Kit Review

Straight build

Size comparison with a cigarette pack

Detail shots

Underside view

Underside of the wings, before and after weapon attachment

Landing gear deployed and cover closed.
Reproduced via swappable parts.

Cockpit hatch open

The head can slide neatly back into the body.

The gun barrels on either side of the head can each rotate forward and backward independently.

The head can also rotate up and down.

The tail can be pulled back and swung left and right like a wagging tail.

Tail up/down range of motion

The tail section can even rotate~

With the tail pulled out, the wings can also be folded back.

The wings fold up and down in three stages.

The wings can also rotate slightly on the horizontal axis.

A dedicated diorama stand with a wave-pattern effect is included.

The detail and paint finish are excellent.

You can also change the mounting position using the separate stand extension parts.

Tomy EMZ-19 Sinker - Rolling flight pose with the body twisted (1/3)

Rolling flight pose with the body twisted

Flight pose 2

Flight pose 3

Together with the MSS series Shield Liger and Godos.

The Sinker — a manta ray-style mech — has been released as a new addition to Tomy Tec's cute little MSS Zoids series. Since it's a unit that was never part of Kotobukiya's HMM injection kit lineup, just getting an injection kit release at all feels really fresh. ^^

As expected, it's tiny — barely fits on top of a cigarette pack — and given its design, it actually has the fewest parts of any MSS Zoids kit so far, making it a quick and easy build. That said, what's interesting is that they've packed in way more articulation gimmicks than you'd expect from something this small.

For starters, there's a forward/backward slide gimmick on the neck, plus the head can rotate up and down on top of that, and the beam guns on either side of the head each move independently. But the most impressive moving part has to be the tail. The body splits open slightly in the middle to let the tail pull out backward, and it can bend in all directions — up, down, left, right — at various angles, plus the entire tail rotates around the body axis. It's a genuinely impressive joint design. On top of that, the three-stage wing gimmick is great, and there's even a hidden articulation feature that lets you swing the entire wing assembly back.

For such a small kit, the articulation design is really well thought out — it honestly gives Bandai's RG a run for its money in terms of precision. The fact that this tiny little manta ray, just a few centimeters across, moves so fluidly with joints tucked into every corner makes it a really fun kit. The wave-pattern stand included in diorama style also has great paint quality, so it looks pretty sharp displayed on a shelf too.

The one downside compared to all those positives is that the joint strength on the wings is a bit weak — even though the wings aren't that large, they tend to droop down under gravity. It does seem like Tomy Tec still has some room to grow when it comes to designing joint strength for articulated model kits.

The MSS kits still aren't great value for money when you look at size versus part count, but in terms of what the kit actually offers, this one is pretty solid. It's a uniquely charming kit worth recommending to mech modelers and Zoids fans looking for something different, and there's definitely something appealing about seeing a mech with no arms or legs — just wings — pull off such smooth and flexible articulation :-)

EMZ-19 Sinker | 2013. 7 | ¥2,200

AIThis page was translated by Claude Sonnet.