Well, I finally unboxed, stickered, assembled, transformed, and posed my Trypticon!
The right hip is already busted.
It no longer ratchets, but rather "mushes" into place. It only took a few clicks for it to break too. It's not affecting Trypticon's ability to stand up too badly, though it takes more finesse with the right hip. The left hip is fine and ratchets perfectly.
For a quick overview of my evening, I started unboxing Trypticon, soon after getting home from work, right before about 8:00 PM. I finished just after 1:00 AM. At least four of those hours were spent applying stickers. My take on the stickers: overdone and underwhelming. They really don't add a lot of fun or detail to the figure, at all. A few key stickers would have been nice, or just putting some paint apps in a few choice areas to break up the larger swaths of gray and purple plastic. 158 tiny little sticker details were not needed. I will say that the directions for applying the stickers were largely fine and error free, if you pay close attention, have good visual special skills, and don't get too hung up on the numbering. Sometimes, you have to do the other sticker in a pair than what is indicated, but it's not hard to figure out on shape alone, most of the time. The one error I did see in the directions were for some "headlight" stickers that go near the underside tip of Trypticon's tail. The directions seem to point to random areas to place these, while it's quite obvious they're supposed to go in the four perfectly sized little rectangular indents further down than the diagram indicates. The only frustrating stickers were the smaller, squarish ones that just seem to go randomly on large areas of smooth plastic, rather than having a nice little molded area to fit inside.
The transformations were fine. Not too complicated, and largely intuitive, though unlike with smaller figures, I did follow the directions step by step to ensure I didn't break anything on a $150 figure. (HA!) I love the city mode, A.K.A. "Nemesis Command." That name is amazing. Kudos, Hasbro! The "spaceship" mode is fine, but Kaiju mode is where it's at! He looks fantastic, even if he's a little bit shorter than Metroplex and Fortress Maximus. Those teeth are MEAN and ready to rend some metal (or plastic)!
I'm going to try calling up Hasbro (repeatedly if necessary) and get them to send me a replacement right leg, or at least materials to reassemble a functional hip on my own. No way and I returning the figure now, having put FOUR HOURS into stickering him up. I can cope with redoing one leg, maybe two (if it really came to that), but not the entire figure.
By the way, my batch number is "71241." I have a feeling there is no "safe" batch to find. Either every leg is a ticking time bomb, waiting to self-destruct, or there is a random assembly issue, where something doesn't get set just right during production, causing some legs to catastrophically fail, but not others, due to some as yet undetected and stochastic production/assembly error.
