Tronus_Rex wrote:Well M', you have to understand that I come at this as both a collector and a hobbyist, or, someone who wants the "toy" to actually function.
There are high end model collectors that build giant ships, planes, and the like, but these things can demand prices as high as 20k and more. When given what I just stated is actually not unusual at all, I suppose a mere 549.99, being only 1/5 of what I just described, it's not unusual. Still, it just seems odd that there would be fans who didn't care if the figure transformed or not.
I do look forward to seeing the features on this as well. Hopefully, for the model collector, it will meet that standard too.
I don't care if it transforms as long as it meets this criteria:
- Fantastic robot-mode
- fantastic detailing
- Show/ Movie accurate
- Good paint job
- Good articulation
Oftentimes the toys have to sacrifice things in order to transform, quite often these sacrifices come at the cost of the robot mode's accuracy.
The concept of this franchise is "robots in disguise", the alt-mode is just that: an alternate-mode. Not the main-mode, the main-mode and standard form for that matter is the robot-mode.
We constantly have people complaining about a toy's alt-mode not being perfect enough, like ROTF Leader Starscream, Masterpiece Optimus Prime (both molds), THS G1 Optimus Prime.
If I care for a character and like the way his robot-mode looks, I want that robot-mode to be as close and good as possible, sometimes the normal toys are great or good enough for that, but often times, like Movies or Prime, they aren't.
And since these are robots, and I like robots, they are displayed in robot-mode, not alt-mode. IF I wanted to display a bunch of cars, trucks, planes etc I would go get models of those things, but since I like Transformers for the robots and characters I collect them for the robots. I guess I'm just weird like that.
For those fans who are absolutely infuriated that their almost perfectly show accurate Optimus Prime sacrifices alt-mode accuracy in favor of a good main mode to the point that they claim it's not worthy of the title Masterpice, well they can still just go and buy themselves a model truck and display that instead.
But official TF toys are the only source for this minority of people like me who like TFs for the characters and their robot-modes, so stuff like this is appreciated.
Granted, this thing is an odd example and choice, since his alt-mode isn't something from the real world and can easily be pulled off without sacrificing any of the robot-mode, its articulation, or detailing, but it's a step in the right direction.
An expensive step, but then again, it's huge, has diecast, probably isn't as hollow as your typical TF, has a decent amount of articulation, is pretty accurate, seems to have a crap ton of detail, and it's produced in extremely limited numbers. It is also priced pretty much the same as other figures of its class:
http://www.bigbadtoystore.com/bbts/prod ... ode=retailAnd that's not even an import.
And back on the topic of Unimetal Prime, that thing is not only huge, but made almost entirely of die-cast