I believe they were talking about raising Laser Prime's arms UP, not forward.

Which, uh, I hate to dispel a myth here, but, like... original G2 Laser Prime can't raise his arms up either. His shoulders purposefully disallow you from rotating his arms up more than 90 degrees because his right arm has WIRING in the shoulder that leads to his light-up fist. And the left shoulder matches the restrictions of the right shoulder.

This is as far as the original can raise his arms:

Because of this wiring:


tl;dr: there is no articulation that legacy laser prime has that the original does better, not even the shoulder articulation

 

This is exactly why I'm fine with the pauldrons being made stationary on the new figure. With the flap piece in the front you can get the same amount of arm articulation out of it as the original and the pauldron stays straight up instead of going backward with the shoulder. Which makes sense if they're supposed to be housing missiles. You'd want to be able to fire them no matter if your arms were up or down.

 

and also the shoulder pads work that way, but if they were your shoulders they would have to move together with your arm

 

Just because the original can't do it doesn't mean the new one shouldn't. The TR version can do it, and it looks awesome, so why shouldn't the new version be able to?

 

The TR version looking awesome while doing that is strictly your opinion. Others are of the opinion that it looks ridiculous.

 

I put it to you that NO pose the TR version does looks awesome, because the entire thing is super awkward.

But this especially doesn't look awesome:

 

No they wouldn't. Their shoulder mounted missile launchers. The ability to move your arms independent of them is nice because you can point them forward even if your arms at straight down at your sides. And adding flaps to cover the shoulder joint is a nice little bonus they didn't need to include, but did.

 

I agree

 

I feel the same the hands are just different not worse, but I do question why the blue eyes on a blue face....why do they do this repeatedly?

 

Oh, hey, it's Laser Octane...

 

I admit that awesome may be an overstatement, but it can look good if you pose it properly:

(and both arms raised is the least flattering pose you could put any bot in)

 

Agreed, I had Laser Prime and the shoulders flopping around wasn't a feature to me, I feel like sometimes people are really trying hard to find something they don't like, the shoulder thing really???

 

It's almost like now it's the opposite of Rodimus where there were complaints that his hands were too big. But they work just fine in terms of pose and grip.

 

Looks like the shoulder nonsense is just nonsense...



Anybody who wasn't going to buy this because the shoulders aren't flippy floppy wasn't going to buy this anyway.

 

There's also the fact the RTS version did have far better arm articulation than this one, which is what one would want for a sword wielding bot.


And if the defense is that the original figure from nearly 30 years ago couldn't do that's a pretty piss poor defense.

 

That picture shows as much arm articulation as the original and Legacy ones though  

 

Because having your shoulder slide into your armpit is normal...

It's okay to like your shoulders flippy floppy

 

As much as Optimus Prime is depicted as a sword fighter, I've never really pictured him as the agile, Errol Flynn-style swashbuckler. Don't forget that medieval knights were also frequently sword-fighters, with greatly hampered mobility that full plate mail entailed. You don't need full articulation range for power blows.

 

Also: RTS Laser Prime can't raise his arms to the sides any higher than this.