Hmm.
I was really excited for the Thruline. I really wanted to like it. But it’s just… really weird lol. My prediction is that this will be one of the most divisive releases of the year.
In theory, a wide, non organic yoyo with a shape leaning more towards the performant end of the spectrum from One Drop is akin to an ice cold glass of water and some shade on a brutally hot summer’s day. People (including myself and a few vocal others) have been wanting this sort of thing from them for awhile. Designs are definitely trending towards the bigger end of the spectrum these days so the specs didn’t put me off even a little bit. And I’ve been loving all those bigger releases that have dropped in the past year or so. If anything, I was expecting it to be maybe a bit too light for its size.
However, upon receiving it, to my surprise, I think the weight was one of the only things I actually liked about it. I don’t wanna waste anyone’s time so I’ll get straight to the point: I think the shape is weird and takes some getting used to, and even when you do get more used to it, I think it’s so big that it actually gets in its own way sometimes. I’m sure this is a great yoyo if a lot of your tricks involve risky catches and zoning, but very bluntly, I don’t think people buying OD yoyos are doing a whole lot of that. For more intricate tricks, it just kinda gets in the way of itself and if there are a few string layers or elements it can get caught up a lot more easily in that. I do want to say that on the string, the yoyo feels actually pretty great depending on what you’re doing. I found myself appreciating it more during play after feeling like it was kinda weird at first. But then, I’d pick up a different yoyo, use that for awhile and then come back to this, and it was just kinda weird all over again.
So, in an effort to see if my experience was the same for others, I took it to DXL to get more opinions on it. Basically, I wanted to check if I was tripping or not, and if people didn’t end up feeling the same way as me, that’d be totally fine and I’d love to hear their thoughts on it, because I trust a lot of these people to articulate very clearly why they do or don’t like a yoyo, or why they think it’s a good design or not. Some of these guys are quite literally the best yoyoers in the country, so I don’t take their opinions lightly. Most of the people that tried it ended up actually not liking it very much and feeling similarly to what I had thought about the Thruline myself. Several comments on how the shape felt a little strange in the hand and on the catch, and how it was just too big.
Two other things I wanted to be sure to mention: Not sure what was up with the QC on these? Mine came with a lil ding on it fresh out of the box, and normally I don’t care about dings, cause Imma ding it anyways eventually… AND I wouldn’t have even brought this up at all, except I was talking to someone else who brought up that theirs came with a ding on it as well, without me even telling them that mine did too. I just think that if you’re charging $70 for (1) a monometal and (2) what is a brand new A-Grade item from your store, you should probably inspect them before packaging them, because not everyone is as lenient on that sort of thing as I am. And secondly, there’s this quote on their site as a description of the yoyo: “An experiment in algorithmically informed cross-sectional mass distribution.” So uhh… maybe this is a joke to say “We’re trying what everyone on social media has asked us to do for years now” in a more subtle way, and if so, that’s fine I guess. But what makes me think it might not be a joke is the fact that for the Fat Tire revamp in May of last year they literally recruited a physicist to help them achieve “optimal” weight distribution for “floatyness.” From their site: “Weight distribution is the key here. Chris examined yo-yos which were universally considered to be Floaty and was able to figure out what they all had in common through deep physics. […] The re-work stems entirely from physics analysis.” So like… is this yoyo based on some physics “algorithm” of some sort? Why not elaborate on that in the description? That would actually be pretty interesting if it was the product of some sort of algorithm and it would be cool to know more about it. But the marketing for this yoyo is just kinda as confusing as the yoyo itself.
Someone at DXL brought up the point that a yoyo that is 59mm should have quite a bit more spin power than the Thruline. Not to say that the Thruline LACKS spin power, it’s just that when you start getting into that territory of diameter, you start to get pretty insane spin power and it just spins forever and ever and ever. The Thruline feels very… comparable to decent monometals in the 56mm range, which is fine, but not what’d you’d expect from a yoyo this size. If this yoyo was “algorithmically informed” somehow, (again, the description might be admittedly going over my head and I could be over-analyzing it - but it’s hard to think they aren’t serious when they were serious about the Fat Tire physics stuff lmfao) you think it would be able to calculate the proper, ideal weight distribution for the yoyo to achieve maximum spin power.
I think with some refinements this could actually be a real banger - keep the weight the same, make it 57mm, adjust the width ratio according to the new diameter, round out the sharpish edges at the rim even a liiitle bit more, and adjust the shape just a tick to make the hand and catch feel a bit more comfortable, while still retaining this sort of shape.
Even though this review is on the more negative side, the LAST thing I would want is for OD to read this or hear similar thoughts, and drop the pursuit of this kind of design (bigger, wider, rim weight pushed to edges, etc). I want to be clear that I think they are really, really moving in the right direction with the ThruLine. To me, this yoyo is kinda reminds me of a game of Battleship - sure, it was a miss, but damn… it was ONE peg away from a direct hit. They’re so so so close and it’d be a shame if they moved to a different section of the board, so I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what’s next from them.