TE Prime absolutely blew me away this year. One of if not the most impressive Tf I\'ve ever handled. The way it goes from a slick toon accurate bot mode with zero kibble to a slick truck with no gaps or holes or kibble via a complex yet satisfying transformation, absolutely amazing

 

Was NA Flipper not 2019? Cuz that thing started a movement. Changed the scale landscape. Was KOd near immediately. MOST importantly didnt usher in a lazy CJ.

Just saying.

Edit* wow mid 2018... didnt realize it had been that long.

 

About that, the votes were so dispersed that no single figure got votes for the first places but TE Prime was mentioned four times by the team and the pic was cool.  

 

Ironically enough, both KFC and Robot Hero both put out versions of Overkill, so even he's already seen more representation than dozens and dozens of other characters.

 

Like a G1 toon inspired MP class/representation of Scorponok and Trypticon? Only issue I see with those two is price point, I mean a point where enough people will buy to justify the overhead and production costs. DX9 and weijiang managed to bring us Omega Supreme MP's for reasonable price but city bots are even larger. I would LOVE to have a Metroplex exactly like the one photographed in this link: Masterpiece-scaled G1 Metroplex custom - Transformers Discussion - The Allspark Forums and I think it could be produced for reasonable price if it could be disassembled to reduce packaging size, die-cast would not be necessary, only durable plastic like children's outside toys. Where I would display such a large bot is another matter altogether! Maybe use him as furniture, not sure how my wife would feel about it...LOL It's one of those "I'll make room, something will have to go" deals.

 

He wins by rank choice voting. My boy still made it  

 

This article needs more pics.

 

The fun irony of city bots is that when they're made to scale with other MP, they actually work as shelving and storage for other MPs, so they're sort of an unintentional space saver in a roundabout way.

 

This is probably the first time in 3 years that the winner is an mp scaled figure. Overall it has been a wonderful year for 3p collectors.

 

Likewise, due to the excessive price of MP-44, and the missed QC and clunky designs of MP-45, and MP-47, plus the ghastly alt mode of MP-46, it's been a rough year for 1st party MP collectors.

 

For me too. Gigapowers Grimlock/Superator is genuinely a thing of beauty. I've had it on my shelf for months now and still have to stop and admire it whenever i walk past.

 

What I love is that there's so many great figures that we're distracted by TE Prime, MS Prime, FT Roadking, FT Goose, and MMC Skylynx and all the great legends from Iron Factory, Magic Square and Newage, that other great releases get lost in the shuffle: "oh yeah, that's right this was also the year of the XTB limbots" and the GP dinobots.etc....
.......what's funny is how easily we forgot how we started the year with people predicting that 2019 was the beginning of the end of 3rd party. LOL ......Well I gotta go budget my 3rd party money for 2020.

 

I'm still amazed by the fact that people in the official threads can say their copy of mp-47 is perfect except for various paint defects and cracked panels (which inevitably happen from just transforming the thing). Really makes you wonder how shitty a product takara has to make for people to stop salivating over the newest mp like its the second coming of christ.

 

I think I actually got lucky with my MP-47 with it not having any noticeable paint flaws or breaks yet, but given what I paid for it (even at a reasonable discount from Amazon Japan) that thing is gonna sit on a shelf untouched for about as long as I own it for fear of breakage. Same with MP-45. Ironically, I bought both of them expecting a number of design flaws to bug me, but once in hand, there was a whole list of different things that really bugged me instead. I think a lot of things like this is what lead people to make "Takara apologist" references. I don't mind people liking Takara designs, but people that accept and acknowledge Takara's bad decisions and QC and then defend it, mostly because it's official, and go so far as to bash 3P offerings because they aren't; are kinda asking for mockery in my book.

 

Every year the 3p companies get closer and closer to cartoon accuracy and it's not just fans toys. Xtb, te, jiang xing and magic square are doing it too. Pretty soon fans will be arguing about some of the most petty things lol

 

Yeah most especially his dino mode so freaking awesome! I'm all in for whatever gigapower has next.

 

Aside from the throne teased for Grimlock, I vaguely recall talk awhile back that they had a G1 Skylynx in the works?

 

Yeah my guess is they wanted to rush these figures out to the market for their 35th anniversary. I'm still salty about them pulling the plug on zeta unicron bec. their version of unicron looks like a spiky turtle.

 

Yeah it was skylynx and overlord? I'm very curious to see their take on sky lynx. Hopefully they can add something to its original design.

 

Eh, I'm not happy with them going after Zeta, but I completely get it. I know for a long time they've kinda had the outlook of "If you don't tell us about 3P, we don't go looking at 3P", but that seems to have sorta lead to many Takara... fanatics, to make it a point to try to derail as many 3P initiatives as they can, sometimes out of their devotion to Takara, sometimes just to troll 3P fans.

I think because Unicron was such a gamble on their part and they were willing to try a lot to make it work, they just weren't willing to suffer the interference of a 3P, especially with a number of recent crackdowns on several KO operations in China working in their favor. I'm honestly more surprised they never really went after MS or TE for competing against their MP-44 release. I doubt we'll ever hear the sales results, but I can imagine both having caused a fair bit of disruption to Takara's numbers.