Honestly I’m kinda glad Legacy bulkhead isn’t prime accurate, he would probably be a hollow paneley mess with a nightmarish transformation if he was show accurate

 

I'd say Combiner Wars was far worse because it had the much more intrusive gimmick. Sure, nothing forced you to combine any characters you didn't want to, but their engineering and overall visual designs were so badly compromised by needing to be able to combine that most of them looked like oversized KOs of Legends-scale figures, and they made so few distinct body types, they ended up looking so generic they didn't even look like the characters the molds were originally designed for a lot of the time, let alone any of the characters they were reused for. Usually the vehicle modes were at least decent (aside from the cheap-looking painted-on windows), but even some of those were awful, like Swindle who turns into a... pile of scrap with wheels?

TR wasn't a perfect line by any means, and it was kind of annoying how they made so many non-Headmaster characters into Headmasters, but at least the figures that were supposed to be Headmasters were generally pretty good, and those who weren't (usually) didn't have any compromises that were as severe as those that every single CW Deluxe and Voyager mold had.

The biggest problem with him for me isn't either of those, it's the completely needless use of a faux chest that's way too small and doesn't look at all realistic, when they could've either made his roof/windshield a tad smaller and then used the real parts like the MP figure did (its chest proportions look so much better IMO), used the Wheeljack/Sunstreaker trick to shrink his windshield down for robot mode, or just made a slightly larger, more realistic faux chest like they did for the Battlechargers. His robot mode just feels so lazy compared to every other WFC carbot.

 

From everything lately.... this must be unpopular: I'm actually not complaining.

I enjoy every line, and while I justly complain about quality and pricing, I still consider it lucky that Transformers has even survived at all for so long. Just that we've had the assortment, the selection, the choice for just about any character in a form or another, was something that 40 years ago, no one would have believed the figures that we've had since.

Every line has some bad apples, but also some great figures.

I look at my collection that's coming to a fairly evident closure as the hundreds, if not thousands of figures I have, are filling all of the holes that I had imagined impossible once... I look forward to the last few that I have incoming or on pre-order, and wonder what other figures might grab my attention.

Sure, there's a LOT that I don't consider for myself, but enjoy that others do.

I hate that prices/quality/value are pushing more and more people out of the hobby, and I hate the condescending that happens over it.

I know that G1 will always continue, as that's asking McDonalds to do away with Big Macs, Burger King with the Whopper, it's what the franchise stands on, it's its foundation and I hope that they continue doing more as (for example) while Earthrise is presently my definitive for Optimus, I'd love to see if they would be ever able to improve upon it some day.

 

Point taken, but I can't at all agree. The Combiner Wars deluxes and voyagers were simple, sure, but that doesn't equate to bad. Most of them are perfectly serviceable Generations versions of their G1 selves with adequate paint, articulation, and excellent build quality. I'll point out that at the time waist swivels weren't standard on deluxe figures, and every CW deluxe had one. Beyond that, the molds really don't look bad as part of a collection. I know this is skipping to POTP, but Dreadwind, Darkwing, Moonracer, all those figures stand uncombined on my shelves and don't really feel out of place at all. No they aren't perfect, but I have a lot of imperfect figures that don't have an intrusive gimmick at all.

The torsos are really cleverly engineered, too. They managed the "every Voyager is a triple changer" thing way better than Titans Return did on pretty much every torso except Motormaster. The fact that CW worked as well as it did to me is a minor miracle- the fact is, combiners are way harder to engineer than headmasters. Headmasters get to partsform for free, whereas combiners have to find a way to be stable as part of a larger robot.

There were also some weird caveats with Titans Return that need to be brought up- every single head in the line feels at least a little loose. Every single head in the line between deluxe and voyagers is the exact same size, which makes for standardized proportional issues. (Why don't the bigger robots have bigger heads?) And mandatory partsforming on every figure won't bode well with me ever.

That's not to say TR didn't have its strengths- it certainly did. There are some real gems in that line, but like I said before, it failed to produce many figures that I consider "definitive". Combiner Wars Superion? Defensor? Bruticus? Devastator? To me, those feel definitive. They aren't perfect, but they set out to achieve nothing but fun and recognizable combiners and achieved exactly that.

 

A lot of discussion about CW & TR, so I will state a related unpopular opinion:
I don't hate gimmicks.

Prime Wars was my prime collecting period when I bought mainline en masse. I enjoyed CW and most of the traditional combiner characters were done well, and I even liked the new members of those teams, particularly Rook replacing the overscale Groove who was reduced to a reasonable Legends size. Some may say the Deluxes were too similar, but that's to be expected when emulating the Scramble City format. The main objections people have are about the Autobots who were not combiners before being relegated to repaints of the traditional ones.

As stated before Titans Return is my favorite subline because I've always loved the Head/Titan Master gimmick because drivers/pilots always add playability to any toy vehicles. The Head Masters mini-series was also my jumping in point for the Marvel comics. Again, the main objection people have is characters forced into the format, and some dislike repaint choices. I don't mind the previous Target Masters exchanging gimmicks to Titan Masters as I always thought Head Masters was better than Target Masters and am still disappointed we didn't get the original Autobot Target Masters in the line. I still hope Hasbro will give us these characters as they did the Horrorcons later.

Power of the Primes was CW redux plus a few leftover Titan Master compatible Legends and a Leader gimmick that wasn't done very well. I'm satisfied with the Dinobots from this line though most are not. Dreadwind and Blackwing work good as partners for CW Cyclonus, but I would have preferred them as Titan Masters to include Hi-Test and Throttle.

After Prime Wars, Hasbro has scaled back gimmicks to be an essential part of just a portion of figures for the line, while still making them interactive with others not hindered by it. I've liked Weaponizers and Modulators, but not the Fossilizers.

 

I agree with this. But I understand why it didn’t happen. I think Hasbro saves “deluxe++” (and voyager++ for leader price point) for more marquee characters.

As I said before I think the entire size class model just gets more obsolete, constraining and ridiculous by the year and the line would do well to a abandon it as other toy lines more or less have.

 

Not an opinion, but perhaps an unpopular question:

Are we all done with Windblade? There's nary a hint of any new toys on the horizon...

 

And I think the classes are actually more for the benefit of the designers at Hasbro instead of the customers. It allows them to plan and more easily allocate funds to projects, especially since they have increasingly moved towards multi-year product lines.

 

Yeah, I guess Cyberverse was Windblade's last hurrah for the foreseeable future. I really thought she (and Drift for that matter) was going to be a new regular character.

 

Hasbro wanted to make her a name stay but she came out after the 80s.

Their heads must have exploded trying to figure out what to do.

 

That's not true; in fact it's that they aren't standardized is why some heads work better than others on some bodies. The only thing 'standardized' about them is you fold them in half and it makes a head; there's a lot of little differences here and there from one set of moldmates against another, not the least of which HOW the faceplate rests on the body, but also the size of the head peg and things like extra antennas.

It was made worse with Prime Masters who also had its own set of deviations (three sets of them, I think), not even counting the ones that used metal pins since that's a different problem. Those also had their own weird quirks when being used as heads (yes, people did/do that)

And then you have Apeface and Snapdragon deviate from the rest of the Titan Masters in their own ways, and Cogman and Nitro Zeus from the movie line (and their moldmates)

If the Titan Masters were really standardized they wouldn't be having any sort of issues that all the other ones wouldn't also be having.

 

I said that the head sizes were standardized, which is true. All titan masters are the same size.

 

I feel like Hasbro doesn't care about the quality of alt-modes anymore

Like, lets take a look back at alt-modes from RID 2001-Early to Mid Generations, alt-modes from this time effort put into them, there was actual thought into how they'd look and function, and because of this they ended up just as good (and in some cases BETTER) than the robot mode


But then you get to Siege and a little bit of Earthrise, and you just get these awful vehicle modes that just look like they didn't care while making them (if they even looked like anything in the first place




Now I'm not saying we haven't gotten good vehicle modes lately, we have, Cliffjumper, Wheeljack, either version of Sideswipe, esc, but even then some of these have issues, like how the wheels are practically useless since they barely roll, but at the very least they look good, but I'm really hoping Blitzwing isn't an indicator of things to come because, eugh

 

I made a thread about this before, how alt modes used to get a lot more attention than they do now on average. Calling the modern alt mods awful is harsh IMO, especially since a lot of these examples are going for a sci-fi aesthetic to begin with. Still, it seems that older figures aimed for good alt mods as the standard, and the measure of a good robot mode was determined in part by just how much it needed to be compromised for the alt mode. Now it seems the design philosophy is reversed, with the robot taking priority over the alt mode.

 

You're just looking at the wrong line. Studio Series has put out a lot of really solid alt modes, both licensed with the Bay stuff and even the creative ones with most of the BBM Cybertronian ones. G1 didn't have a lot of detailed alt modes and wfc has been stuck doing a lot of those lately

 

The designers no longer seem to consider playability for vehicles. Lack of clearance underneath has been one of my design pet peeves for years. The undersides are too low and scrape if you push any cars with all 4 wheels on the surface. On a related note: spinning tires with stationary rims (WFC Grapple, Inferno) look dumb.

 

I hope not, I want a slightly larger one that balances better. We need more non-standard-Deluxe-sized fembots.

 

Blitzwing’s tank is definitely the worst to me because of what it represents. While other alts may be bad due to the bot being valued over the vehicle, Blitzwing’s tank was purposefully designed to have a jet cockpit sticking out its front. It’s an active decision to make the alt mode look worse (if you want realistic-ish alts and not cartoon accuracy, that is).

 

tbh i don't even like light piping bc of the glowing eye effect i just think transparent plastic mimics the look of colored glass (which i'd assume transformers eyes r made out of) better than solid plastic would