Pokédex Entry #0006-MX: Mega Charizard X
"The overwhelming power that fills its entire body causes it to turn black and creates intense blue flames."
"The overwhelming power that fills its entire body causes it to turn black and creates intense blue flames."
Pokémon Legends: Z-A launches today, and to mark the occasion, I built one of the Mega Evolutions introduced in X and Y: Mega Charizard X! This is also part of a larger Mega Evolution collab, and the rest of the builds can be seen on Instagram!
Making Mega Charizard was a bit of a challenge, even though I thought it would be one of the easier Megas to build in my style. For one thing, some time after I had decided to make Charizard, MitchBuilds posted an excellent rendition of the standard form of the Pokemon, which was a tough act to follow! Mega Charizard X also has feathery blue wings which don't have an easy match with a LEGO fabric element. Ultimately, while I borrowed Mitch's excellent snout design from his Charizard's head, the scale of my build, and the approach I took with the body, distinguish our two builds from each other. And, as for those wings, you can see the approach I took here: leaning into the feather-like aspect of their design to build them out of many dark azure threeves, in the role of feathery scales.
Wings aside, one area I focused the most effort on was the head. My goals were to achieve an accurate triangular eye shape, and of course to fit in crucial details like the blue flames emanating from its mouth. The flames were the trickiest by far; space was tight between connecting the lower jaw and tongue, and it needed to be attached at the right angle while keeping construction from being too large. The bar holder Technic hub in conjunction with clear superhero stand elements turned out to be just what was needed here.
Charizard also has always had a prominent belly across its many depictions, which in the case of Mega Charizard is a light blue color. For this blue underbelly, I had to pick up a bunch of bright light blue System parts -- and then flex some muscles in SNOT System building much more than I've done in a while! This was also a fun experience because, not having acquired many recent System sets, I hadn't worked with many of the new curved slopes before. In particular, 3x2 wedges and 3x3 corners were extremely useful, and elements I'll need to get more of for future builds!
On the tail end of things (or, to taper things off), for Charizard's tail I had the chance to use Ben 10 scales for the first time as the light blue underside. And, for the iconic tail flame, a single flame piece would have been insufficiently large, so I used a trans-blue skeleton arm to connect two fiery Chima wings (that sounds like a menu item) around another marbled blue-to-white flame. This connection is purely by friction, around a Technic bushing in the center!
And thus, one completed, fierce, Mega Evolution. I learned a ton about System and Bionicle fusion in this build, and had a blast with it! And now perhaps, when I'm getting to playing Legends: Z-A, I'll need to catch a Charizard...
