Review - Fans Hobby MB-13 Ace Hitter
Fans Hobby continues their Master Builder line with another of the youngest members of the Autobot Headmasters faction: MB-13 Ace Hitter, an homage to Gō Shūta/Go Shooter. This young man turned Headmaster Jr. is one of the main characters in Transformers: Super-God Masterforce. Let’s check out Fans Hobby’s take on this iconic character from the Japanese Transformers universe!
Vehicle Mode
Ace Hitter comes packaged in his stunning police cruiser mode. The original Go Shooter was an unlicensed design based on the Mazda RX-7, and Fans Hobby has implemented much of the same design elements in their take on the character.
The hood and doors feature intricate tampographing of a police crest and badge on top of black paint, along with the written word “Police” featured at the top of both designs.If you want to add even more law enforcement livery there is an included sticker sheet that adds a banner across the top of the windshield and stripes above both rear fenders.
The windows and windshield are cast in a translucent blue plastic that allows you to glimpse the interior. The lightbar is cast in the same blue transparent plastic as the windows. There are rubber tires, and also flip up headlights at the front of the hood which is pretty cool! You can put the pilot inside and have him drive the vehicle as with previous offerings from Fans Hobby.
If you follow Fans Hobby on social media, you may have seen a post immediately prior to Ace Hitter’s release showing copies with disfigured paint on the hood, caused by the plastic protector they used to ship the figure. Thankfully this was caught before the shipments were sent out and Fans Hobby corrected this on all of the figures prior to release.
Robot Mode
Ace Hitter has a fun and satisfying transformation process that is very similar to MB-12 Athena. I’ve seen a few people go so far as to call Ace Hitter a retool of the Athena figure, but I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. There is a lot of shared engineering, but Ace Hitter does quite a few things differently as well. Regardless, that’s more of a subjective observation that may differ from user to user.
Hitter’s bot mode is a looker. He’s got a lot of the staple Transformers visual cues that have survived in the line even 30+ years later. The vehicle hood splits to become the lower legs, with most of the rest of the figure being contained within the vehicle, leading to a rather clean silhouette in robot mode with only a backpack section and the shoulder armor adding some bulk. The backpack can be removed if you want a cleaner presentation similar to Athena. Just pull straight back and it will unclip and pull out. It’s not as immediately obvious on this figure as the clip is hiding within a plastic sleeve.
Articulation is comprehensive, if a little basic in some spaces. Let’s go over the movement.
From the top down:
- Ball joint/Headmaster joint at the neck. Full 360º rotation, tilt, down and up (limited up).
- Compound joint at the shoulder, if you lift the locking flap you get 2 points of rotation.
- 360º rotation at the shoulder, as well as a bicep swivel directly below.
- Single axis elbow, forearm is cut to allow a bend past 90º while maintaining a natural look.
- Wrist swivel 360º, as well as a hinge joint that allows up/down movement.
- Partially articulated hand. Base joint for thumb, 2 joints on hand. Same as Athena
- Ball joint at the waist, allowing ab crunch, oblique crunch, and 360º swivel.
- Ball joint hips. The hips also have a drop down feature at the pelvis.
- Thigh swivel.
- Double jointed knees, however the door panels get in the way. Maxes out at 90º.
- Multi-axis ankle, including a central ball joint, and a separate tilt at the toes.
Ace is a great robot toy, but I can’t help wishing that something more could have been done with the door panels behind the legs. That double knee is wasted unless you put them to the side, which looks really rough. This was the same with Athena and Nite Walker. It would be cool if there was some way to fold those doors into the lower legs, since there is an empty cavity in there once the feet are folded out.
Accessories
1x Instruction Sheet
1x Collectors Card
1x Sticker Sheet
2x Folding Blasters
2x Face Plates
Final Thoughts
Ace Hitter implements and in my opinion perfects a lot of the ideas presented with the previous releases of Athena and Nite Walker. Great Tolerances, great design, fun to transform and play with. His design is simple but effective and he just gets what it means to be a transforming car robot. I just wish something could be done about those door flaps, but they really aren’t a deal breaker and can be worked around if you really need to bend the leg farther for a specific pose.
Fans Hobby is known for big chunky bots, but they do a great job in this smaller scale as well. I can’t wait for their take on Cab to finish out the Autobot Headmaster Jrs. There’s also a really cool Fire Guts gift set of Power Baser and the God Armor coming soon that looks really cool. Thanks Fans Hobby for letting me check out Ace Hitter! Click here to get your own.
