by Bowspearer » Thu Jun 21, 2012 10:09 am
At the risk of throwing a negative into the ring with what in terms of design and engineering, look like amazing figures (I haven't been this excited about TFs in a while and tbh I'm not sure if I'm more excited about the "uncruzimatik bore" or the fact that we're finally getting in scale MP Autobot cars); I'm not happy with the way TakaraTomy have handled them on the marketing end of things.
We all know that there are exclusives and with this mould, I completely expected an exclusive Clampdown, Deepcover and Tigertrack. I could even understand a G2 Sideswipe exclusive out of the mold. Heck, if they wanted to go with extras, the idea of bonus coins is a great way to go too, like what robotkingdom is doing.
But for the love of Primus, don't gut every single release but the store exclusive of some of their accessories. At this stage (and please feel free to jump in on the first one if I'm wrong) Soundwave looks like he'll only come with energon cubes as the exclusive version, and Sideswipe is missing his secondary pile drivers (jackhammer versions). If they were going to be made, then that should be the very territory that simply never gets explored. At the risk of invoking the Transformers version of Godwin's Law, I would have thought that both Hasbro and Takara would have learned from Hasbro's mistake with the Games of Deception Boxset.
On top of that, they give the exclusive to an online retailer in Japan that doesn't ship internationally, when they'd know full well that their International customer base for Masterpieces is potentially the whole of Hasro's adult Transformers fan demographic.
I realise that robotkingdom is getting in a limited quantity of these (which due to the limited quantities only a partial workaround), but the problem there is you have to pay for your orders up front, even if they're 6 months away. So in this case, if you wont have the money now but have budgeted for them at the end of the year; you're screwed.
Honestly, I think the lesson TakaraTomy need to take from this is that their engineering and design teams should be allowed to let loose as much as possible with future releases because all they touch appears to be gold. However at the same time, their marketting department needs to be kept on a VERY tight leash in terms of "great ideas".
Fanboy wrote:You need to see the figure, feel the figure , lick the figure , be the figure,
And only then can you love mp 01 the way I have.