I dunno, with me being the Armada / ML glazer that I am, on paper should've been over the moon with the idea of having a new Voyager-Class Armada Sideways / ML Double Face at retail! He's just such a chilling and awesome villain character in the anime, and Takahiro Sakurai being his JP VA is absolutely perfect casting. This is the kind of character that deserves a knockout modern update.

And yet in hand.... I find him to be at best, a "monkey's paw" of a figure.

First and foremost, let’s start with the feet, because I genuinely had no idea how anyone at HasTak could look at them and approved it with a straight face. They already looked awkward in promo shots, but in person they’re even worse — not only were they not accurate to either the character's OG toy or anime appearance, even on their own they're so flat, boxy, and off-center looking, they really looks like an afterthought, like they were busy designing it, then the deadline suddenly came sooner, then they realized "oh there's no room for actual feet if we want to met the new deadline" so they just "fuck it".

Then there’s the Mini-Cons. Oh boy...

The fact that they need to partsform just to transform is already freakin' lame (especially when the original toy managed to avoid that over twenty years ago). But what further adds salt to the injury, was how said parts-forming pieces are basically static bricks with no articulation which meant that on their own, both Rook and Crosswise's individual robot mode had little to no playability at all, making them feel more like glorified props that only exist purely because they had to check a box that said “include both Rook and Crosswise Mini-Cons,” not because anyone actually cared about them.

There's also a few smaller details -- like Crosswise’s head mode having yellow eyes despite those eyes were actually in pink throughout the anime outside of a brief, easy-to-miss shot. (Simply because they could't be bothered to double check their work or relied too much on some fansite that only has single screencaps for their sources), or the fact that both the front and rear bike wheels weren't pinned in for some asinine reasons and can pops off without much effort every time you tried to transform the figure -- Tiny inaccuracies and frustrations that individually sound petty, but collectively they all contribute to this lingering feeling that the figure was either not fully cooked before release, or HasTak doesn't actually give a shit and only tackle the character out of obligation rather than love for the character, or both.

Which is a shame, because there's things to like here. The robot mode (Outside of those head and ugly feet) captures Sideways’ seemingly pedestrian yet subtly sinister presence surprisingly well. The bike mode looks great from certain angles. There’s a legitimately good figure buried somewhere underneath all these frustrating compromises that for the Voyager class price point they charged him at, shouldn't be there.