Me: hunched over, working hard, sweating out the combinations, cranking through every damn position I can think of. Her: hard, unyielding, stubborn...yet playful. Decadent, yet mocking. You stupid, stupid S.O.B., I think to myself as a rivulet of sweat beads on my elbow and drops to her cool, smooth white skin. I've waited too long for this; no WAY I'm giving up this early. An hour of hard (yet somehow gratifying) exertion later, we're nearing the end of the line. Suddenly....good lord, SUCCESS! What a feeling! I roll to the side, spent and satisfied. She sits on her landing gear, watching, waiting for me to recover and give it another go.

What? I'm referring to Toycom / Yamato's newest little creation, the fully-variable YF-19 Valkyrie. What did you THINK I was talking about, you total sickos? Man oh man, what a toy. What a HEADACHE. But then again, sometimes the crazy ones are the most fun.

I've been around the block a few times, Valkyrie-wise, and I'd thought I'd seen nearly all there is to see. But it's like they say: you never know when love's going to come up and bite you on the ass. And this is one slick transforming toy. It has an absolutely stunning amount of detail, even down to painted panel-lines and such. There's a serious amount of diecast -- not only in the chest and legs, but in the wing-roots as well, meaning there's no WAY anyone's going to be able to say no to this hot little number. In a nutshell, it's what Bandai SHOULD have done with those infamous "Macross 7" toys of a few years back. Good lord, man, it's NEARLY AS BIG AS THE OLD 1:55 TOYS!

But no "honeymoon period" lasts forever, and my turgid little affair with YF-19 is no different. The culprit? The insanely, insanely complicated transformation system. The old-school Takatoku 1:55 Valkyries were the result of an incredible engineering feat that succeeded in making a complicated design very, very easy to understand. The YF-19, on the other hand, seems as if it were designed by a sentient CAD program with a deep-seated desire to torture transforming-robot aficionados. Mission accomplished. I haven't put this much blood, sweat, and tears into a transformation sequence since I first tried to appear like a smooth and collected guy to the opposite sex in high school. (Hey, at least I succeeded this time.)

The YF-19 is insanely engineered pop-sculpture, but there's no ignoring the fact that the design, great as it is on film, doesn't work so well in the cramped confines of reality. The thing is wasp-waisted and utterly prone to tumbling when it's in "Battroid" mode. (Indeed, it's more like diecast origami than an honest-to-god "toy.") Don't even make me laugh about the "Gerwalk" mode. But that being said, the "Fighter" mode is a thing of beauty, except that it takes, like, two hours and at least as many paint-chips to figure out how to do it the first time. Unlike several other YF-19 owners I've spoken to, I WAS able to completely transform the thing into Fighter mode without breaking anything, although there were quite a few heart attack moments in there. (There's absolutely no way one of these toys will survive even a single robot-to-plane conversion in mint condition -- no exaggeration.) And I've gotta say that it looks GREAT as a jet -- perhaps even better than in the Battroid mode, although your mileage may vary. (The only thing that kills it for me is a pair of huge, exposed screw-heads on the upper fuselage, but I can't really complain -- they need 'em to get those heavy diecast wing-assemblies to swivel into place.)

All in all? Thumbs up. Flaws and all, my hat's off to any company with enough taste (and insanity) to engineer something this complicated. Now I'm dying to see the upcoming designs, the VF-11 and YF-21. It's a crying shame that legal troubles have forced Toycom to temporarily postpone the American release of the toy, but they're on shelves in Japan as we speak -- and available through a select few importers, such as www.robozone.com, who hooked me up with mine. Thanks again, guys!