Mark Maher on Instagram: "Legacy Evolution Voyager Leo Prime needs to be the king of your Legacy collection! Shu Umezu san just absolutely floored me with this absolute masterpiece of a figure. This guy jumped right out the Beast Wars II animated series and I really couldn’t be happier about it. ☺️ . This guy has all the features you could ever dream of, his Evo-Fusion Lion claw technique is unmatched. He has his Lion Typhoon attack mode with the sweet Lio missiles and blasters that have all sorts of places to flex them. The missiles even have storage in the underside of the beast hide and can actually be used as a jetpack! All the stuff is blast effect compatible, the blasters that plug in on top can remain hidden under the mane inside the awesomely sculpted lion head. He has a flip open panel that reveals his Energon Matrix. . Articulation is out of this world, you even got some awesome range in beast mode! . I mean, cmon now people! The colors and actual spray op placement is marvelous. . Break out your Yuya san Skywarp to hitch a ride on this absolute beast of a figure. Name off the other characters you would like to see from this great Japanese series! "

BTS on Leo Prime!

 

Lio Convoy still looks good, and the lion face still looks terrifying.

 

God, that lion face. It looks like the edibles just kicked in and they're stronger than he expected.

 

Fantastic! Really excited for this guy. The lion face is fine, mostly. It’s really just those whacky Goofy teeth that are plain wrong. Fangs should not be visible. Cut those off and he looks miles better instantly.

Looks to me like a friendly, wise lion, which is precisely what Lio Convoy is.

 

“Diver this isn’t weed”

 

Kinda bummed that these "behind the scenes" have turned into just more of an early in-hand look. It's like the higher ups said, "hold on now, you can't let them think we're the bad guys" when the designers talked just a little too much about the budget cuts

 

I cant be the only one who isn't bothered by the lion face right?

 

I’m not

 

Neither am I.

 

Yeah, this was less "behind the scenes" and more "look how cool this figure is!"

 

It bugged me at first, but a little bit after the reveal it didn’t bug me as much. Either way it never ruined the figure or overall look of the figure.

 

He looks really good, but when I get mine I'm gonna paint his ears in white, probably paint his eyes blue (the dead gold eyes are just too creepy), and file his teeth so they're not just blunt pegs. Dude looks like Goofy.

 

"This guy has all the features you could ever dream of."
"So is mane spins around all awesome like?"
"No."
" "

 

So all the blasters can be stored while being completely hidden in both modes, that is awesome news. That was my one nitpick with the figure as the promo shots showed two of them just sticking out on his mane. The best part of these BTS info dumps is it actually allows people who know about the figure to make pics so we can see what the figure really looks like.

 

Of course they were going to do a great job, Takara wasn't going to leave their husbando without a completely faithful representation but even with that in mind, they completely knocked it out of the park! They surpassed expectations in most, if not all of the aspects.

Amazing articulation, great details (really wasn't expecting the molded Matrix to be blast effect compatible) and fun accessories that function very well with a lot of the robot mode. Still wish they would have put a comparison with Kingdom Primal but so far, so frikking good!

 

Such a fantastic figure (lion face aside)! I really do hope to see more JBW stuff in the future. A Magmatron with good articulation would be a dream come true.

Also... let's see that Breakdown BTS!  

 

Been a while since we had a character who's design got in its own way a bit, as was fairly typical of Japanese-originated characters from BW II through Cybertron, but he's very accurate to the original toy and looks downright amazing. I've got the original Lio Convoy, who is a great toy, and this looks great as well.

I'm not so enamored of the character I wanted to shell out for the MP, but this will scratch the itch nicely and much more affordably.

Now let's get a leader-class Big Convoy.

 

Arm kibble is kind of awful but looking like you can fold them up a bit helps.

 

This looks amazing!, I don’t mind the lion face and kinda think that it’s overreacting, but nice to see energon matrix (aka titty gun)