then simply be pinned to tilt instead.

Aside from the fact that I really did not enjoy transforming Haiku the first couple of times, and ignoring the QC/assembly issues with the leg armour, I think it's a fantastic achievement. The Bugatti Veyron car mode certainly isn't flawless, and 'helicopter' mode is a travesty I shall surely never revisit, but robot mode - for me - transcends its somewhat botched articulation. He's easy enough to pose in Drift-like poses, he handles his swords well, the sculpt and paint work are nothing short of phenomenal. Considering the quality and cost of Hasbro's recent Masterpiece figures, Haiku presents far better value for money, albeit with the significant caveat of a fussy transformation... and I know I'm more inclined to be forgiving of that sort of 'flaw' than some folks.

That said, it's probably not the most horrific transformation at Third Party company has produced, and nothing about it feels particularly fragile, even though there are some instances of metal pins inside what seems to be very thin pieces of translucent plastic. Chances are, after a few more attempts, I'll get a better grip on how Haiku's arms are supposed to be manoeuvred and, once the method clicks, it'll be a lot more enjoyable to transform him back and forth.

I do have one, quite strange complaint... and that is that his fingers seem too short. Fully extended, they look about right... so it's possibly just that they're all conjoined and their hinges behave weirdly but, in certain poses, with the fingers bent, the hands just don't look right, and certainly the fact that they don't wrap fully around the hilts of his swords is unusual.

If you're particularly fanatical about scale, or not overly keen on the later Bayverse aesthetic, Haiku is probably not for you. As with other Third Party releases, MetaGate did not feel beholden to any particular scale and, while his vehicle mode might fit adequately with official MPM figures, his robot mode certainly won't... Though he's probably close enough to the likes of La Hire and most of Unique Toys' MPM-analogues, and possibly the upscaled KO of MPM Ratchet... He's certainly too tall compared to Rescue Pioneer. I ordered Haiku from Iacon.Store for a touch over £110 including shipping (direct from China via the courier YanWen, and taking just over a week to arrive), and that's a steal considering the prices Hasbro expect us to pay for their mainline toys now, let alone the Masterpiece figures. If the Third Parties continue to produce figures like this, Hasbro have basically priced themselves out of relevance to collectors.