Kamen Rider W - Fang Memory

Fang Memory showed itself about half way through the series as a sort of "ultimate" Gaia Memory.  In the shape of a dinosaur, it can wander around and seems to have some kind of sentience.  In toy form, it looks pretty much the same as it does in the series.

  As you can see, he's a dinosaur, and a very mechanical-looking one at that.  He's about 10 inches from nose to tail tip and about 6 inches tall, meaning that he's a pretty big toy.  In this form, it's a little hard to tell what kind of dinosaur he is, but he's actually a Tyrannosaurus rex (you'll see that in a moment).  He looks more like an Allosaurus, but he's a T. rex and a very cute one at that.  I like dinosaurs, so even though he's a Kamen Rider toy, I've actually added him to my dinosaur collection.

Anyway, in this form, it doesn't really look like he does much, but in fact he's not as useless as you'd think.  His tiny arms have a limited range of motion, and his hip joints can make a 360 degree rotation (it's necessary).  His head can move up and down to a degree, as well.  He has a funny looking tail, but if you push down on it in dinosaur mode, he will make three different roaring sounds.  However, he is a Gaia Memory, so let's see what he looks like in his Memory form.

Front and back of the Memory.  To get him to this form, you flip his tail up, push his head into his chest, and push his feet up to where his head used to be.  It also helps if you push his arms up, but that's more for aesthetics more than anything else.  Like others Memories, he has a button that you push and it'll say "Fang!" and the color of the light will be a very vibrant blue.  It ends up taking the color of the sticker bearing the Memory's name instead of the color of the Memory itself (which is a clear plastic that's somewhere between purple and blue).  This thing is huge when you put it in the Double Driver.

It's taking up the entire chair.  But you can see the color of the light and that it's obviously really big.  I really can't imagine a child wearing this thing without the belt overtaking the poor kid.

That horn-thing is practically in my armpit.  It's big I'm telling you!  Now that it's on the belt, you can see that the dinosaur head is more similar to a Tyrannosaurus rex more than any other creature (or even a Giganotosaurus).  In his dinosaur form, though, he somewhat resembles a short-necked Compsagnathus.  But let's not make this anymore geeky than it already is!


When pushed, the horn on the Fang Memory will say the attacks that it's supposed to.  One push for Arm Fang, two pushes for Shoulder Fang, and three pushes for Fang Maximum Drive.  Unlike other Memories, Fang doesn't work in the Maximum Drive slot on the right side of the belt.


Truthfully, this guy is great, not so much as an extension of the belt, where's he bulky, but as a cute little dinosaur toy.  I like just having him hang out on my desk and push his tail to make him roar and despite having so few points of articulation, he's still quite expressive.  As an add-on to the belt, though, he's a bit in the way.  He's heavy and really hard to get into and out of his Memory slot.  If you like dinosaurs like I do, he's definitely a great buy, but otherwise that's really all he's good for.