Today we’ll be looking at the Tryon 3’s third and final animal form, the Sora Tryon (AKA the bird). Looking at key art and screenshots alone, you’d think the Sora would easily be the coolest of the bunch. In actuality, it has some big, potentially unavoidable issues.
The Sora Tryon is assembled out of the suit’s lower torso, and legs. The bird head comes from the upper half of the sword hilt, and a pair of clear plastic wings rounds out the ensemble.
The main problem with the Sora is that its proportions are all wrong. The legs and wings are huge compared to the unit’s tiny, tiny body. Whereas the other two animals look like robots in the shape of animals, this one looks a little closer to a bunch of pieces strapped together to create a rough facsimile of a living creature.
I’m not really sure if there’s much Bandai could have done here. The problem is that in the anime, the animation team can tinker with the size and scale of the Tryon 3’s individual components without most people noticing. That means the head can look bigger when attached to the Sora Tryon than it does when it forms the sword. You can’t do that with a model kit, not unless you decide to make two separate pieces for each use case. I don’t see that happening (and I don’t really blame them), so this is what we’re left with.
Another issue is that it is very hard to stand this figure up. It has small rocket boosters on the bottom of its talons, and they make balancing difficult.
Now, I don’t want to solely crap on the Sora, so I will say that with the right pose, it can look intimidating. And I’m impressed with how it causes the Tryon 3’s legs to transform into something closer to a bird talon, though there’s a lot of work behind that transformation.
The Sora took even slightly longer to build than the Umi Tryon, mostly due to the legs. They’re built out of many layers of pieces, and it is crucial that you put them on in the right order - and in the right orientation - otherwise you’ll discover that subsequent parts suddenly no longer fit.
Once everything is assembled, the transformation process for the Sora Tryon is the most complicated of the three. You first have to reorient the legs and torso into a completely different configuration. Then you have to remove some of the outer layers of armor, flip certain pieces upside down, and reattach completely new pieces (such as the rocket boosters). Again, you have to be very careful; one mistake can force you to undo all your work and try again. The one saving grace is that the model itself feels very sturdy. I never felt like it was going to break during the transformation.
One last note on the build - there is some very tricky decal application going on here. Specifically, you have to place a large white sticker on both sides of the head, making sure to smooth it out at a sharp right angle and line it up so that a protrusion on the head inserts cleanly through a cutout in the decal. It’s not easy, and I don’t think I did it perfectly, but it’s cool.
Now that the Sora Tryon is built, all three animal forms are complete. Let’s see the gang together.
Part of me looks at that photo and thinks, “How impressive is it that a High Grade kit is able to split out into three separate forms?” But then I stare at it long enough, and my thoughts shift to “Man, they really are just three sections of the Tryon with some cosmetic pieces slapped on them.” The thing is, however, that I’m not sure what more Bandai could do to make the animal forms look better, especially at this level of detail. I suppose it doesn’t matter in the end, however, since this plastic is never going to be in this form again.
In our final post we will look at the fully assembled Tryon 3. In the meantime, here is a gallery of both the Sora Tryon alone, as well as the whole gang.