Here's where the Power of the Primes stuff starts to get a little messy.

Okay, so, like, there's these Thirteen Original Primes.  Some of them have gotten toys before, like Megatronus (The Fallen) and Vector Prime and Alpha Trion.  Most of them haven't!  But they're getting toys now!

Sort of!

See, they're being represented in toy form as... random Pretenders characters from 1988.  For example, in this case, this toy that for all the world that looks like Pretender Cloudburst has "Micronus" written on the package, and this is a toy of Micronus wearing a "Cloudburst decoy suit" or something like that, maybe.  I can't remember if that's just HasCon presentation slide stuff or if any of that Cloudburst stuff made it to the packaging proper.  I'm too lazy to grab the instructions off the floor.

Why is Cloudburst actually Micronus?  I dunno.  Micronus is, well, the Mini-Con member of the Thirteen.  Cloudburst doesn't really have anything about him that would suggest he'd be an appropriate repurposing for Micronus.  

I dunno what's going on here.

The play pattern idea is, however, that you take the little Prime Master robot guy out of the "decoy suit" or whatever, and you fold him up into his altmode, which is a chunk of plastic with a Micronus symbol on it, and you plug him into another Power of the Primes toy and pretend that grants the other toy a certain powerset.  Micronus's powerset seems to be related to "Power-linking," or in plain English: sharing.  If you plug Micronus into Swoop, for example, it's said that Swoop can gift other Transformers the power of flight.  Throw your Jazz up into the air and see what happens.... in your imaaaaaaaaaaagination!

The "decoy suit" transforms into a double-barreled gun for other Transformers to wield.  Also, the gun barrels can pop off the back of the "decoy suit" and be pegged into the fisthole of the "decoy suit" to be used as a weapon.

It's a little more fun than it sounds, but Micronus/Cloudburst is just a bad example.  Now, Liege Maximo, whose powerset is "be Marvel's Loki," and Vector Prime, whose powerset is "time travel"... those offer some more interesting playtime possibilities.  

I mean, would you rather transform into a Sharing Gun or a... TIME GUN?

This may feel abbreviated because I wrote a really long and verbose review of this toy the other night, but my website ate it, and I don't have it in me to write about this toy and its bullshit twice.  So.

Let's just get this part out of the way: Power of the Primes Jazz's deco artist hid the acronym "MAGA" in super-tiny Cybertronian-language characters on both of his doors, and then whichever Hasbro employee was in charge of this freelance person didn't catch it, but one of us nerds spotted it and translated it, and everyone was all "whoa yikes" and Hasbro had to release a public statement because some jag tampographed a white nationalist slogan on their black guy Transformer character.  

I removed it from mine with denatured alcohol after I took the photos you see here for TFwiki.

Before this discovery, this toy to me was kind of boring.  And once I woke up last week to this news, it was suddenly the wrong kind of interesting.  

Let's face it, this toy had a lot to live up to.  The last toy of G1 Jazz was the 2010 Reveal the Shield toy, and that is one of those rare Perfect Transformers.  And after seven years of budget shrinkage and rising production costs, it is impossible to create something that perfect again at the same pricepoint -- and even if you did, it'd just be the RTS toy again.  

I mean, this isn't a terrible Jazz.  It's an aggressively okay Jazz.  It's just not a perfect Jazz.  But the one thing it has going for it is that it can become an arm or a leg for a combiner.  It's true, RTS Jazz couldn't do that.  And it's not a small thing for a toy to do.  (Admittedly, another thing that RTS Jazz can't do is be on shelves right now in 2017, so that's another point to PotP Jazz.)  

Like the other Deluxe Class toys from this toyline, Jazz's combiner fist is also chest armor for the robot mode.  However, it fits on his chest only awkwardly, if I'm following the very scant instructions right.  There's just a drawing of the fist/armor piece and Jazz with an arrow, the end.  I thiiiiink you're supposed to gently nudge those thumb tabs into the seemingly-corresponding slots on his fender.  But it's not a great, secure fit.

In summary: This is the best available Jazz to you currently, but it's definitely not the best Jazz possible.  But it can be a combiner limb, if that's cool.  Also, maybe you might want to wait until he's repacked for Wave 3, since the MAGA might be gone by then, or see what the hell TakaraTomy does with him.

There's a new Dinobot in town, and she's a velociraptor!    Say hello to Slash, the second female Dinobot (the first, Strafe, is part of the team in IDW comics right now), but the first female Dinobot with a toy.  

And you know what, I'm going to lay it all right here now.  I love this toy.  It's tiny, it's just complex enough to be interesting but simple enough you can fiddle with it back and forth, and it transforms from a robot to a velociraptor.  A Jurassic Park-style non-feathery velociraptor, but whatcha gonna do.  The other Dinobots are kind of stuck in the 80s, so Slash being stuck in the 90s is still some kind of temporal improvement.

Slash transforms essentially like Beast Wars Dinobot.  While the head folds inside the torso instead of forming the chest like Dinobot, the rest is pretty familiar.  Her robot legs fold up underneath the beast mode torso, the robot arms become the beast mode legs, and the tail folds out from behind her.  (But it does not become a rotate blade weapon.)  

With her red torso, black head, legs, and fists, and silver everything else, she fits in really well with the aesthetic of the rest of the Dinobot team.  The Dinobots desperately need a velociraptor anyway.  

You can open a compartment in her beast mode back to fit a Prime Master or Titan Master.  The Prime Master trading card she comes with is supposed to be multingual, but no matter which of the 12 random cards you receive, they're all going to be entirely English.  The same English phrases repeated four times.  Because I guess somebody didn't bother to translate the last three into Spanish, French, and Portuguese.  Whoops.

Even if you don't get the rest of this line's Dinobots, I highly recommend Slash.  She's by far the best toy in this wave of Legends, and she's just fun to transform back and forth, each mode being a happy destination.  

And nothing's covertly written on her in cybertronix by some jag who's probably not freelancing for Hasbro anymore.

WE'VE ACHIEVED SOMETHING: the it's walky! kickstarter has funded

Swoop is the second of two Dinobots available in the first wave of Power of the Primes Deluxe Class guys.  And y'know what?  He is pretty great!

I mean, Slug's okay.  He's an awkward-looking triceratops (which can be mitigated somewhat by creative transformation) who is, essentially, just the original Slag toy but with knees.  There's not a lot new there, other than the obvious "oh there's a combiner port hidden in me so I can become an arm for a giant robot."  

But Swoop does something important for me.  Sure, he, too, is pretty damn similar to his original toy, but with knees.  But his pterosaur mode has articulated legs.  This means you can swing them under his body, so he can stand up and perch properly -- or you can swing them back, and they can dangle behind him for flight.  Transformers pterosaurs rarely bother with giving you the choice, choosing to mold the feet in place one way or the other.  But being given the option really opens up Swoop to me.  

You might notice that Swoop has a blue chest instead of red.  This was a later change to the toy, since the promo images still had him in toy- (and comic-)accurate red.  But I guess Hasbro decided they wanted him to have a blue chest, like in the cartoon.  Ultimately, swapping the chest color and nothing else actually resulted in a kind of Diaclone-style Swoop. (Diaclones were the Japanese toys which Hasbro imported/localized as Transformers.)  Cartoon Swoop had a fully red helmet, while the Diaclone toy had a... blue front and a red back?  The black front and the red back on this Power of the Primes toy feels more Diacloney than cartoony.

I generally trend towards Marvel comics colors, but I'm okay with a blue Swoop.  It's nice to have a little variety, color-wise, plus I've decided that only the dinosaurs in the Dinobots get to be red-chested.  Swoop is not a dinosaur, so he gets a different color.  

Once again, Swoop comes with a combiner fist which the packaging prioritizes as chest armor.  The chest armor is supposed to house a Prime Master (sold separately), but since Prime Masters are cross-compatible with Titan Masters, it means you can plug a Titan Master head into the same spot.  Since there was a (renamed) Swoop Titan Master, you can totally have Swoop wearing a giant fist-smock with his own head embedded in it, kind of if he were piloted by Krang.

The instructions do not tell you how to connect the chest armor to his chest, and there's no obvious 5mm peghole there.  What you have to do is use the tabs on the inside of each of the combiner fist's thumbs to fit into slots on each side of the pterosaur head.  

There's also a sword for Swoop to hold, and a smaller peg on the sword for it to be used to stow in non-robot modes.  The only real good place to stow it is underneath the pterosaur beak.  It's not a GREAT place.  But it's slightly better than one of the other two compatible pegholes under his abdomen.

The only real complaint I have about POTP Swoop is that the front of the pterosaur face doesn't plug well into the back of its skull for beast mode.  It tends to kind of droop out.  I'd use some floor polish to make it a more solid connection, but, well, his robot mode face is kinda in there.  eehhh

OBLIGATORY: I have a Kickstarter running right now to print a first It's Walky! book collection!

Usually new toys show up in, like, Southeast Asia first.  That's closer to where the factories are, and you gotta add in Pacific Ocean Ship Time before things eventually show up in North America.  Not this time!  Suddenly, and weeks ahead of schedule, the first wave of the next Transformers subline, Power of the Primes, appeared in an Arizona Target.  They were also found in Dallas and Michigan that night, once we figured out the DPCI number and could track the toys' appearances in Targets across the country.  Today I showed up at a Target where no fewer than two other Transformers nerds were also there to ask the same question as I, and after a set of toys had already been put on hold by an unseen fourth (at least) nerd.  There were no toys for any of us there then, but I found a lone Slug at another Target on the way home.  

(It was mildly hilarious to me that this rush to Targets, crowding myself out, was very likely my own fault: I'm the one who published how to easily locate these toys at Targets online, and this knowledge was very quickly spread to the major websites.  Oops!  Too helpful!)

Slug is the new name for the Dinobot triceratops Slag, who can't be called that anymore because, as Dr. Kelso once reminded us on Scrubs, "Slag" is a gendered insult in some parts.  You can still call him Slag though if you wanna.  No one will stop you.

The gimmicks in Power of the Prime are... storied and legion.  Okay, so each Deluxe comes with a little bit of armor, right?  You plug that into their chest, easy as you please, and also there's this removeable center bit on the chest armor that you can replace with a Prime Master, which is sold separately!  Prime Masters are exactly like last line's Titan Masters, except instead of transforming into a face, they transform into a symbol.  There are 12 symbols, one for each of the original thirteen Primes (minus one?).  The idea is you plug this Prime Master into your larger Transformer toy and you imagine he is being bestowed with godly powers.  

There are trading cards included to this effect.  There are 12 possible cards with every toy, each explaining what power up they get from a certain Prime Master.  I don't recommend completism.  

ALSO, not mentioned on the exteriors of the toy packaging itself is the fact that the Deluxe Class-sized toys such as Slug are combiner guys again.  Slug's "chest armor" is actually a very thinly-disguised combiner mode fist.  Hidden within his chest is a Combiner Wars-style combiner plug.  That this is possible is detailed on the instructions and no where else.  Surprise combiners, guys!  (if you haven't seen the internet)  The decision to obscure this is very strange.

Slug is essentially the original G1 Slag, but with modern articulation.  He's got translucent parts that are painted gold on the inside to give him that original flavor, and he's... not really trying to be a modern understanding of a triceratops.  He looks like a 1980s triceratops (again) but with a slightly less dragging tail.  I recommend mistransforming him so he has a neck, keeping him from looking TOO doofy.  The biggest difference his in robot mode is that he doesn't have the wings on his back made of triceratops hide anymore.  

He comes with a gun (and his chest armor/combiner fist) but not a sword.  The clear plug on the outside face of the chest armor can be removed and held like a gun.  

And once you have the other four Dinobots from this toyline, you'll be able to make a Dinobot combiner.  

So let's set a scene.  

It's 11:15am.  I've just gotten up, and I'm sitting on the potty.  (wait wait don't leave, let me finish)  I know there's the Transformers panel running at New York Comic-Con right then, and so I pull out my phone and start watching a live feed.

Oh, hello, John Warden!

Oh, huh, John Warden is pulling out two toys.  I guess each is one of the toy's two modes?

...oh, cool, it's Grotusque!  I guess we're getting a Grotusque!   That's a surprise!

......oh, i see, it is now suddenly on sale at HasbroToyShop.com right now

and those kind of things tend to sell out in five minutes

Can a man will himself to stop shitting so he can run to his computer and order exclusive product on a time budget of about ninety seconds?   The answer is, apparently, yes!

And a day later, here Grotusque (and his extra Titan Master partner, Scorponok) is.  These guys ship from Pennsylvania, and I'm just one state over, so the trek is pretty short.  It is ... insanely odd to go from "I just now know this toy exists" to "I have this toy in my hand" in a matter of hours.  Usually first you get the store listing, then you get the blurry and/or cropped stolen imagery, then you get the official announcement, and then you get six more months to wait for the damned thing to actually come out.  Grotusque went from Knowledge to Having in a day.  It's kind of rad?  I mean, definitely not rad if you were, say, at work that afternoon, and not a cartoonist who spends all day at home.  But for me it's definitely rad.

(He will reportedly be available later at Toys"R"Us as well, so there's another chance at him.)

Grotusque is half Doublecross/Twinferno and half new parts.  The bottom half, or the legs/tail is what's kept, while everything from the waist up is new.  (Okay, the wings and stomach are still retained.)  And, honestly, Grotusque is working for me a lot more than Twinferno.  Twinferno had this problem where his torso was awkwardly elongated, and he just looked kinda weird in beast mode.  But Grotusque throws all that stuff out and starts fresh.  The beast mode arms become robot arms, the beast head now opens and unfolds and integrates into the torso, and the result is a toy that looks proportional to itself in both modes.  So, like, score.  

Like Arcee before him, Grotusque has a "premium deco."  That means they actually paint him.  They don't, like, go overboard or anything, but they put enough paint on him that he looks like himself.  There's lots of parts that are painted over entirely just to get them to be the right color.  The wings, for example, are translucent plastic under there.  His head, Fengul, is sculpted and meticulously painted (for a Titan Master) to look like the Battle Beast Platinum Tiger.  This attention to detail also nudges him over Twinferno.

Also like Arcee, Grotusque comes with an extra little die-cast Titan Master head guy.  This time it's Scorponok.  Hi, Scorponok!

hey takaratomy maybe make this toy into fangry please and thank you

A "Headmaster Arcee" has been a hypothetical holy grail of a Transformer for so long, that its very name is a meme.  It's the punchline to a platoon of fandom in-jokes.  And now it's sort of real????

I only say "sort of" only because of semantics.  Though the exact trademark terminology involved is "Titan Master," this is a Headmaster Arcee.  It's a toy of Arcee where her head pops off and becomes a little guy.  A guy named Leinad, which is "Daniel" backwards, because Daniel Witwicky-the-10-year-old-child transformed into Arcee's head in the final episodes of the original Transformers cartoon.  This is a Headmaster Arcee.

Titans Return Arcee is another retool of Titans Return Blurr.  Unlike Nautica, which only added parts to Blurr, Arcee actually replaces some parts.  She's got new shoulders (with fake kibble Arcee shoulder stuff sculpted onto the back of them so she keeps her silhouette), she's got a new car hood/shield, she's got new handguns, and she's got a new swooshy-thing on the roof of her car mode.  And, of course, the new face, both for herself and for Leinad.

Everything's gloriously pink and white.

She's one of the two Transformers-related offerings available at HasCon last weekend.  (they say she'll also be at retail at some enigmatic later time through unspecified means, but we'll see)  Just one single BotCon-style exclusive (and one Optimus Prime phone charger that most people ignored) are kind of a step back from the figurative avalanche of exclusive products that BotCons had up until their demise, but, well, I dunno, a Headmaster Arcee is such a big, crazy deal that I feel that the exchange rate of one Headmaster Arcee kind of equals a dozen or so toys.  Also, I only had to spend $25 instead of like $800, so that's cool.  

The source mold for Arcee, Titans Returns Blurr, is still a great one.  Easily one of the best in this line, so it doesn't hurt so much that we're getting it reused repeatedly.  And she comes with a bonus Ultra Magnus Titan Master head, so everything's pretty good all around.  

Hi, Don.  Squeaky wheel, eh?

I also have Sky Shadow!

I got him quite a bit ago.  There was a long dryspell of new Transformers (like a week or two) and I saw this guy in a store and I bought him, even though I'd planned to skip him.

He's pretty, at least!  It's hard to go wrong with black, silver, and red.  And he's Overlord from the pants down.  The top half transforms into a completely different jet.

I dunno.  I have regrets.  It's not that this toy is bad, but there were reasons I was skipping him.  I'm happy with the Sky Shadow I already had, and that Sky Shadow takes up way less room on a shelf (he's a Deluxe) and IDW comics based their design of him on that earlier toy.  I just don't need a giant-ass Sky Shadow.  It was a bad impulse purchase.

But here he is, anyway, for you to look at.

Like I said, he's not bad.  He's just surplus to my requirements.  And I have an Overlord now, who's mostly this guy anyway, but as a character I wanted.

So.

Not that he wasn't somewhat of a deal before, but folks have been very loudly asking for a new Overlord ever since he was the big villain in 2010's Last Stand of the Wreckers.  BotCon tried to jump on this hype in 2012 with a version of him retooled from Revenge of the Fallen Bludgeon, but that's always felt like a band-aid on a gushing wound of desire for the real thing.  Well, here he is, the Real Thing, probably!

I mean, I can't rule out that there'll be a Better-er Overlord at some point, but this offering seems like it's the most on-the-nose that retail can muster.  He looks like Overlord (the original toy, at least, though not the LSOTW redesign), he splits into two vehicles like Overlord (not a common gimmick), and he's the largest size class that isn't a city or a combiner, which is suitably Overlordy.  Overlord was a big-ass guy.  But, frankly, anything much larger than this and he isn't gonna fit on any of my shelves.

(note: TakaraTomy just solicited their Overlord, and they're officially mistransforming his feet in a way that extends his legs, making him taller by about an inch.  Essentially, theirs is on tippy-toes.  You can do that easily on the Hasbro version as well if you want your Overlord to be a smidge taller.)

In addition to the tank and jet modes and the combined robot mode, the two vehicles can also combine into an okayish base mode.  I probably won't be using this much, but it's there.

Since Overlord is a Titans Return toy, that means he's got a little dude that turns into his head.  And since Overlord is a LARGE Titans Return toy, that means his little dude actually just transforms into the face, which sits inside a larger helmet, so that body parts remain proportional.  There's also little head-guy-shaped crevices inside doors on his chest where you can capture two other head guys.  (These take the place of the Powermaster engine plug-in spots on the original toy.)  

Overall, Overlord is a solid toy.  His robot mode is where it's at and stays together like a toy that doesn't transform at all, featuring most of the articulation you'd want (though no waist rotation), and he transforms into two smaller vehicles which are also individually fun entities.  The tank mode's turret doesn't rotate, but considering how the thing transforms, that's not really surprising.  

Just keep him away from Pipes.