For a while I made it a point to buy one of every figure with a Glyaxia symbol, like good old Standard Ecroyex Glyan here. And then we had drops that would cost a couple of hundred bucks to assemble, at which point I thought "Well, that was fun." There are still plenty of great figures with awesome design flourishes, and the little quasi-Atari faction symbol on his shoulder really is quite cool. While nobody probably needs every last flavor of this one, I will say I'm glad I bought it - even if I sat on it for about a year before opening him.
This 2 7/8-inch figure features a ton of moving parts. Introduced several years ago, the Glyan (and also Neo Sincroid) has had nearly 70 different official releases and configurations sold by Onell Design. That's pretty amazing, especially considering they sold out in minutes for a while and now blow through pretty quickly. Each figure is made of about 25 parts which connect using the proprietary Glyos system, which lets you reconfigure the design or swap parts to do whatever it is you feel like doing. I personally prefer to keep the factory configurations, but upgrade packs let you add more articulation, more armor, and alternate helmets to the mix if you're so inclined. Those cost a little bit more, but a $4 Hub Set really can bring out a lot on this basic figure.
Fans of the M.A.S.K., StarCom, or Dino-Riders figures will see this guy as a distant relation. He's about the same size, but every piece of him can rotate freely - this is great for shoulders and wrists, but unless you plan on building something swivel elbows aren't overly useful. These pieces can be used to change the bends in his elbows slightly, but for them to actually bend requires the purchase of a $4 Swing Joint set. There are numerous ways to mix up this figure's build, but there's nothing wrong with the default either. The knobby look of these guys used to be augmented by black painted panel lines, and now it's largely unpainted giving it more of a toylike feel. The bright red visor paint is applied cleanly with no dark plastic showing through, which is no small feat. Just as amazing, there's a dark blue stripe on the helmet which is painted to perfectly match the dark plastic. If you collect a lot of toys, you know how rare it is for a painted piece of plastic to perfectly match the nearby non-painted plastic supposedly of the same color.
This figure should meet all your basic requirements for a good action figure. He can stand, sit, be taken apart and reassembled, and hold his accessory without any real problems. While the design is starting to age, the tooling itself still seems sharp and I'm not seeing any real softening of detail here. I haven't seen many of these pop up for sale, but it's a safe bet we'll see more blue Glyans some day. It's a charming figure and one that would probably make a fantastic pilot if someone, somewhere, would put out some sort of nifty space ship or dinosaur or other form of thing to ride.
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