I don't understand why people are always mad and complaining about the fact that a good deal of the Bayverse toyline after its soft reboot was made up of shellformers. It's honestly sickening. Why do people do it? It's maddening! See this curvy sh#t below? I want you to think about making a functioning toy for him. Make it ages 8-12. It has to transform from a badass giant knight robot into a Peterbilt. Got it? And make it fast. He has NO KIBBLE! He has NO DISCERNABLE TRUCK TRAITS! So the fact that the designers at Hasbro managed to make the voyager below, keep it in scale, and make it not so complex that some exasperated, down-$30 parent stands there and admits to their child that they don't know what the f#ck to do with this piece of sh#t! We should commend those Hasbro designers! It looks ACCURATE! And yes, maybe the head is off, but whatever! It's accurate. Anyway, what are your thoughts? Why are people so adamant about shellformers being so bad? Yes, there are some cases where it's a bad thing, but there are places where it's completely fitting!
Shellforming sucks because it fundamentally misunderstands the idea of a Transformer. It's supposed to be a robot that turns into something, not a robot that curls into the fetal position and pulls a vehicle-shaped blanket over itself. It's like saying "I'll make this card disappear" and then just shoving it in your pocket. Like yeah... I guess you did it, but we both know that's not what you promised.
You're pointing out the more fundamental problem: the character designs. Yes, it's impossible to make an accurate toy that meets all your criteria without compromise... so what I and likely others would want are character designs that DON'T require such compromise and which lend themselves to non-shellforming toys.
Basically hasbro should go back to the “toy first, media later” approach to avoid shellformers. In those cases where it is unavoidable (Like knightimus prime up there) for the time being, oh well it’s better than nothing.
At this point I think we should all just give a special pass for Bayformers shellforming. The designs simply weren't meant to work in real life.
The Bayverse bots in 4 and 5 aren't Transformers. They are designs that tend to look cool, but don't git in said universe. The toys are fine for their pricepoint and for what they are meant to be. Shellformers in general are only bad when most if not all of the alt mode(s) kibble is exposed.
I'll take a shellformer any day over ridiculously complicated messes like ROTF Mixmaster or Fansproject Motormaster. This reminds me of people complaining that the likes of Hot Rod and Blurr were Headmasters in Titans Return because they weren't Headmasters in G1. In that case, just ignore it. In both cases, don't buy them if you don't like them. That's what I do with deluxe cars and legends. It's money saved for something you like. G1 Scourge is a shellformer and I loved the transformation as a kid. It reminded me of a bat and I thought it was cool. Even G1 Grimlock, Slag and Sludge partially shell form.
Honestly. The more I think about this subject, the more I’m ok with shellformers existing. Complaining about shellformers even when they’ve existed as long as transformers existed is like complaining about lack of alt mode weapon storage or even articulation. Appreciate when a figure does something you like and buy it but don’t complain about figures That you probably weren’t gonna buy in the first place. too many times have I seen people complain that a $20 figure doesn’t do something that you’d expect a $200 figure to do.
This. Toys where the alt-mode are designed first and have the robot built around that (like a lot of G1 toys) didn't have this problem. You cut up a car or jet into bits and figure out how to make a humanoid body out of those bits, then figure out what needs to move in order to accomplish that. The robot modes were, for lack of a better term, compromised, but back in the 80s people had expectations for robots to look like, well, stereotypical robots. Nowadays it's the other way around, and it does not work as well that way. Even still, characters have an identity to them that cannot be compromised. That's why Megatron to this day still has a chest shaped like a pistol chamber and gun hammers on each shoulder despite turning into a tank. He's not Megatron if he didn't have those features. Movieverse figures are especially victim to this because they're made from concept art first, and concept artists are not toy designers. That's why Movie Grimlock has two T-Rex heads on each shoulder. "How does that work? Iunno let Hasui and Warden figure it out." Sunbow and a lot of other animated depictions also love to "cheat" at transformation because, as animators, they can get away with the impossible, leaving the poor toy engineers stuck in reality with the bill. So to point at a movieverse character and go "make a toy like that and do it fast chop chop" is really unfair, because the problem isn't that they decided to make a shellformer, it's that they had to. You point to a Peterbilt and tell someone "turn that into a robot, you have to give it a heroic silhouette but other than that go nuts" then creativity has a little more breathing room. Also, the cynic in me wants to say the head is inaccurate so they can sell you the same character later with a more accurate head, but to be fair toy designers are artists, and as an artist I know they can't give it their all 100% of the time. You miss a detail, but the molds are already made, and CAD designers gotta eat.
Well, AoE and TLK set the new low in terms of their robot designs so no wonder those can exist only as shellformers OR very complex 3P collector figures. It's a reminder how seriously bad are those designs for this franchise. This got to be one of the worst designs OP ever sported. It's about as "Cybertronian" as is Tony Stark armor.
The worse the character designs, the more food for 3rd party designers/engineers. The fans will soak it up regardless.
I have a better idea. How about Hasbro and Takara design the characters, so they follow actual real-world physics to a degree? So the robot has visible elements of the altmode and a physically plausible transformation? The same way nearly every other toyline and media adaptation works? I actually prefer the AOE First edition because it has the truck kibble the animation model lacks. A lot of people hate that mold because of the big truck kibble backpack. I like it because of the backpack. It makes Prime actually look like a Transformer, and stows the kibble out of the way. (The regular Leader had those stupid enormous flappy shoulder panels that did nothing but get in the way.) But even then it's not a good design so much as the best they could do with the impossible morphing design the movie model has. It's simply the least sucky figure Knight Prime has gotten. Yeah, shellforming is the only way to achieve transformation for the later Bayverse characters. But how much more satisfying would it have been for it not to have been an issue in the first place? Look at G1. The toys came first, and the designs were tweaked for animation. Overlooking characters who got major overhauls like Ironhide/Ratcher, or ones where the animators apparently didn't bother to look at the toys like the Combaticons, you could see, in broad strokes, what vehicle/machine part became each part of the robot. Heck, when the animators showed especially good care, you could figure out the toy's transformation by watching the show. Optimus' transformation in MTMTE3 is a near-perfect adaptation of the toy's pattern. (As the show progressed such instances became rarer, of course due to budget and time constraints.) But it worked because it was the show replicating the toys. That's what it needs to get back to.
