REVIEW: Final Fighter 2166 Sea Malefic

[emily]

 

Set Name: Sea Malefic

Number: 2166

Theme: Blocko Final Fighter

Brand: Kimboli Toy Company

 

This review is image-heavy!
 

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So this isn't a real Bionicle set. But back in the day, it was pretty famous on BZPower as one of a series of cool and unique bootlegs that didn't merely copy official set designs directly. They were first produced back in 2004 by the Kimboli Toy Company under their "Blocko" brand (which did, yes, mostly produce direct knockoffs). The line was called Final Fighter and was at least distributed in China and Russia through 2005. In the short span of a year it had already devolved into bizarre attempts to directly copy Bionicle models using the unique parts library the initial Fighters has introduced, but that's not the interesting part - the interesting part is the first wave and the unique figures. They even have an implied story on the packaging, with a Throwbots-style pizza-slice island!

 

The thing with these less-than legal brands is that they are very fluid in what they are called and who sells them. So Final Fighter sets have been released under a myriad of different names by different brands in different countries over the years. Hence, the copy I have doesn't say "Final Fighter" or "Sea Malefic"...

 

 

... It's "Masters of Disaster" and "Doomsday." I prefer the original names. Also, this packaging is really boring compared to the original, which has an interesting background and even an elemental symbol for the character.

 

Here's the back of the box. Basically the same.

 

 

This particular copy was produced on August 30, 2104. It also "conforms to the safety requirement," which is great and makes me feel very safe opening this

 

 

Let's open it up!

 

 

 

Oh hey, a tray! That's more deluxe than I expected. Except, wait...

 

 

That's not a tray at all! Or at least, not in the sense I was thinking. It actually just holds two special parts for display. Which is nice! It would be nicer if buyers could see it before, uh, buying.

 

 

The rest of the parts are in gross plastic bags in a gross cardboard tray.

 

 

And here's the contents all together. Three parts bags, the display tray and a single-sheet manual.

 

 

I suspect the instruction art is unchanged from the Final Fighter days, as it stylistically matches the old boxart. Cool! (page 2 here if you're curious)

 

 

The parts lineup. A lot of the black technical bits go unused, including the three that were in their own separate bag. 

 

 

Even though the designs are unique, virtually all of the parts do have a direct analog in the official Lego part library. Here are a few comparison shots.

 

 

 

 

 

Additionally, I find this 2004 Blocko part to be suspiciously similar to this armor element introduced to Bionicle in 2009. Good thing there aren't any otherweird parallels between Final Fighter and Bionicle 2009...

 

 

this is also not suspicious at all

 

 

The light shade Sea Malefic uses is somewhere inbetween teal and Gali 2015's dark azure color. I got Nick Stryker to stop by and provide reference.

 

 

The mask connects by the mouth, as you might expect. I didn't get a shot of the head before assembly but it's basically just the Metru head in lime green.

 

 

 

Like I said, lotta extra parts! More than this actually, because...

 

 

... I screwed up building the weapon assembly the first time and couldn't get the parts off. So they're just hanging out on her left hand now. As you might expect with these off-brands, the parts are rough. They don't go together well and the come apart even worse. There is a gearbox inside Sea Malefic's torso that works just like the Toa Metru design (the cover is just on the back instead of the front), but the gears skip and the function doesn't actually work because there's too much friction.

 

One thing that really, really surprised me is the final model's size. I had always thought of these as a sort of stylistic half-step between the Throwbots and the Toa so it is somewhat jarring to me to see Sea Malefic towering over Gali.

 

 

She's even got a height advantage on Metru Nokama and that other Gali!

 

 

The legs are nice and poseable (just like the Rahkshi legs they are lifted from), but the arms are essentially limited to a forward-back motion at the shoulder. The arms are single-piece, so no elbow articulation, and the shoulder armor actually blocks outward movement of the arms. As a result poses are limited - even as someone that doesn't care too much about articulation, this one bothers me.

 

 

 

Unlike on the boxart, the mask is not printed, but I think we all knew that was never going to happen. Other than that, its a pretty interesting design, and probably the most creatively independent thing about the entire model. The top fin is very ocean-y.

 

 

Overall, this is a cool thing to have! For me. In part just because of its fame in the Bionicle community, and in part because its a unique piece of Bionicle history. A forgotten sibling that offers some insight into how people perceived Bionicle, and how it was changing. This is structurally a 2004 set, but it harkens back to the earliest thematic notions that drove the line and made it popular in the first place.

 

 If you aren't really, really deep into the Bionicle fandom, though, there isn't much for you here - Sea Malefic offers nothing that someone with casual interest couldn't find in the official product lineup.

 

 

If you're interested in learning more about the line, some other folks have been buying up sets from the Masters of Disaster release you can take a gander at. Logan McOwen's got some great photos of "Mr. Zero" aka Diamond Star, and Dimensionalist on Reddit bought a creepy Visorak with a head.

 

 

I would like to take a moment to thank Google's cache for saving this review for me. You're lovely, Google's cache!

[mumboking]

1 hour ago, Pereki said:

This review is image-heavy!

It's too late. All the images get downloaded even if they're spoilered.

[emily]

11 minutes ago, mumboking said:

It's too late. All the images get downloaded even if they're spoilered.

Thanks for the heads up.

[lol username]

This is pretty interesting for a bootleg. Production quality aside, the design seems mostly alright aside from the arms being single piece.

 

(BTW, I made the first topic hidden but moved its replies to the second one)

[ProfessorBrickkeeper]

Well, you can't say the name of the line isn't accurate.

[BobaFett2]

I have Red and Blue "Toa" sets of theirs that I got from Argentina. The Blue one looks a lot like this (and it might be the same - I'd have to check if I still have them).

 

The mask really isn't all that similar to the 2015 Gali mask. It's likely inspired by the 2003 mask to some extent and the 2015 mask was also inspired by Gali's old masks.

 

I also got a Rahaga ripoff set from a different company and it was... the same but crappier quality.

[aidenpons]

... I screwed up building the weapon assembly the first time

 

It's a cheap bootleg - how is that possible?

[emily]

9 hours ago, aidenpons said:

 

 

 

It's a cheap bootleg - how is that possible?

the axle piece went through the axle connector part and wouldn't come loose. So it was actually the cheap bootleg status that made it possible!