Saberlion

When I ordered my Geno Breaker at HLJ, I added this guy along with it (and the Raynos my mom was giving me for Christmas). It sat on backorder for a while, and I finally got sick of waiting and got one on eBay. Its list price on HLJ was 500 yen (a little over 4 dollars), and I got mine on eBay for close to that.

When opening the box to a Saberlion, the first thing you'd probably notice (I did) is that the parts are a bright teal color, not blue like on the box. My guess is that they changed the Saberlion's color after designing the box, but who knows. I like teal so it doesn't bother me, although I think I would have liked the blue better. The parts are all quite small, and the Saberlion doesn't have a motor. Take note of the fact that the instructions show that one piece on Saberlion's stomach going on the wrong way-mine came with a little sheet of paper showing the correct way.

The only hard part about putting the Saberlion together was that the pieces were small, and thus a bit fiddly to work with. The jaw was a bit tight, so I made the hole a bit bigger with the tip of my xacto knife. When pushing the peg things in that the legs anchor to, it helps to wiggle them a bit to get them on all the way. It's not really apparent in pictures, but in addition to the little clear piece that forms Saberlion's eyes, it also has a clear orange viewscreen sort of thing on its back, like the one on Gun Tiger. My one complaint is that the large piece on the head tilts up a bit from the head if you push on the back part and thus looks like it's going to whack the pilot and his viewscreen.

Saberlion, when assembled, is pretty small...it's the smallest of my Zoids, in fact...smaller even than Helcat and Glaive Quama. And its teal-and-blueish-grey color scheme definately stands out, with him being my only Zoid so far with green-based colors. But this little guy's got nice articulation, especially considering how few pieces it has and how small it is. The legs can angle in and out a bit and bend at one joint in the front and two at the back, and the paws are attached by clipping them over ball things, so they can swivel around. The tail can move up and down, and while the head and neck aren't jointed, probably due to all the stuff on them, the saber can be flipped forward, the jaw can open and close, and the side blades around the face can flip out and turn. With the exception of the KFM Liger Zero (who isn't a model), Saberlion probably has the most articulation of any Zoid I've built yet.

While the color scheme takes a bit of getting used to, I've warmed up to it, and Saberlion's a pretty fun little Zoid...it has a lot of personality, if that makes any sense. I find that Zoids that you can pose look more...I don't know, like they could hop up and walk away. Or ride around on your shoulder and nip at passing pesky kids who went "Oooh, cool!" and poked at them...