Dragon Ball Z Brother vs Brother 2 packs
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Hot on the heels of Jakk's last wave of Dragon Ball Z two packs come the "Brother vs
Brother" packs. The pairings this time include Goku and Raditz, Nail and Piccolo and
Gohan and Goten. The wave includes one new character, three resculpted figures and two
figures repackaged from previous waves. But I will only be covering two of the three
sets in this review, Nail & Piccolo and Goku & Raditz.
Packaging - 8/10Once again, Jakks has gone all out with thier packaging. The figures come on a large card with the two figures facing off with each other. The bubble itself is quite large, filling the entire bottom of the card and has the DBZ logo on an insert inside at the top. The Brother vs Brother theme along with the character's names are printed on the large insert on the bottom and once again they have included a banner written in Japanese along the side with no indication of its meaning. The only sections which are not covered by the bubble are the two top corners which have images of the two characters. The back of the card is a generic backer with images of the other 2 packs, Battle Warriors, the Stadium playset and the Buu Playset. Some character info or images from the anime would have been an nice addition.
Sculpting - Raditz 7/10 others 8/10Both Goku and Raditz are new sculpts and both turned out very well. Goku is sculpted just as he was at the end of the battle with Raditz (except for the being dead part) with his undershirt, wristbands and shoes removed and his pants and overshirt torn. The only draw back is that they sculpted him with too much muscletone in his chest. He was wasn't this ripped at the beginning of DBZ. Raditz gets a much needed hight boost over the original Raditz figure, standing almost 3/4 of an inch taller. One of the big selling point for this set is supposed to be the addition of a separate tail for Raditz. The tail isn't bad, but since it is made with soft rubber without any means of holding a pose, it really doesn't look quite right no matter how you try to position it. The head sculpt is slightly off too. the chin is to pointed. They also tried to cut down on the weight of the hair by making it mostly hollow like on the first figure. Unfortunately since the hair is sculpted as if it was being blown by the wind, the gap in the hair becomes very noticeable.Piccolo is a reuse of the sculpt from the Ultimate Struggles 2 pack. The new sculpt is slightly taller than the Irwin sculpt which gives him better proportions. They also corrected the details for the pink areas on Picolo's arms and added antenna that actually extend off of his head as opposed to simply being sculpted on. This is a battle damaged version of Piccolo but the damage isn't very extensive or noticeable. There are minor tears in his clothing on both legs and his chest. His collar is also slightly torn. Nail uses the same arms and legs with a new bare chest and a new head. The head sculpt has an open mouth scream and even larger ears. As with Piccolo, the antenna are separate and extend off of the forehead.
Paint - Goku 8/10 others 5/10Goku does extremely well here. There aren't a lot of details but with the exception of a blotch on the right knee joint and in the corner of the right eye, the overall result is excelent. Raditz has problems with the white that was used for his armor's trim. The edges for the white aren't very clean and the white bleeds onto both the armor and the skin. Piccolo and Nail both have problems with the pink used on their arms. Piccolo has a few spots where the red for the border bleed over and a couple of stray brush stroke on his forearm. For Nail, it just a few clumps and a single area of bleeding but he also has a lot of paint clumps on his knee joints.
Articulation - 8/10All four figures feature twenty points of articulation:
Accessories - 1/10The Goku/Raditz pack comes with the same four rocks that have come with more than half a dozen DBZ figures since Jakk's took over. Raditz also comes with a scouter that wasn't even worth taking out of the package. It is molded in extremely soft plastic that warps very easily and a peg that is very difficult to insert. As a result, by the time you ever get it onto the figure, you'll have mashed the scouter into an unrecognizeable mass of plastic. And to be honest, even after several attepmts and using a knife to try and expand the hole behind Raditz's ear, I still never got it to stay in place. Do yourself a favor and track down the original Raditz and use his scouter since it not only was fully painted, but had a clear eyepiece. The new one is just a white piece of plastic with green paint globbed onto the eyepiece. The Nail/Piccolo set comes with one item, a tree. It is a nice tree and a good effort. But what are you going to do with a single, way too small to be in scale tree? And it is small. So small that it looks more like a big wad of cotton cahdy for Nail to eat. This is just a shame, first since they already have an terrific mold for Piccolo's cape and hat. They even had a cloak made up for the prototype but left it out in the final product.
Value - Nail/Piccolo 3/10, Goku/Raditz 5/10At $14.99, these take a big hit in the value depeartment. The individual figures aren't the strongest offerings and the price is certainly no savings over the individual carded figure. The Piccolo/Nail pack takes an extra hit since you can already get the same Piccolo figure with better accessories and a great figure of Cell for the same price where as the Nail figure included with this set looks more like a second Piccolo figure with a different pair of pants.
Happy Hunting:Thus far I have only seen these sets showing up at Toys R Us. I bought them at the TRU stores in Madison, WI (one on each side of town). They will also likely show up before too long at Amazon.com.
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