After 7 months, this Yolopark Optimus Prime is finally done. This PG-sized model kit that replicates Optimus Prime seen in the 2018 Bumblebee movie is immaculately accurate, it’s motherfuckin’ beautiful, but it’s also one of the worst builds I’ve experienced in 2025.
My dad got this quite a few years ago when it came out at USA Gundam Store, and for a while I thought this was actually a bootleg model kit of Optimus Prime, but no this is officially licensed by Hasbro according to Yolopark, and well, a bunch of Transformers branding and the Hasbro logo itself do appear on the box. For how detailed it is, I honestly had no clue how exactly the kit would be put together, but I knew it had a shitton of plastic along with a bunch of small, intricate parts. We decided that we would take this together back in August, following the completion of the Solomon Physalis, and whatever qualms I had with the Physalis’ build… pales in comparison to the absolute nightmare I faced with Optimus.
When I say there’s a lot of plastic, I mean there’s a lot of plastic, especially with the inner frame due to a lot of it being exposed a la Narrative. While the head has quite a few parts, nothing prepares you the insane amount of parts for the torso alone, and the complexity continuing with the arms and the legs. Being a kit of a live-action Transformer, this deviates a lot from your traditional Gunpla build, you basically have no idea what you’re building until you literally finish it. And that was just my impression while cutting all of the pieces off, which came to my first biggest hurdle of the build. As my dad and I like to split the frame into multiple colors, I ran into a huge dilemma how I was gonna split those colors up. How I usually separate the frame’s colors are in 3—the primary color making up most of the main parts of the frame, the secondary color being used for joints such as the elbows, knees, stuff that gets more exposed, and a tertiary standout color for smaller pieces and joints to break up the other two. Take the Physalis’ frame as a good example. As you can probably guess, this can definitely take a while, and with Yolopark Optimus… it got me frustrated because there are so many frame pieces overlapping each other, I couldn’t fucking tell what pieces would be good for the primary color, secondary or tertiary. If memory serves me correct, I probably just went random bullshit go at some point, but yeah, it was not fun separating the frame.
And that was only the beginning of my problems. Once everything was painted, everything was laid in multiple trays, and oh god it became a frustrating puzzle finding the right pieces to fit everything together. So many parts are identical to each other, but are actually different somehow, it would take me ages to find a small piece within the jungle of those trays, and worse of all, actually snapping the kit together fucking sucks. Fitment is largely inconsistent, either being too tight or too loose, it’s never right. The manual—despite being colored, is a pain to read since the geometry is washed out by the colors. A lot of pegs will snap on you forcing you to glue the piece back on. The joints are complex yet poorly designed at the same time, the calf spring mechanism makes no fucking sense, and oh have fun with a bunch of pieces falling out for no reason. The kit sacrifices so much substance and integrity in order to get the style right. While you’d think after painstakingly fitting all the pieces together you’d get a solid, final result, in actuality the kit feels as hollow as a Full Mechanics kit, the joints feel delicate, and almost in a way feels unsatisfying to finish because all you can realistically do with Optimus is have him just stand there and look pretty. My sanity has been long gone to even move him just a tad bit, as it’s probably gonna mess something up, and once I try to fix that something else happens, and so on. Once I finished assembling him, I was done. So done, I even refused $40 to help my dad paint the weapons for him, which he wouldn’t paint until another month.
Speaking of, once I finished snap building him for the first time… he was placed in a spot and didn’t move… for months. All there was left was panel lining, hand painting and 4 decals, and somehow it took another 5 months for my dad to do that. With Optimus standing there, waiting to be done, I went ahead and did another, and I kid you not, 21 kits while Optimus was still in a “work in progress” state. It’s not like it took forever for my dad to paint everything because it was hard and intricate. It took forever for my dad to do anything because he was doing something else. I even had to go ahead and panel line the kit since I wanted to motivate him to do anything, and it still took another month for him to actually start. Once he started, he basically took another 2 or 3 weeks until he did more, rinse and repeat. In 5 months, it took him 4 sittings to detail the goddamn thing. I’m gonna be honest as well, for as much as he did, it doesn’t look like he didn’t even did much from a distance.
But what you can probably see is the single metallic eye on Optimus’ head, which fun fact—that’s a sticker from the RG Amatsu Mina, however the reason why there’s only one and not two is because the left eye sticker fell in between the pieces and… well, neither of us wanted to fix it.
Anyway, after getting the 4 decals on, it was time to finally take the final photoshoot of Optimus, and you probably already know that I wasn’t gonna pose him for shit. Optimus can stand, but he can’t hold his weapons that great since his limbs weigh barely anything and the elbows not having great strength. At least Optimus looks absolutely handsome and the photos I took did absolute justice to his beauty. I’ve been shooting with a Nikon D5300 for a while, but I this photoshoot was done with my dad’s barely used Nikon D610 that he lent me pretty recently, paired with a Nikon 50MM f1.8g lens, and it’s quite a step alright.
Well, that’s about it. The 7 month painful journey to get this one-of-a-kind Optimus is finally over, and neither of us ever want to go through something like this ever again. I ain’t religious, but I pray that our experience with the PGU Nu Gundam that we’re still very likely doing this year isn’t as bad as how this went. Unless you really like Optimus, I don’t recommend this kit for shit. It’s $200, it builds terribly compared to Gunpla and even to SNAA kits and the Physalis, and it’s not fun to play around with. It just looks really good, but that can be said for 95% of the kits we have. Anyway, thanks for reading and I’ll see you later.
