by MaximalNui » Sat Dec 25, 2021 6:08 pm
Finally got a break from my studies, so I can give my thoughts on the Legacy reveals. Mind you, it's a few months waiting, so it's going to be a bit of a text dump:
In general, the G1 characters so far look very good, though I can only say for certain when we start getting reviews. The Energon Weapon gimmick seems fun, especially if they do combine like the Solitarium weapons or even just like the Energon ones - which, if Prime Arcee's blades/shield are any indication, is pretty likely - and are not as intrusive as previous line-wide gimmicks for those who want an accurate representation of the character coughprimewarstrilogycough.
The other continuity characters, though, are a bit hit and miss. If they just transplanted characters into the G1 aesthetic like they did with so many like Barricade, Bulkhead, Lugnut and Lockdown I wouldn't mind (...okay I would mind a bit we were still stuck in G1, but at least the other iterations were being aknowledged), but to advertise them as being the non-G1 characters when they're clearly designed differently just feels wrong. It feels like a repeat of the Prime Masters, where instead of toys of the Thirteen or updated Pretender toys we got a mishmash of both which ended up being faithful to neither. Prime Arcee doesn't actually look too bad - she's just blockier and with a nose - but Prime Bulkhead they didn't even try: it's basically another character with Bulkhead's head and mace, and the vehicle looks less like Prime's jeep-like truck and more like Animated's military van, and even then only in the most superficial level (long, cylindrical six-wheeled military vehicle), since the details are closer to AOE Hound. The concept art is closer, but it still needed shorter legs and a bigger torso to be true Bulkhead proportions. Honestly, the whole thing makes me wish they don't touch on the more "drastic" designs like Animated and Beast Machines - and that's a poor sentiment to have for a line that's meant to homage all of Transformers' history.
As for the Menasor combiner, that seems like a pass for me. I'm usually all for greater cartoon accuracy, but when you sacrifice an integral and frankly more interesting gimmick of the original - the interchangeable limbs with other similar combiners - for the sake of what's basically a persistent character model error, I feel it's a bit too much. That being said, if this was an alternate continuity's take on Menasor, or as a rumour said a multiversal Menasor made from different iterations of the Stunticons (which I think has been debunked by now but still sounded interesting), I'd be all for it; it actually sounds like an original take on combination we rarely see in Transformers, and it reminds me of that concept from a scan of the Generations book which was basically 14 cars and a base. I hope we do see more original combiners like that in Transformers in the future outside of the typical humanoid gestalt we tend to get, like the Duocons, beast combiners like Sky Lynx and Magmatron, weapon combiners like the Armada Mini-Con teams, GoBots-esque exosuits or the cancelled (also from Generations book) vertically-split animal-vehicle Duocons.
As for the rumours: Cybertron Metroplex sounds really good, but the original was pretty much a copy of the toy's AutoCAD anyway, I don't really care for scale accuracy and it will probably not have the Cyber Planet Key gimmick, so it's not for me; I hope Iguanus is an update of the Pretender concept instead of another Transformer with the robot mode shaped like the Pretender shell, or at least the Beast Wars character; no idea what the Energon Monsters are yet, but given the Energon Weapon gimmick could it be another take on the Weaponizer/BattleMaster/Fossilizer concept?
. I'm also glad to know that I'm not the only one who uses Aragon as a stand-in for Grand's "Cog". I cannot wait to get my BZ and have my Titan Shelf truly complete. Even GameStop however seems to be delayed in getting this into the United States. I have my pre-order with Pulse, but basically, whoever gets it first, for the original price point gets my money.
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