Legacy: Transmetals II Magatron
Very late to the game, but finally got a Legacy TM II Megatron and...I'm honestly on the fence on this one. I will preface that the original TM II Megatron is way high on my list of great Transformer toys; it was big, shiny, and fun. This new one was already a thorn in my side as most, if not all, stores in our state of South Dakota have more or less quit carrying the $50+ Transformer toys, with maybe one or two showing up now and then. But come into our stores and be ready for a ton of Starscreams w/Throne and maybe a G2 Toxitron Scourge or Dinobot if you're lucky.
Out of the box, I like his robot mode, clean, but feels a bit fragile. Nothing we can do about that, it's just what plastic is anymore, no two ways around it. The transformation was simple but did 7 out of the 33 steps need to be about his dragon arms moving in tiny ways? It took me three seconds to ignore the instructions and just position them when he was in dragon mode. TABS...jeez...the tabs hated me on this guy, trying to get one side of the legs to mate with the peg/slot on the head/tail section was nearly impossible. It was almost like the toy was slightly misaligned and there was no fixing this.
Back into robot mode was pretty painless, but that god-awful section on his back felt lazy, even by my very forgiving ways. It'd be fine if it snapped to the back for a clean fit, something it was designed to do, but on my toy, doing this would force the whole head assembly to arc upward by 30 degrees and ruin the robot mode. Also, maybe I missed something somewhere, but his chest just sits upright and doesn't connect to the rest of the toy except for some friction created between a small piece of the head/neck and the upper chest area. I hate this, if dragon mode, everything is supposed to tab together, and for the most part did...but that chest section in Dragon mode was difficult as well (I hate tabs, I like pegs or connectors).
Looks, it's a cool Dragon for sure, but for something new, it could have been so much better in my opinion. Heck, we even lost Megatron's third mode, a silly vehicle that was part of a concept never fully translated into the cartoon, the clear cockpit now an orange gem in his chest.
I want to enjoy these great Beast Wars-era remakes, but so many of them have left me a little bummed vs super-excited. Oddly, I'm not having any of these issues with the vehicle-to-robot figures that have been coming out. Maybe, with the constraints of the animal modes, the designers have to be more creative than they would with the vehicles.
These pics were snapped in a few seconds during some downtime between errands.
