S.H. Figuarts Kamen Rider Super Dead Heat Drive Gallery

Signal Bike/Shift Car!

Drive really is all we need. Or at least in my case it is. The time has come once again for a Kamen Rider Drive gallery, this time focusing on the latest Tamashii Web Exclusive release for the series, S.H. Figuarts Kamen Rider Super Dead Heat Drive! Whoa that's a mouthful. Super Dead Heat Drive is a form exclusive to the film Kamen Rider Drive Surprise Future. A bit of junk heap of parts Super Dead Heat is accessed when Shinnosuke haphazardly tosses the Tridoron Key into Chasers' Mach Driver and the body resembles Mashin Chaser but with a retrofitted Drive Type Speed head. It's an interesting form to say the least. Read on below for more!

**Much of this review will be very similar to my S.H. Figuarts Mashin Chaser review. The 2 share a nearly identical base body so there won't be much new to say on that point.

Packaging
Business as usual once again! Nothing new to report with the now standard Drive release packaging. Just some epic shots of Drive himself on the box. Otherwise we have seen this numerous times over up til now, just as with Type Technic, Heart, etc this is a Tamashii Web Exclusive so the box is windowless.


Main Figure
Just a heads up right up front, Super Dead Heat Drive's main body is 100% identical mold wise to that of Mashin Chaser. Take away the belt, head, and red paint and it's just straight up Mashin Chaser. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's accurate, but it needs to be pointed out. And much like Mashin Chaser, while Super Dead Heat looks gorgeous, he doesn't actually feature a ton of paint apps. Mostly because he doesn't need them, the red paint apps present are all that are needed on top of the gorgeously detailed black base body. The grey piping on his body is molded in the appropriate color from the outset. So while Super may not seem to have as many paint applications as other Figuarts, the details are all present.

The Mashin Chaser/Super Dead Heat mold is probably one of the more elaborately molded Figuarts ever. Each thigh is unique, both forearms, both shoulders, his chest, head, everything really. This release in particular embodies a ton of chaotic opposite elements. That's mostly due to the rampart hodgepodge nature of how it's created in the film. Made from Mashin Chasers' body, with Mach/Chasers' Driver, & Drives' head makes for one very interesting combo. And thankfully the sculpt of the figure has captured this perfectly. The Mach Drive actually works well on this mold and doesn't impact waist articulation. For this release it's been paired with a Tridoron Key instead of a Signal Bike. Like the Bikes & Shift Cars it is removable but I wouldn't recommend it for fear of losing this tiny piece of plastic. While this head isn't nearly as elaborate as the molds original one, it's by far the most interesting part of the figure. There's just so much extra technical detailing that's been grafted onto the Type Speed head. It really helps sell the junker thrown together nature of this form. I wish there had been a better paint wash to bring out more of the finer details, but it still looks great.

By the way those tubes I mentioned above? They're made of an awesomely flexible plastic so you're much less likely to break them than you think. They still tend to get in the way of moving the figure's torso a bit. But my biggest gripe with them is how difficult the abdominal tubes make it to use a Tamashii Stage properly. Most of the time the grabbing arms on one can't get under them and around the waist. Unless you have larger grabbing arms like those that come with Cloth Myth figures, they aren't big enough to wrap around the tubes on the outside either. So it's a pain to find a happy position with a stage. The shoulders and arms are still a bit of an issue with this release too. Though this body really does have a full range of motion, both shoulders have ball jointed pads on them designed to prevent you from lifting the arms up and fully out perpendicular to the body. The shoulders can be pulled down and out but when you try to bend them back and up the sheath around the shoulder impacts the torso. Rather than being able to put his arms in a 90 degree angle relative to the torso, you get more of about 75-80 degrees. So it's a bit hard to create his more iconic poses.

One more thing to mention is that this figure retains Mashin Chaser's back port! Meaning Super Dead Heat is entirely compatible with the Busou Chaser Accessory Set! So if you want to give your Super Dead Heat a pair of rocking mechanical wings you can. I had some real fun with this in the images below. Oddly enough the connection for these wings on Super Dead Heat appears to be MUCH stronger than it was for my Mashin Chaser. They fall off of him very easily. On Drive though it's a very nice and snug fit. And wow do they look great with this body, pairing him up with a Door Gun & Handle Sword really does the trick too. As you'll read below Super Dead Heat Drive is a sparse release.

Accessories
The pickings are VERY slim:

3 - Sets of additional hands.

And that is it. Now to be totally fair, Super Dead Heat doesn't have a Break Gunner like Mashin Chaser, nor does it technically have access to the Door Gun or Handle Sword. I've included images of these weapons as well as the Busou Chaser Accessory set with Super Dead Heat just to have some cool pictures. But he doesn't come with any of them. Though the hands he comes with, as straight repacks of what came with Mashin Chaser, are designed to hold a Break Gunner specifically while the other general "holding things" hands work for just about anything. This shouldn't be a surprise coming from Bandai, but would it have killed them to include something, anything really, to offset the price?

Final Thoughts
Taking us back to the lines sophomore outing using the Mashin Chaser body I expected only to be mildly please with this release. The minor functional issues of the mold are of course still present, and there's the accessory issue, but it's still a fantastic figure. S.H. Figuarts Kamen Rider Super Dead Heat Drive will fit right in with the best of Kamen Rider Drive displays, but I'd recommend waiting to pick this one up second hand. While it's a nice repaint it doesn't ultimately come with or do enough to warrant paying a premium.

Post 2

- Crossplay with the Busou Chaser, Door Gun, Handle Sword, & Break Gunner
- Group shots

Very cool, has some solid presence, that is for sure.

This is a very cool form. I kinda wish it had shown up in the show at some point.

I thought it did?

No, it was only in the movie, You might be thinking of Chaser Mach which is a similar thing.

Like a Car Accident Angel of Death...

I gotta agree. This form didn't do much on screen, its largely a mishmash of designs . . . and its got a high price tag.

Sorry, Bandai.

I genuinely find this form a lot more memorable than Type Special. It's debut scene was a lot more dynamic with a really cool musical chord accompanying the moment it turned towards the camera with all that smoke billowing up, and it has way more screen-time than Special in both Surprise Future and in the Final Stage.

Those gallery shots of it posing beside Mashin Chaser... Two cybernetic monstrosities but also brothers-in-arms...

I've always loved the way this form looked in the movie, how menacing and crude it looked to the regular Kamen Rider Drive Type Speed that we always see in the show. It would have been really cool to see this form used more in the show rather than just the movie it appeared in.