Hasbro Zoids Battlers Needle

Needle (aka Scorpear in the Japanese dub) is a small sized scorpion type Zoid that specializes in stealth attacks. Needle has powerful senses of sight and smell it uses to track prey. It’s eyes are able to see clearly in dark areas needing little light to guide them, and it’s strong sense of smell allows it to track opponents and prey from a distance. When it’s Wild Blast is engaged, it’s already powerful stinger becomes even more deadly. The blades on the sides of it’s tail come down to allow it to latch onto it’s opponent and deal a deadly blow with the poison in it’s stinger.

Battalia (aka Penne in the Japanese dub) has been one of my favorite characters in the series since her debut, so I couldn’t resist picking up this kit. 🙂 This is one of the wind-up ones, so it’s a fairly easy build. I picked this kit up on Amazon for $9.99, which is what it typically retails for. Like the other kits in the Hasbro Zoids Wild line, this one comes with a figure of the Zoid’s rider in the show. In this case, Battalia. 😊 One thing I noticed about her rider figure is that while she’s mostly painted, there are a lot of spots on the figure that aren’t painted. I went ahead and painted those parts on mine here, but I’m disappointed that they put so little effort in the paintjob on the figure.
Needle herself is done very nicely, but requires a lot of repainting to get her looking how she does in the anime. So to be clear, I painted mine. The legs and tail come molded in a light grey plastic, which annoyed me because they weren’t that color in the anime. So I painted those black and added an extra Team Freedom stickers to Needle that I had laying around from one of the Takara Tomy kits (The Hasbro one doesn’t come with that sticker).

Without any paintwork, this isn’t a bad looking Zoid, but I just couldn’t get over all the wrongly colored pieces, so I gave mine a major paint overhaul. Anyway, being a wind-up Zoid, it comes with a key you can use to wind it up, and once fully wound up, it does walk around pretty well. 🙂 Maybe I’m biased because I like Battalia and Needle, but I really like this kit, and I do recommend it for fans of the duo. 🙂