Hope you are not tired of seeing these models, as these are my seventh and eighth, of a total of twelve. And I got all twelve. These two are also called Ma Chao and Zhou Yu, respectively. Deltoro / Ma Chao is the one with the staff, while Pasley / Zhou Yu wields the sword.

Okay, so if I’m a little honest with you, I was starting to get a little tired of reviewing these models. While they do have a lot of variety in color, shapes and armaments… their construction does become rather repetitive. And writing about the same things over and over again (albeit in slightly different combinations / order) get old. And I imagine it gets boring to read. But! Things do start to change up, at least a little, with this pair. And the next pair is an even bigger change-up (hint: females).

Having said that… there’s still a lot of repeated construction methods in these two. In fact, most of the building involved for Deltoro is just a mish-mash of construction methods / forms used in previous builds. And Pasley is mostly the same, though I do like the unique stylizing of his robes being highly asymmetric. That is, if robes is the right term. Sorry if it isn’t. And their armaments do seem to stand out more than some of the others. The cool open hole in Deltoro’s staff/spear is nice, and the sheer size of Pasley’s sword alone is impressive, even without the unique position it is being held in.

Anyways, a lot of what I could say here would just be derivative or repeating of previous advice and or accounts of how I dealt with certain aspects of building these Piececool Q Series models. I’ll spare you that. But there are definitely some things I can call out. And the nightmare of [self-inflicted] failures I encountered while building Deltoro. Speaking of, let’s just go ahead and start with Deltoro.

I got stumped for a few minutes with Deltoro, for the silliest of reasons. In Steps 8 and 9, you build the two standard “raised ornamentation” objects that are usually secured to torso and head. They all use the same part to attach / raise up the ornamentation, and then usually you have two related, but different, ornamentation pieces. In this case, it’s Parts 9 and 10. And I sat there, going back and forth between the two, making sure that I curved them both in similar ways (I really like to add some curving to these elements, when applicable, to give the models a little more character). But then I became worried that I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.

Everything I was doing was identical. They looked the same, and they were the same size! How would I know which one went on the head, and which on the torso? Why do they have different numbers if they are identical? There has to be some small difference! I kept looking and looking for that tiny minuscule difference. Before I had my facepalm moment, noticing the giant red ribbons that are only hanging off the bottom of Part 10. Yeah. I mean, I was sitting there, looking at them, handling them, looking at the instructions, and my mind just couldn’t get past the fact that everything but the ribbons was the same, so I just didn’t see the ribbons? I dunno. It was definitely an embarrassing moment. That I decided to tell you about. Because we all have those moments, right?

Moving right along to Step 10, I just want to point out that you can add a bit of flair by folding down the “tassels” at the end a little bit. I also added a slight curvature to the part those tassels hang off of. And one thing that’s easy to miss, when shaping this, is the thin spurs to the “upper” section – the don’t naturally fold over with the outermost folds, so you need to remember to fold (or curve) those in some.

And now we come to my stunning ability to absolutely screw up the assembly of the torso section of Deltoro (the aforementioned nightmare). And there is nothing super-special about the construction style of Deltoro’s torso. I just screwed it up. The big ugly was a result of trying to attach his shoulder-ornamentations. I had trouble aligning and seating the tabs, especially on his right shoulder. And while I did get it attached “alright” after a couple of attempts, I ended up returning to it and deciding to attempt again, so as to get it “tighter” and not have as much of the tab exposed. Bad idea. I broke the tip off the tab. Which lead to a long sequence of trying to get an even shorter tab secured (or even glued) in place. It did eventually happen, and I did eventually get a little bit of the tab twisted. I also blew out the tab slots, and had to add glue to both tabs, and added some glue to where parts met, just for extra security. I used 5-Second Fix for this, because it cures fast and clear.

Unsurprisingly, I was super worried that I was going to break a seam in the torso itself as I manhandled the heck out of this. And applied a lot of force to smush the pauldron into place. I think the challenge in getting it in place is partly due to the alignment of the right arm, so it’s not entirely my fault. Anyways, I did not break a seam! So I quickly (but gently!) inserted the legs and secured the back of the torso on to finish it without breaking it. And then I noticed that I put the legs in backwards. Yep, the feet were sticking out under his butt. Go me. So, I had to delicately take the back panel off, reverse the legs, and put it back together. It’s quite frankly a miracle that none of the torso seams busted.

The rest of building Deltoro seems to be pretty stock building. I was glad to see the lower tabs of the helmet being marked for folding out, unlike in the previous models. And I highly advise that you consider adding some curvature to the hair / fabric / whatever that hangs off the top of the helmet, cause it just adds all the more character.

With Pasley, there really wasn’t a whole terrible lot that was unusual. I will call out that the “skirt” (part 9) of the robe does wrap around and connect to itself, so if you want to fold the tabs on the inside, don’t fold the top flaps of the legs (parts 7 and 8) out/down when indicated. Instead, leave them up, build the “skirt” segment and slip it down over the top of the legs. Then fold down the flaps on the pants over the tabs in the skirt and secure the tabs. And that’s really the only thing to watch out for.

These Piececool Q-Series models are fairly consistent in one front: they all seem to take me roughly an hour and forty minutes, regardless if I screw up something big time, or don’t. I know, it’s weird. Anyways, feel free to watch the build videos (embedded below) if you want to see how I handled any specific steps.