AOE LC OP can pose like a cool statue, why is he still lame?

Money, violence, sex, computer graphics, scatalogical humor, racism, robots designed to be rednecks but given European accents, and maybe another sequel to the saga... what's not to love? TF m1, Revenge of the Fallen, Dark of the Moon and now Age of Extinction.
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JediTricks
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AOE LC OP can pose like a cool statue, why is he still lame?

Post by JediTricks »

Two weeks ago, I reviewed TF4:AOE Leader Class Optimus Prime and gave him a rather middling score:
http://www.actionfigs.com/content.php/1 ... ass-Review

Recently I saw this article about a Japanese statue-styled detailed figure of TF4 Optimus:
http://www.tfw2005.com/transformers-new ... ed-180123/

The first thing I thought upon seeing that statue was "that's quite impressive", and a notable part of that was the pose. Then I asked myself, "why doesn't Leader Prime excite that way? What's different about them?" and grabbed the figure from my coffee table, transformed it, and put it into a similar pose. Honestly, the pose was something I wouldn't be sure any other Leader Prime could do, but I knew outright that this new one could. Here are the results:

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It's pretty cool that this new Hasbro figure can pose like that, but it still comes off very uncool, very blah, very lame. It's not one big thing, and I think that's where this figure caught such flak in my review as well, there's a feeling that this is the sum of a lot of little underwhelming elements that came together to make a big disappointment. Let's break it down and see if we can figure out what is the biggest issue...

The backpack and shoulder kibble is of course a notable problem, that stuff doesn't look nice and gets in the way.

The shield accessory is less a shield and more a big gun.

The joints are limited in a lot of ways that make them less dynamic to pose, some are ratchets that lock out poses while others - like the feet - just don't look nice being posed out of their intended positions.

The detailing is simplistic and shallow/flat, the torso is a big box with detail only in the front, and that has the silly chrome plate to count on as well.

The shins are short, making the boots larger and throwing off the proportions.

All this adds up to Age of Extinction Leader Class Optimus Prime feeling lesser-than, more compromised than the previous LC Optimus, and lighter and less a Transformer than the 2007 figure. At $45, I still feel like Hasbro doesn't really know who they're marketing this figure to, so they are trying to cover all their bases and coming up short with too many little compromises.
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See, that one's a camcorder, that one's a camera, that one's a phone, and they're doing "Speak no evil, See no evil, Hear no evil", get it?
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