Reflector2000 wrote:Am I the only one who's not feeling the feels with the latest toy news? So the Ark is the next titan class figure... That's... nice... But we still don't get a titan class Volcanicus with Voyager-sized dinobots? "Well, hey! We're releasing a bunch of redundant figures for Studio Series 86, and some of the non-redundancies will be dinobots!!" Great. Along with another Kup that no one asked for and that looks awful... And Hasbro still has yet to do the Insecticons justice...
With the Kingdom releases, it looks like we can look forward to Tracks, which is good... I guess... Warpath looks... fine... but yet another Optimus? Hard pass. I can't really say much about the Beast Wars figures - they look good, but Beast Wars figures were never my thing (although I thought the show was great). Cyclonus looks quite good, but I'm not all that excited about him. I certainly don't feel the need to add him to my collection.
I caught the collecting bug a number of years ago when I was passing a toy section in a department store and I found Universe Hound with Ravage. I was blown away - I thought the engineering was great and the figure's aesthetic was really cool. I then picked up a Universe Starscream and stylized Trailcutter. When the Combiner Wars figures dropped, and I saw how Hasbro had updated the Aerialbots, I was hooked. But when POTP was sort of lacklustre (dinobots, no, terrorcons, yes) and seemed to fizzle out the Prime Wars Trilogy with a whimper, I started to get disenchanted. I thought War for Cybertron would be a great opportunity to give us stylized cybertronian versions of many our favourite G1 characters, and in my opinion, Hasbro blew the chance when this was suddenly dropped after only a handful of them in Siege to go back to the Earth forms in Earthrise.
I had faith that Takara might fill the void - the updated Seacons were great, I thought. But now they seem to have fallen into the repaint trap as well with a POTP Volcanicus tweak that no one seems excited about.
I dunno... Maybe this is all a good thing in the end... I can say I had a good run as an armchair collector for a few years and hang up my spurs. But part of me is a bit sad that it's all ending this way...
I agree with a lot of what you've said... In recent years I have passed on a whole lot of figures.
I'm almost positive the only POTP figures I bought were the Terrorcons. And I love the Dinobots as characters, but never bought one of them; they just were too lacking in scale imo.
I like the look of the Seacons, but not for those prices.
You may be at a point similar to me (which I've been at for a while now), where you are relatively picky, and will only buy figures that you REALLY like.
The positive in all of this is that figures are getting better and better, and so personally my collection is starting to become more and more finalized. An example is the ER seekers... I don't see myself ever buying another seeker, especially not a whole set.
It takes some patience, but in the end, you're happier with your collection, you've saved a lot of money, and you don't have a room (or boxes) full of figures you probably never really wanted to begin with.
I also agree with W.J.; I don't want any more Dinobots until they are done right.
For me that means larger scale, and no compromises due to a combining system.
They deserve to be impressive, stand-alone figures.
Sure, update them a little, but more importantly, I want them to have a very close resemblance to the G1 characters.
It's really almost insanely past-time for this to happen.