Sacredpower Robo

I was introduced to the concept of Chinese mythology's Four Symbols by the Cowboy Bebop episode "Boogie Woogie Feng Shui," which in no way attempted to hold Western audiences' hands about the concept: someone was just told to go "where the four gods meet," and no further explanation about what that meant was offered, even when they got there and the four were named. It's still a relatively obscure concept; like, people know the Chinese zodiac, even if they can't name all 12 animals off the top of their head, but the Four Gods are still a secret. But 52Toys is a Chinese company creating primarily for the Chinese market, so it makes sense the gods would show up as Beastboxes. Each of the Symbols represents a direction, a color, a season, an element, an emotion... you get the idea. We begin with the Black Turtle of the North, Xuan Wu (玄武). Technically, it's not a turtle, for two reasons: first, because several different Chinese insults include calling someone a turtle, so 玄武 actually translates to "black warrior"; secondly, because it's not just a turtle, it's a turtle and a snake together. Why? Because according to old Chinese belief, all turtles were female and need snakes to mate with. And before you laugh that idea for being stupid, remember that Europeans at the same time thought birds spent the winter hibernating under frozen lakes, or that salamanders were fireproof. Hell, some peoplee today still think lemmings run off cliffs, and that story was only made up 70 years ago! Ancient people may have been dumb, but so are we. The Xuan Wu robot is short and flat, with four legs poking out at an angle from beneath it to carry it around. Instead of the single, solid, domed shell you may expect, it has more of a thick collar at its neck that then drops down at the shoulders before rising again as we move toward the rear of the beast. The head has a pointed beak, like a snapping turtle, and sticking out of the rear of the shell is a snake, curving up ove rthe body like a scorpion's tail. The turtle isn't black, just a dark grey, but that's close enough. It has pale gray limbs and darker feet, and teh snake is molded from translucent red plastic, matching the painted color of the turtle's eyes. A few gold accents are painted all over, to break up the monotony of the body. The legs are balljointed, the snake has four hinges, and the turtle's mouth can open and close. Moving to the east, we meet Qing Long (青龍), the Azure Dragon. Or, well, "azure" is how it's most commonly translated, but that's not really right: remember that the color spectrum of visible light does not have any firm divisions in it, instead being a smooth flow from one shade to the next - a spectrum, one might say - and so how we split it up is totally culturally arbitrary; Americans may know the colors as "Roy G. Biv," but that isn't necessarily the case everywhere. And until recently, most Asian societies considered "green" and "blue" to be two shades of the same thing, the way you might consider "canary" and "school bus" to both be shades of yellow. So while, yes, 青 does mean "blue," the fact the Dragon of the East is assigned the season of Spring and the element of Wood suggests an idea of plants growing, and so would probably work better with green symbology. No surprise the Qing Long robot is long and snake-like, with four legs and no wings - that's the Chinese dragon way! It has pieces on the side of its head that could represent either its ears or its antlers, and its snout is narrow. Scales have been sculpted on its sides, though we're not about to count and find out if there are exactly 117 of them. Stretched out fully, the dragon is 9½" long. Its body is made from nine segments, with joints in between each, but to get the best poses out of him you'll need to rotate the black sections near the middle different directions so the balljoints they contain can do more than curl him down. All four legs are on balljoints, and each has an ankle hinge as well. The jaw opens, and the antler-ears can be swiveled up or down. Be sure you don't knock his tail tip off when you're moving him! Continuing around the horizon, next is the Vermilion Bird of the South, Zhu Que (朱雀). Since its associated season is Summer and its element is Fire, it's often conflated with the Greek phoenix. It also often gets mistaken for the fenghuang, the ruler of all the birds and the feminine counterpart to the masculine dragon, but that's a different mythological bird. That would be like saying Jonah's whale is the same thing as the constellation Pisces. The bird is a rather odd shape. The wings almost appear to be on backwards, with the flat side in the front and the curve in the back. Its tail is just two long, trailing feathers, and the head is surprisingly large. Some plumage sticks off the cheeks, and there's either a horn or one stray feather sticking up off the top of the head. Clearly the snake was gang-molded along with the bird, because 52Toys' way of making it as vibrant as possible was to make it from translucent red plastic. And some of the parts are the same dark grey as the turtle, including the little balljointed feet underneath. The feathers on the face are golden, matching the paint on the top of the wings, and the beak is silver. In addition to the feet, there are various joints that will allow you to move the wings and head. The final entry is Bai Hu (白虎), the White Tiger of the West. China wasn't the only culture to assign colors to the cardinal directions - consider how much of the Middle East is located below the Black Sea and above the Red Sea, with the Mediterranean (called Akdeniz, or "White Sea," in Turkish and Al-Bahr Al-Abyad Al-Mutawassit, "The Middle White Sea," In Arabic) off to one side, and the Caspian Sea (partially labelled "the Blue Sea" on a mid-18th century map of Iran, possibly as a vestigial name for the entire thing) on the other. We've had three interesting, original designs, and then this... is just a Voltron lion. I realize there are only so many ways to do "large jungle cat, but make it robot," especially when it needs to change into something else in a few steps, but this is the "can I copy your homework" meme in plastic form. Explains why the box art seems to be an "Original Character Do Not Steal" tracing of the famous Voltron key art, too. When you hear the name "White Tiger," you probably assume two things: it will be white, and it will have stripes. This toy does neither. The body is white... by comparison to the other three, but it's actually gray. The same gray as Xuanwu's legs, Quinglong's jaw and feet, and Zhuque's beak. It is admittedly nice when the colors spill over like this; it makes the four beasts look like a team, not a crowd. The toy gets three points of articulation in each leg, plus one for the tail and a hinge in the center of the body. These are BeastBox toys, and so far we've only discussed the beasts, not the box. Do they transform into cubes, like the rest do? Yes. Sort of. By which we mean "no." But also yes? The official product listing says "each beast transforms into a quarter-sized cube," which gives the wrong impression: that makes it sound like they all become small boxes, doesn't it? Well, they don't. What it's trying to say is that each beast transforms into one quarter of a cube; as in, each of them turns into a flat panel, and then when you stack those four panels on top of one another, that's what forms the cube. So they don't turn into cubes themselves, but together they all turn into one cube. It's about 2" on each side, and the four slices fit together really firmly - you don't have to worry about it falling apart when you pick it up. If you thought a simple triple-changer was impressive, you're really going to dig this. These figures are part of a BeastBox subline called "1/4 Squad," which are all specialized teams like this. And just as the panels can stack into a cube, the robots can do similar. That's right, BeastBox has combiners now! By virtue of turning into flat squares, these four Beast Boxes are basically Transformers Cassetticons. And while the Autobots and Decepticons have both done mini-cassette combiners, that was in the '80s and engineering is way better today. According to the marketing copy, this robot is "the Ancient Spirit Deity - a towering divine warrior form," though the box calls it "Sacredpower Robo." The tortoise becomes the torso, and the robot's face slides out from underneath; then the bird finishes the head and wraps over the shoudlers to add some bulk; the dragon becomes the legs, explaining its length; and the tiger spits in half to become both arms. SOme new deco is revealed in this mode, too: all this time, the turtle has been hiding panels of red and gold inside hie dark shell. It's not a perfect conversion, it must be said: all four of the beasts have to have pieces removed before you can change them (the top of the turtle's shell, the tip of the dragon's tail, the bird's tailfeathers, and the tiger's entire butt). Amusingly, the tiger's tail plugs into the back of the gestalt robot's head, looking like a ponytail. That, combined with the way the bird's head sits on top of the robot face, really gives the impression of a stylized helmet. What's really impressive is the articulation. The Transformers cassette combiners could do little more than stand there, but Sacredpower has hinged ankles, double-hinged knees, balljointed thighs, balljoint hips, a swivel waist, swivel wrists, hinged elbows, and swivel/hinge shoulders. There's no neck, because of the way the head is constructed, but this is still plenty of movement, and definitely more than you'd expect there to be on a robot made from four separate animals all locked together. We already told you the tiger's tail ends up on the back of the head, but the other pieces of kibble don't go to waste, either: plug the feathers into one end of the shell and the dragon tail into the other, and you've got a sword he can wield! It's named Zhurong, after the god of fire, suggesting the blades are meant to be actual flames, not just red. Since the tiger-jaw-hands (remember, the connection to Voltron is way lighter in this mode than it was as a standalone animal, but it does still exist at some level) don't open, you have to slide the hilt into place before attaching the blade, which is a bit of a cheat, but we've seen action figures of humans that work the same way, so it's in no way a point against this one. Those same kibble pieces not having anything to do in cube mode? That is a point against it. If you get the normal edition of Sacredpower Robo, you also get a clear storage box for the cube form, a character card, and a sealed pack of BeastBox cards. If you buy the Special Edition, though, you get something else. Something fun! Rather than autonomous machines, the 1/4 Squad sets are basically sentai teams - you know, Power Rangers. So if you get the Special Edition, you also get the pilots. The Spirit Fusion Team are a little less than 2" tall, and not made from the usual kind of rubber you expect from keshi figures, but rather something more like a pencil eraser. They're solid red, though art on the the back of the box shows what colors they'd be in real life. Each of the figures is sculpted with unique costume details matching their animal - like, they all wear the same armor on their arms and legs, and the breastplate differs only in what beast is portrayed over the heart, but then they get unique "coats" (for lack of a better term) covering their abdomens, and unique helmets with stylized animal details on them. The official site also gives names to all the pilots: Black Turtle is driven by Zhi Ming, Azure Dragon is driven by Meng Zhang, Vermilion Bird is driven by Ling Guang, and White Tiger is driven by Jian Bing. Those are all just normal human names, so if they're called anything after their color or animal, we don't know it. The combined robot is over 6" tall, counting his bird helmet, but the box is ridiculously huge. There is no reason the box needs to be 12" x 16" to hold four animals that turn into 2" squares. More than half of it is just empty space! It's not like it's even particularly expensive: even the Special Edition retails for around $40, which is only $10 per Beast, so it's not a question of "bigger box to justify bigger price." Sacredpower Robo is a fun toy, with some wildly impressive engineering, but would be just as impressive in packaging that was half the size. -- 09/01/26 What would you call the Team Spirit Fusion members? 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