...What?

 

I haven't transformed mine in a while but can the Prime abs store inside Jetfire while it is in bot-mode?

 

Was referring to how TT provided extra steps in their instructions, while Hasbro's have contentiously been a mess.

 

This. Hasbros instructions are pretty crap.

 

"something something save the trees"  

 

...I mean, if the piece has metallic paint, wouldn't it be pretty obvious that there will be metallic paint on the figure it's supposed to go on? I get being disappointed that Takara isn't doing premium feeling figures anymore but Studio Series has been pretty fucking hot as far as decos and such go, all things considered.

I do echo the sentiments that Hasbro's instructions really have been sucking lately. I literally haven't been reading them. I've either figured it out on my own or watched a review or something. Jetfire's illustrations are so small and the directions almost incomprehensible.

 

Will not stop them cost cutting for unknown reasons

 

Well that wouldn’t really be too much different from the first SS voyager prime, he had more metallic plastic and metallic paint on certain parts. Since this piece is a very similar shade, I assume DOTM prime will look closer to that prime than the SS32 one.

 

I went and tested out the chest storage because, ya know, I had to. Can confirm it fits in every mode. Can also confirm that this now renders my review of Jetfire flawed...  

 

Not really sure if that’s “putting them in their place.”

 

^Fixed

 

Takara’s are digital  

 

I'm going to take the advice given to me by a fellow collector in my state, I'm going to use the break to pop out the pin, pull him apart and then sand the edges down to get rid of the ratcheting (which is the cause of this fracture) and glue the plastic for the pinhole back together and once it's cured, carefully reassemble him and not worry about it anymore. Shouldn't have to go to extremes like that, but they're clearly not going to fix it and he doesn't need to be ratcheted there anyway. Terrible design.

Huh? Do tell, please.

Well, to be fair, John Warden and his team DO share design responsibilities with Takara Tomy on these lines. TT only works on the MP by themselves, everything else is a collaborative effort. Hasbro can then choose whether or not to bring the TT original designs to the US as a main or exclusive release. Aside from that, I agree that the Hasbro instructions are simply awful and make the angels cry.

They're just getting worse and worse. They're utter garbage at this point.

Nah. It's all about making the shareholders happy. I get that they use that money to keep running, but doggone I'm kind of sick and tired of people who know nothing about toys controlling a toy company's movements, much like shareholders do the same with other companies such as tech and whatnot. Though, to be fair to them for a sec... They do expect the company they fund to actually know how to operate, so they can continue to operate. "That's what I pay YOU for!" kind of deal. So, really it's all still on Hasbro's shoulders and they limp to the finish line on certain subjects when they could blast past it. They choose to do it this way. Aggravating to no end.

I hate it with a passion, but I've actually taken the time to figure out how to transform the figures myself, without the instructions and then to rely on a video review to get me the rest of the way if necessary. It actually bothers me a great deal, I hate not having instructions. I can't stand it. It's what Hasbro's forcing us to do, though.

It's all about the money lining pockets, it has nothing to do with cutting costs above and beyond what's already been cut. It's just cheapness, period.

Your review isn't flawed, it was an honest review of what you thought at the time with the info given to you. It's Hasbro's fault for leaving you in the dark trying to figure it out by yourself. That's ridiculous. You shouldn't have to have a guess at it like a 3rd party sample that doesn't come with instructions, this is a finished product that's given a crap job instruction sheet that gets you the basics and nothing more.

Here, not in package. They'll be printed on paper, just like Hasbro's and it's not going to cost them much more, if anything.

 

Thank you for the support. I'm used to Hasbro instructions having issues by now, but I have to admit that Jetfire's are a new kind of bad.

 

I think someone has drunk the koolaid.

 

People have a very strange version in their heads of what Hasbro and Takara's partnership is like.

 

Ah nice! I'm thankful to whomever found these scans, now I have a place to store that chest piece.

 

This is so annoying. Not only did Hasbro switch to dark backgrounds for instructions, (Why? Wouldn't white paper cost less?), making them harder to understand, now they are out and out omitting features of their figures. It is utterly inexcusable. Hasbro is seriously taking things in a bad direction with stupid decisions like this, and all of their other blatant cost cutting, while they continue to increase prices. Oh, and distribution still sucks.

 

I doubt omitting instruction steps is intentional. It's just a mistake.

I think a lot of times though, what we don't really account for most of the time, is that these things are just hard to come up with clear, objective instructions a lot of the time. Especially when cost-cutting is in effect and they're trying to rely on just pictures, instead of having to come up with multi-lingual instructions like they did back in G1. Especially as the engineering is more complex, and the designs are more detailed and abstract than they were back in the 80s.

People say "well, obviously the toy's engineer didn't check these before they went out to the printers", but you can't really say that for certain. When you know the in-and-outs of the toy's workings, it's actually pretty easy to miss subtle bits that you just tend to do automatically. Personally, I never use instructions for the sake of the puzzle, but if I ever take a peek after the fact, I can usually follow the instructions just fine because I generally know already what they're trying to tell me, so it becomes super hard for me to scrutinize.

While the current darkness of their prints makes things kinda difficult to see, I feel like there've been worse things in the past. For G2 and Beast Wars, the instructions could be pretty bad, because the line drawings were really vague and blobby. For RiD (2001), Hasbro experimented with fairly precise-looking CAD linework, like Takara had been using. While it was very clean looking, the toys were so detailed that all the lines crossed into each other and got really muddled looking. There were years where they used photography based on grey-scaled prototype photos, but in that case, because of the lack of colour differentiation, sometimes the parts wouldn't immediately look like what you had in front of you.

Really, the only thing that works in the greatest certainty is large, full-colour photographs like they used to use in G1. But high-quality, magazine-style colour printing is super expensive, and they're trying to cut back on packaging and paperwork costs as much as possible.

 

I don't know, I managed to figure out Jetfire's transformation using Hasbro's instructions. Could they be better? Sure. But they're really not that bad.