VF-25S Armored Messiah

Yesterday I went over to Toyslogic to pick up my Bandai DX VF-25S Armored Messiah. After chatting with my friend Ivy for a bit, I hurried home to open this sucker up and for good reason. This is the coolest and baddest of the armored valkyrie in the history of Macross. It's also the first time that an armored unit can transform into all 3 modes with the armor on. The VF-1 in Macross had to jettison the armor in order to transform. So did the VF-11C in Macross 7. Even the VF-0S in Macross Zero had a brief scene in full armor and had to jettison the parts off to fly and fight. So the fact that the Messiah can transform is a very cool thing.

Anyway, on to the good stuff. Here's the pic of the box when I first got it home. It's a very big box and surprisingly, the VF-25S was packed in it with the parts in the most efficient manner.

Here are the contents of the box. You can see the VF-25S packed in a foam box, there's one package that has the SMS stand for displaying the unit, and the rest are all armor parts.

Below is what the fighter looks like without the armor parts on. I put it next to my VF-25F for comparison.


I then went about putting the armor bits on. I read online that putting the armor on will take time and can be cumbersome so I knew that it wasn't going to be a quick and speedy process. I took my time with it and found the instructions isn't really helpful. The reason being is that the instruction booklet is quite small and it has small pictures in it with japanese text explaining the process. Anyway, I was very careful as I put the parts on so it took me a good hour and 15 minutes to put the parts on. Now that I'm familiar with the process I can probably put the armor on in 15 to 20 minutes.

So, here's how it looks with the armor on.

Top view with the radar dish in the center.

With the missile hatches open at the top.

With the hatches open at the bottom.

Since I didn't have time to mess with it some more and I like the look of the fighter mode, I stopped there. I'll probably come back to this and post pics of it in both Gerwalk and Battroid mode. Bottom line is that this is an awesome piece and well worth what I paid for it. It's heavy and quite durable. From the enemy's perspective this thing will incite fear and intimidate those into leaving the battle. From the pilots perspective this is the coolest thing in space combat.