Ironhidensh wrote:william-james88 wrote:Ironhidensh wrote:Screw you Hasbro, you cost cutting bastards.
But doesnt the high price tag anticipated from this Takara product (since importers are already charging 20$ more than they did for the last Legends Leader figure) prove that Hasbro was just trying to keep things at the same price range instead of augmenting the price? Takara has a higher cost but passes it off to the consumer or so I am assuming in this case.
Worth it. It would be nice if Hasbro offered more than bottom of the barrel options. They would get more of my money.
Compared to the original version of the mold, Hasbro's retooling of Ultra Magnus into Powermaster Optimus Prime seems far more extensive than Takara's retooling of Powermaster Optimus Prime into Super Ginrai. In the former case, Hasbro retooled nearly the entirety of the mold itself from head to ankle, with barely any common aspects left between Magnus and Prime. But with the latter case, Takara merely changed the cab/inner torso, the outer torso, the forearms, the Titan Master, and the feet, along with two gun accessories, with virtually everything else left unaltered and identical in molding between Prime and Ginrai.
What's more is that Hasbro's figure is exactly what it was meant to be: An update of the Powermaster Optimus Prime design. Takara could have easily used the Hasbro version as is, since it is every bit as an update to the Super Ginrai design as it is an update to the Powermaster OP design, what with Super Ginrai and PMOP sharing the exact same original design in the 80's, with only their hands, smokestacks, and some of their colors differing between the two on a visual level.
For Takara's figure, however, the extra work they've done actually
regresses the original intent behind Hasbro's figure, as the changed elements on Takara's figure no longer resemble as much of an
update to the original design as Hasbro's figure, but now instead the changes more closely resemble the same original design with
less updating to it. Sure, there's still the updates made to the mechanics of the figure via the implementation of modern day toy engineering, but in terms of aesthetics, the visual design has lost the original updated design manifested by the Hasbro figure, and has instead taken to more closely imitating the original design from 28 years ago in a vein similar to the Masterpiece line, but without any of the MP line's level of engineering.
In this regard, Takara's figure may have had more work put into it, but at the cost of contradicting the essential nature of the CHUG-style toylines. That is, taking the older character designs and updating them for the modern age. The MP line is what takes the original designs and replicates them into modern toy form, yet Takara has effectively put that strategy into this figure, as opposed to the more established strategy of the CHUG-style toylines, thereby partially undoing what was originally intended for this figure in the first place.
