Brastle Tiger

2004 was a great summer and fall, and Brastle and Rayse remind me of it all too well. That combined with the incredibly surreal experience of building Brastle when extremely tired and very insomnia-driven will likely stick in my mind forever...

When promo photos of both Tigers showed up, Brastle was the one I immediately favored. Besides the fact that Rayse photographed very poorly early on, Brastle had sabre teeth. We know I have a thing for those by now, right? But then Rayse had to be glowy and much better-looking than I'd thought...long story short, I ended up with both when I'd thought I'd end up with neither.

Let's get one thing straight: building Zoids when very short on sleep is Not A Good Idea. I pried most of Brastle apart to get the back thing right only to discover it was fine all along, and I'm not sure how I escaped with all my fingers intact beyond a subconscious protective instinct to put the blade down in periods when the lack of sleep caught up with me. But man, it was fun, piecing together things with my brain all strange. I should try it again sometime but trim the pieces beforehand.

What was I building, exactly? Brastle Tiger is a pretty complex critter with a good compliment of pieces. They come molded in black (and not the crappy untrimmable black, praise be), metal flake red similar to the Imperial Liger Zero, silver, and gold. The eyes are clear red, and are one of the most brilliantly angled pieces of Zoid plastic ever. They catch the light perfectly, giving Brastle the ability to STARE into your soul from wherever it sits. The overall feel is Zenebas-y, somewhere in between the Newtypes of old and the Energy Liger's royal colors with a very faint hint of Lidier.

My only complaints? Both one frame of little red guns and the entire silver one are cast in an irritating semi-soft plastic. The teeth being on this frame screams safety concerns already, and then they had to go and make them blunt. When I say blunt, I mean butter knife. Needless to say, they were my first step into not being afraid to mod stock kits a little - I took my xacto to them, very carefully shaving slivers off the back edge until they'd been pointified in a manner suiting a pointy kitty. (Practice a bit on the sprue if you're unsure of how the plastic handles before you try this, since soft plastic is temperamental.)

On the weird front? Brastle's traditional belly gun is a unique design on the box, but the model within has a very Saber Tiger-like construction instead. The original prototypes also had a red tail with the black pieces as heatsinks that could all be moved. Sadly, this was dropped in favor of a solid black tail with most of the heatsinks molded as solid pieces - much like Geno Saurer's tail vents years previous. Finally, the head seems unpredictable: some Brastles hold theirs high, others droop down. Rick and I both got first run Tigers, and I have the former and him the latter. Who knows?

My memories of the exact details of assembly are...well, rather blurred. All I can remember is the thought that it was a bit like a Liger Zero crossed with a Saber Tiger, and overall not quite as different-feeling as Rayse Tiger, but still quite engaging. For all they looked like they might have separate toes, the feet didn't - the other surprise came in just how lanky the thing is under all the black armor flaps that cover its legs. Seeing the cat underneath the bulk makes its top speed of three hundred kilometers per hour sans any form of boosters a bit less silly...just a bit.

Speaking of which, all those various flappy foldy bits are heatsinks, 'cause this kitty is all about heat - searing, slicing thermal goodness and a lot of raw power from its rather wild legendary core origins. That means it's gonna need cooling of the sort that would make a König Wolf or Blade Liger envy, and is really its main weakness - it can't keep all that black armor folded up forever, and the red bits underneath aren't as tough. Of course, it can also channel heat into claws and teeth that would be happy to melt through armor, and use heat to power those funky guns on its back that seem to possess magical curve-to-hit-target-fu. Roasty!

Those back guns are the source of Brastle's other gimmick beyond being foldy: when the weird unit they're attached to is flush with the Tiger's back (one must also line it up just right with part of the neck - this took me a while to figure out) and the motor is switched on, they wave up and down in a hypnotizing fashion. Pointed cats doing more than walking and chomping is a rare thing, so it's a welcome touch indeed. I like to keep the gun mount bit that way even when I'm poking the heatsinks, because it's a bastard to get back into place without losing one or more of the guns.

A final bonus? Brastle includes an any-region NTSC (old PAL TVs beware!) DVD with a brief promo video of it and Jet Rayse Tiger doing stuff, and a series of infobits on each Zoid from the Three Tigers era. Besides being mostly stuff you could get from the box, it neglects to give Brastle a run cycle like the others: Whitz has a standard Wolf lope, Rayse moves like a heavy Saix (and then the Fuzors Liger Zero in the promo itself), and Brastle...does nothing.

All and all, Brastle is one of the more challenging builds of its era, with a nice balance between no more pieces than is practical and complexity. Pretty much everything does something, and the layered armor bits don't just sit there, they fold. Add in the fact that is does something beyond walk and chomp and it's an excellent example of a pointed cat. I suspect if they were all this individually clever, people would complain less about the preponderance of them in the NJR.

Rewritten November 21st, 2006
Old review