General Grevious (Class I)
Vehicle ModeMech Mode
Difficulty of Transformation: Very Easy
Color Scheme: Swirly bluish gunmetal gray, whitish light tan, charcoal black, and some pale metallic gold, pale metallic bronze, silver, transparent light blue, light red, pale green, and transparent light green
Rating: 7.0

    General Grevious' starfighter makes the transition to the smaller Class I size, and in general the vehicle mode handles the smaller size very well. As is par for the course for a Star Wars Transformer, the proportions in this mode are pretty much spot-on accurate, so no complaints there. The paint job on Grevious is also very good, even for a toy from this line-- his main color is a rather nice, semi-metallic-looking bluish gunmetal gray that, combined with the charcoal black paint wash over nearly every part of Grevious' vehicle mode, makes for a quite realistic-looking and eye-catching paint job. The silver-painted windows and alternating bronze-and-pale-gold stripes on the top help to make him look even more eye-catching here, too. Unfortunately, Grevious has a fair amount of mech mode kibble in this mode, most of it simply on the underside. Most of it is stored close enough to the underside that you can't view it except from a side-on view, but the bits of the legs under the cockpit and the head under the front end in particular show in most view angles that aren't completely top-down. It's a double shame here, given how nice the vehicle mode is otherwise. Grevious has one fold-out tab in his mech chest to serve as a bit of a landing gear, but the side landing gear are molded as being deployed on this toy, and it stands just fine on those, so the extra one was a bit pointless, honestly. One quite cool thing about Grevious in this mode is that his lightsabers-- which are stored in his side engines-- can be pulled out from the back end to look like "exhaust trails", a pretty neat effect.
    In mech mode, General Grevious wears most of his alt mode kibble on his back, though it's not quite as bad as it is on his Class II version; here the back end forms his lower legs, while the side pods detach slightly form the main body piece and can seperate to form Grevious' four arms. It's a bit of a mixed bag; on the positive side, his mech mode head, chest, and upper legs look very good and proportional. The mold and paint detailing on his face, in particular, is extremely well-done and spot-on Grevious (which I don't mind for this SWTF, considering he's mostly mech anyways). However, his chicken-walker lower legs are hollow on the front and, combined with the small, tab-like feet, just look bad and make him rather unstable in terms of getting him to stand by himself. As for his arms, the ability to have Grevious swinging four lightsabers with four arms is pretty cool, but the two arms on each side are both connected to each other rather close to the shoulder joint, and worst of all, there's no hands visible-- they're just parts of the ship that have lightsabers coming out of them. That kind of ruins the illusion, there. As for articulation, this version of General Grevious can move at the neck, shoulders (at two points), elbows (at one point for each arm), and at the hips and knees (at two points)-- roughly standard for a Class I SWTF, though his arms are less articulated than you'd think from the description due to how bulky and close-to-the-shoulders the lower arms are.
    Class I General Grevious has an extremely well-done paint job and a pretty cool vehicle mode, and the ability of him to wield four lightsabers with four arms is pretty cool at this scale. However, the kibble underneath his vehicle mode and the oddness of his arm articulation, tiny feet, and lack of visible hands in mech mode does knock him down a fair bit. Still, recommended over the Class II version, given the paint job and being a bit less of a shellformer.



General Grevious (Class I) Bio:
General Grievous pilots his starfighter in a space battle with Obi-Wan Kenobi, then converts his fighter into a mech and unleashes his lightsabers to duel his Jedi enemy.

Review by Beastbot

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