Well lookee here, my first Age of the Primes figure. This line is apaprently going to have a focus on the Thirteen Primes, essentially the first guys of Transformers. Or whatever. TBH, I care very little about the Thirteen Primes, but they do have some interesting toys. Er, Well, one? Is Star Convoy one of the Thirteen? I have no idea, also I believe they've called him Star Optimus Prime. Yeah, I know that Str Convoy was a reborn G1 Convoy, so I guess Star Optimus Prime makes perfcet sense, but it just sounds unwieldy. When I get mine, he will be solely called Star Convoy.
However this is a post about the also unwieldly named "Megatronus The Fallen." So let's have a look.
First off a quick look at the box. It's the same as the Hasbro box, but with a huge black sticker on it. The back of the box is very plain, with the text completely removed.
Do you think that's lazy? Maybe, but have a look at the immaculate sticker placement, specifically, the little divert in the area around the tank blade. They even put a little circle one on the exact point of where the age rating for this guy would be!
In a chaotic D&D frame of mind, when I opened the box to get him out... The plastic window shattered a little bit! SCARY!
The Fallen comes packaged in robot mode.
And what a gorgeous robot it is!
He's big and beefy looking and looks marvelously like his angsty self from the War Within - Dark Ages comic book. Which is where he originated from. I have fond memories of that comic, as it was one of the first Transformers stories to be featured entirely on Cybertron in the past and gave us all Cybertronian modes for all characters. Damn I wish we could get a proper toy of Optimus. Many of the alt modes in that comic were friggin ace!
He's very black.
As he is now, he is very solid looking, and his main colours are black, dark purple and orange highlights. They are supposed to represenet the fires burning from within. They give this guy a very "possessed suit of armour" effect to him and I dig it. It gets better when using his flames effects, which I'll get to in a bit.
There is lots of decent ambient sculpting goin on and it also makes good use of the lines of seperate pieces for transformation. The shoulder mounted things can be wiggled about a bit. The missile pod thing is attached by a peg hole and can be removed, while the other one is attached by a ball joint and cannot.
He has a pretty nicely moulded crotch piece as well. Loin cloth? The hip skirts can be hinged up and down and don't really get in the way. His thighs are a nice metallic grey colour.
His legs are big and chunky with 3 TMNT-esque toes. His feet however are hollow, which is due to what happens when he transforms. The orange bits really stand out.
He has a number of ports on his back where all his accessories can be stored and he comes with a lot. One that I'm not so sure about is the end of the tank turret. Putting this on his robot mode seems, eh, I don't know, kind of too Megatronny. You can hide it, or slap it on his shoulder. The instructions say you should have it pointing over his shoulder, but that looks silly. I chuck it on his back, as even though it does look Megatronny, I hope that Megatron adapted this from Megatronus.
His face is very Shredder from the Ninja Turtles and very Decepticon logo as well. However, very Handsome! He comes with a bunch of accessories:
- Requiem Blaster.
- A spark fuser.
- Machete/short sword.
- End of a cannon.
- 4 flame effects.
They can all be mounted on him in someway or another. However sometimes the shoulder flames can get in the way of the arm gun.
The Requiem Blaster cannot be held in his hand, but it is compatible with the blast effects that have been coming out lately. You need to extend the cannon for his tank mode, but since he has three(3) mounting points for the cannon on the arm, you can choose if you want Megatron forearm mode or Galvatron upper arm mode!
He can hold the melee weapons in his handy pandys though. He comes with articulated fingers too.
They also can be joined together for a halberd/spear thing, but he can only hold it in the middle anyway. Oh well. Luckily his shoulder have an obscene amount of joints in them, allowing lots of good fun.
Oh, you can also add the flame effects to his weapons as well. His open hands can allow for a lot of
SHENANIGANS!
Finally for good measure, they have used UV reactive paint for the orange on his body and if you have a blue light torch kicking around somewhere, you can make him look spoooooopy!
 |
| Not so spoopy |
 |
| Spoopy to da maxxxxxxxxx |
It isn't quite glow in the dark level of cool, but if it was GITD, then the effect wouldn't be as good? I like they way most of his plastic isn't affected by the UB light, so it enhances the orange. Very cool indeed.
Generally this robot mode of the annoyingly cumbersomely named Megatronus The Fallen, is really frikking good and a lot of fun to play with and mess around with. He looks awesome, has articulation out the whazzoo and is just AMAXING! Robot mode is a solid 9/10!
Sadly though, we eventually get to the alternate tank mode.
The chest kinda of dissolves and collapses to form the front section of the tank and precariously plugs in between the treads. Normally on a tank, this would be a solid area, but the Fallen here is breaking trends and does not do this. The back area that holds the arms, which is hidden under what becomes the front treads awkwardly folds down and precariously plugs into some precariously plugged in panels that unfolded from the legs, which precariously plug in to a flap unfolded from his groin.
Are you seeing a common theme here?
You should now have something that resembles an H tank with the arms flopping around. Fold them beautiful hands into the fore arms. Now, you'll need to extend the "requiem Blaster" add the gun sighty thing on the front, and then plug the pegs of the RB into the appropriate holes in the shoulders, and wiggle them into place to form a turret. A PRECARIOUSLY formed turret.
And ya done Congrats.
The other mode.
You now have a precarious H tank formation with a preciously held together turret.
Cool! I bet the cannon can swivel up yeah?
Yes it can, but the turret mount allows for this anyway. Every time you fiddle with the cannon/turret, it will deform a little bit. Why? Because there is no connection for the front of the cannon. Only those two pegs at the back. Okay, edit style update, I have since discovered that if you successfully plug the shoudler joints into the back section properly it is more secure, but it is still TENUOUS.
Still, we have a chunky ass looking tank here right? There's a big slab of turret on the top, that's cool man!
You're right again! Let's have him aim that immense power at some poor unfortunate fellow flying in the sky shall we?
Oooh, I see some GAPS in our plans boys. And the tank. Man, this thing is pretty terribly done. I don't understand why so much effort is made to have the chest deform so much and yet provide no actual benefit to the vehicle mode.
As a result, the tanks ends up looking, really half cooked. No new points of interest are revealed and in fact, most that were there during robot mode have been lost as they are now facing inwards. I feel that this tank mode is such a failure on so many levels.
- It's not solidly built.
- It has no points of interest.
- It brings nothing new.
It is the very definition of folded up robot and I get the same kind of feeling from him as I do from my comments I made on Tarn.
Even its front and back seem dis-jointed. You'd think it would be a tank with a solid tread running through the body, but it isn't, it's a tank more like Armada Megatron and Hardhead. However the colouring doesn't allow much differentiation from the front to the back. What is odd though is that the tank treads are sculpted as if they go all the way under the tank.
I really dislike this mode. It's kinda terrible in many, many ways.
Flame on! You can add the flame effects to the tank in a couple of places, which is nice and dandy, but it still doesn't make up for all the flaws.
The melee weapons can be plugged onto the side of the tank treads as well for storage, if you want to do that.
As a tank, it is of course fun to play with and it rolls pretty well thanks to extra little wheel moulded onto the treads.
Of course there is still the UV light reactive situation, but with many areas now having been hidden within the tank or covered up somewhere, it's just not as effective anymore.
In the end, this tank mode is just terrible. It's weakly put together and looks like a shoddily formed tank. It looks a bit like that Bumblebee Concept Megatron in a way; awesome robot mode, now, what do we make this thing transform into? Maybe this guy was a base for that Megatron, but they didn't want to waste the work, so they crapped out this vehicle mode.
So, rather sadly we once again have half a Transformer, absolutely awesomely cool robot mode, absolutely craptacular vehicle mode with a fairly unpleasant dissolving of parts and pieces to get there.
My final superfluous rating:
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