Wolfman Jake wrote:After avoiding purchasing Takara-Tomy releases for years, for many of the same reasons others have said (too costly to justify the small differences), I've been slowly amassing quite a collection of modern Transformers product from Japan now. I first made an exception earlier this year, after putting up with Classics Megatron since 2007, by getting United Voyager Megatron for my Classics display. I rationalized that the difference in deco was significant enough and it was important to me to finally have a gun altmode G1 Megatron with the correct colors for my Classics display. Then...I decided to order the Seeker Aces and Elites sets. They are fantastic, very screen accurate, and give my Classics seekers some nice internal consistency with their paint layouts. Now, I've got both Autobot Specialists and the Decepticon Specialists three-packs on preorder. I also picked up a United Scourge to make him more distinguished from his Sweeps clones on my shelf (who will remain the Hasbro versions, of course). I've got a whole wishlist now of Takara-Tomy takes on characters I already have from Hasbro just for the sake of better G1/show accuracy. For the longest time, I convinced myself it was alright that some of my figures were more "toy accurate" than screen accurate, or simply homaged their G1 looks, in keeping with the "Classics" mission statement of modern updates instead of slavish G1 recreations, but now, I can't help but go for the screen accuracy that Takara-Tomy usually gives us. I will agree that paint chipping can be a problem with some figures. My solution so far as been to invest in "Sharpie" permant ink-paint pens to fill in some blemishes on figures. I had to touch up Skywarp and Thundercracker's silver paint from the Seekers Aces set, and those pens work like a charm! You may have to search a little to get the best paint matches for a particular figure, but your investment for a set of pens with a wide variety of colors will still be less expensive than many of the more demanded Takara-Tomy figures.
i was the same way, except it wasnt a monetary thing for me. i just wasnt as "in" to the hobby that i am now. the only figures i HAD to have the imports of were the masterpieces. but when i got deeper into collecting and researched the differences between hasbro and takara releases, there was no question. i had to have the superior decos. and since i can afford it, why wouldnt i? so over the last year and a half i went from owning about half the classics/generations line, to being two (or so) figures shy of having a complete henkei-united-TG collection exclusives and all. and buying henkei
, was killer on the wallet. but at the end of the day im really happy with my collection.
