It’s been reported that veteran director/producer Toshiro Tsuchida will be leaving Square Enix. Tsuchida is effectively the founding father for the Front Mission series. There have been rumours that Tsuchida was quite ill during the development of Final Fantasy XIII, so this departure may be in part due to that. In any case, we dutifully doff our cap to a man that has helped shaped mecha gaming to what it is today and wish him well. Thanks to Chazumaru for the heads up.

Courtesy of our good friends at HobbyLink Japan, we’ve been sent the Robot Damashii L-Gaim Mk. 2 toy from Heavy Metal L-Gaim. To help give the toy some context we’ve also included some videos of it from the original anime and a few games it has been featured in over the years at the end of the review.

Courtesy of our good friends at HobbyLink Japan, we’ve been sent a toy that’s one of the most well known Original Generation (or OG) mecha from Super Robot wars to review. Specifically, the new Super Robot Chogokin Alteisen. In addition, to give the toy some context, we’ve also linked some gameplay footage of it in action at the end of the review.

Along with a slew of other toy announcements today, Bandai have finally come clean on the fact they are indeed going to release Robot Damashii toys of both the L-Gaim Mk.I and Mk.II respectively. If you remember the Heavy Metal L-Gaim mecha, designed by the glam-rock-tastic Mamoru Nagano, topped the wishlist of fans for new Robot Damashii figures not that long ago.

Unsurprisingly, with such a classic Yoshiyuki Tomino real robot series it’s been featured in numerous games over the years. From a variety of Super Robot Wars titles to the more recent first two Another Century’s Episode games (not to mention Real Robots Final Attack, but we prefer to ignore that little “gem” if we can).

L-Gaim has also had quite an impressive toy history too, from lovely HCM figures to a very recent and utterly amazing Soul of Chogokin Spec toy. These new Robot Damashii figures will hopefully be a bit more affordable though. Currently there’s no word on whether the L-Gaim Mk.II toy will retain the transformation but it’s quite a simple sequence so it’s quite likely it will. Both toys will be release early next year in Japan and can be pre-ordered here and here. What with us being massive L-Gaim nerds, we’ve also linked the lovely openings from the series as well as a few game clips of the respective mecha in action below.

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Update: GAGraphic has some nice shots from the current Tamashii Nation show.

The iconic PTX-003C Alteisen has finally been previewed in its new Super Robot Chogokin form over at GA Graphic. This design was one of Banpresto’s earlier original generation or “OG” efforts for Super Robot Wars and was apparently meant as a riposte to Capcom’s Blodia from Powered Gear and Cyberbots (though that information remains largely apocryphal). It was first featured in the second Compact game on the Wonderswan and then went on to reappear numerous times after that in both games and anime. This new toy, out in October, looks to capture the design rather magnificently and for the price of 5,040 yen it’s a bargain too. Considering that Bandai are using their prior Chogokin expertise on this new toy line, these toys could end up being rather special indeed.