TYRANT

 The begining of the century was a pretty exciting and interesting moment for Resident Evil since we were getting spin offs and remakes or even a prequel, stuff that elevated the hype for Resident Evil 4 and sky rocketed the mistery of wath was waiting in the future for the series. At the same time we got lots of action figures, from the fun ToyBiz line to the impresive japanese Moby Dick Toys and Palisades Marketing in the middle with 3 different series dedicated to the franchise as a whole.

With the first two figures of series 3 dedicated to CODE:Veronica (Chris and Wesker), the thirds figure was non other but the very first final boss of Resident Evil: Tyrant. And this guy is HUGE!!!! Literally twice the other figures and taller than Nemesis and Mr.X and i still remember how heavy felt the blister with him inside!!!

Somehow this guy is a little bit taller than the Moby Dick Toys figures wich makes me wonder how we get figures this big back then at such a low price....anyway, he can stand on his own but he needs a little bit of help balancing given how heavy is his top part, but most of the time he can stand just fine despite the missing base in series 3.

He is articulated on the head, chest, shoulders, elbows, wrists, legs, knes and ankles, all cut joints that move only on a single direction, standar for back then figures, except the shoulders that are ball jointed as well as the head. The ehad tough cannot move too much thanks to the piece of flesh conecting from his heart to his face. This tissue is made with soft plastic and have some room to move to the sides but not too much.

The rest of the articulations are fine and moves perfectly within theyr limitations and the shulders give him a lot of movement freedom and are the main point for posing him. The giant arm tough is impresive how is able to keep the posing even with the heavy weigth of the giant claw but Palisades made an extremelly strong ball joint.

While this Tyrant cant be posed brake dancing, the sculpt is more than enough to make him a sight to fear. While Toy Biz and Moby Dick versions based the figures on the actual artwork of the first game, this one have a much more american comic flavor to it, with pretty exagerated details to make him more monster like. Even his musculature is extremelly super-heroic looking and gives him  apretty imposing frame.

On top of the amazing muscle structure, his skin is textured with lots of wrinkles giving him the look of a corpse. His giant (really in-human GIANT) heart is made with soft plastic and his skeletale visage is really menacing, with the veins covering his face and arms nicelly sculpted.

The color is really good. At this point Palisades finally get a hang of paint and give him a lots of blueish tones, withes and purples to follow his muscle structure and highlt the cadaveric effect on his skin. The veins on the arms, legs and face are vribrant red and erfectly painted and i particularlly like the bubble thingys on his leg, since they hace a weird wet looks and the intense red make them stand out from all the pale blues.

The heart have pretty soft and strong pinks with blue veins and the eyes really shine inside those dark sockets. His monster arm and chest have a lot of dark browns and blacks and i am not sure wath kind of tissue is this but looks almost like wood. Finally his claw have black nails and i love the sculpt of his claw...each one of them looks like black bone full with stretch marks and they arent completelly black, but have pretty dark browns as well to make them looks natural.

Overall, this guy is HUGE, HEAVY and extremelly cool looking. Is weird how he is not 100% accurate and instead have an exagerated design, but this guy was one of the best figures Palisades marketing ever produced and looks inponent on any horror collection or even around the other Resident Evil characters. Make other Tyrant looks like kids.

TYRANT

 As silly as the look comapred to now days standar, the ToyBiz "Videogame Super Stars" line based on Resident Evil was one of my favorites toys in the 90s. They were the coolest toys to have along side the coolest and most stuning game form 1997. ToyBiz really knew how to keep close to the original game design and artowkr while at the same time add all the fun of a 90s toy.

Releasing packs with two figures, a big one and a smaller one, to add more fun to the display, we could not ask from more....except for a final boss: Tyrant. The ginal boss of the game was soo huge that comes all on his lonesome on the blister and he looked stuning comapred to the rest of the line.

Twice the size of Chris or Jill, Tyrant dosnt reach a Play Arts Kai scale but he deffinetly towers against the rest of the serires and makes it clear this is a totally different beast. Sadlly, while being too tall and articulated, he is extremelly difficult to stand and keeps falling over and over again.

He is articuated on the shoulders, elbows, waist, legs, knes and ankles. All this are cut joints that moves on only one direction excet the shoulder of his giant arm, that one is a ball joint and have a big freedom of movement but aside of that he is extremelly estatuesque, is pretty difficult to give him a good pose aside of the base one.

This is sculpted entirelly based on the Capcom artwork soo he is looking at a side just like in that art and the gesture of his hand is the same. The sculpt is nice, he have a weird wrinkles texture on his flesh and all veins looks really good tough the material of the plastic keeps it looking like a toy.

His head follows the original design perfectly and the paint is pretty clean on the teeth and eyes. The blue skin have some purple shades here and there and darker blue to give it a little shadow and ligth effects but the result is still kinda cheap. The balls on his leg as well as his heart are made with transluscent red plastic. The heart actually is trabsluscent clean and makes it stands out a lot.

Not only he is huge but he have not one, but two action features!! One is a heart pumping action: push a button on his back (nicelly camuflaged this time as a tube part of his anatomy) and you can see the blood pumping up on his transluscent heart. The blood is of course just red paint but sadlly....after 26 years, the blood has dried completelly soo no more blood effect....

The second action feature os the same as the Hinter: turn his body and it will goes back to his place with a sping motion, slashing everything on his path with his giant claw, but juts like the Hunter, the feature dosnt works at all sicne his arm is way too heavy and slows down the spring motion.

Despite his failed action features, lacks of articulation and not pretty impresive paint or sculpt he manages to have an impact back in the day. 

I think it was due more to ToyBiz idea to release the entire cast of the game. Sure, we were missing Wesker and Barry and maybe the giant snake Yawn, but in the end, once you got all the figures of this series you could make an amazing display based on the game. This was very unique because this was the only time a brand made figures of the complete cast of a game, it would never happend again even if figures got higher quality.