Transformers: Combiner Wars G2 box sets

 

Theoretically, we are deep into the first wave or two of the new Titans Return toyline at this date in late August. Theoretically. I have yet to see anything more than the $5 head robots in stores, and I’m certainly not buying those; although, the single time I did see them in store, I legitimately gave a relieved exhale that they were priced at the low price they are, and not attempting to masquerade as $10 toys, in this day where Deluxes are trying as hard as they can to stay under $17: and by ‘trying to stay under,’ I mean the $16.99 I saw them listed for at Target. Anyway, we are supposed to be well on our way into the new line, but I’ve not seen them at all in stores. So, I’m choosing to stick with happier, more plentiful times and lines, and am going to retreat once more (at least) into Combiner Wars.

At this point, my writing on Combiner Wars has entered KISS Farewell Tour territory: always representing itself as the end, the final finale finally, but never actually reaching its end. When I wrote about Bruticus, I noted that that was probably the end of my work on the line . . . until Groove arrived, and then I could finally do the Protectobots. Then, I penned a final, parting thoughts piece that was the end of Combiner Wars talk for me . . . until I got Sky Lynx. Grand Galvatron I almost hold separate, seeing as that is more of an interesting oddity than a real Combiner Wars entry . . . but, I do have Unite Warriors Computron coming soon, so there will be more and then . . . eventually, that Lio Kaiser is coming, along with potentially whatever Takara does with the Victorion set, and since that seems to be being teased as Decepticons, well, they will end up on this blog as well. Oh, and in case I never mentioned it, I did pick up the G2 Superion and Menasor a couple months ago, and wanted to write on them for a bit . . . but decided to wait until G2 Bruticus arrived.

I ordered a cheap G2 Bruticus set via Amazon for Prime Day, which was July 12^th. It showed up August 18^th. Man, shipping so fast!

Anyway, these G2 box sets are terrific deals, for a discounted price. They normally retail for $100, and for that amount, they’re just zany repaints of toys you’ve probably already got. There’s a sense of fatigue going around right now with the Combiner Wars figures, and so a lot of people are skipping these sets, and as usual, I can’t say I blame them; besides, they are just repaints: there is nothing in any of them that we haven’t already had the opportunity to get one way or another, nothing we haven’t seen already. Probably nothing we haven’t bought already either. So, $100 for a strange paintjob isn’t really a thing that lots of people are clamoring for. But I bought each of the three for less than the $100 retail price, thanks to Prime Day and a pretty good Hasbro Toy Shop discount back in March. I got each set for about $70, and so $70 for six figures is a far better deal. 

These boxed sets are kind of good all around. Each of these sets contains all six of the toys originally marketed as part of the team, so that includes the Legends class partner, but replaces ‘new members’ Alpha Bravo and Offroad for the repaints of Slingshot and Wildrider, who were made available last summer, via online shops. This was a big deal a year ago when these sets were first being teased; ten or eleven months later, when they finally went live for purchase, it’s not that big of a thing any more. Even if you’d missed out on the online Slingshot and Wildrider, the original team members were released with the Unite Warriors sets from Takara. At this point, I’d wager that people who were really invested in getting the G1 accurate team members have done so, so the two guys included in these sets aren’t very ‘exclusive’ anymore. Bruticus is the first set that does not contain a previously unreleased member, as jet Blast Off is here, not replaced by the Takara original space shuttle Blast Off. 

The boxes are all good looking as well, each with an action shot of the combined robot. These boxes really are an attempt to mimic the excellent Unite Warriors packaging, at least in terms of the artwork. Other than the artwork, the boxes are just boxes: they lack the flap and window display option of the Unite Warriors boxes. Each set comes with a group sheet of instructions, a collector’s card for the combined robot, and a poster that is a different image as the box art. It is a nice overall package. This is apparently the same type of packaging arrangement that Devastator came in, but I have no experience with those figures, so I can’t really say. But these are giftsets, just like G1 had, and an example of that kid/collector line Hasbro is always trying to straddle: toys are for kids, but a collector would be more likely to buy these sets. The overall quality of the packaging is a manifestation of this clash: it looks nice, like it’s collector packaging . . . until you lay hands on it, and realize it’s just a cardboard box with a cardboard tray, that would be easy and disposable for kids. 

The figures in these three box sets actually held up pretty well, with a few exceptions. In terms of overall quality control, Superion is the far and away winner. All of this joints are tight, each individual figure functions well and, aside from the always thin and weak feeling elbows on Firefly/Slingshot, everything feels sturdy. Menasor suffers from an overused Dead End mold, which,

by this point, has seen more than a few reuses, and this set comes with two of them. These two cars look terrific with their vibrant paintjobs and minor detailing. The rear halves of the cars have some trouble staying together though. This causes an issue when trying to pose the one you use as an arm, because the forearm tends to separate, and whichever one is serving as a leg tends to split above the ankle from the weight of the combined robot. The Dead End and Wildrider figures also feel a little bit thin in hand, as do Firefly and Slingshot. The two Stunticons at least feel great in their original iterations, and I’ve been a big fan of that mold, and so I have to say that Prowl and Smokescreen feel fine as well. Also, I’d forgotten about this, since I’d shaved the plastic down on the Menasor chest pegs that Blackjack attaches to, but the G2 repaint does not fix that issue, so Blackjack falls off of Menasor at the provocation of anything more than a stern glance. In the case of G2 Wildrider here, I think there’s something about the toy being molded in yellow that makes it feel a little more knockoffish than its previous version.

Which brings us to G2 Bruticus, and I’ll start with its yellow member, Onslaught. The Onslaught mold has always felt a bit thin in the plastic, and this version does as well. But, being molded in this bright yellow makes the toy look like a KO, and the general tactile feel of it doesn’t help. Silverbolt and Motormaster are both strong, solid, sturdy toys; the Onslaught mold has never felt that solid. All of the molds here have been pretty overused, except for Brawl, who strangely enough, is the one that suffers from the worst QC in this set. Vortex and Blast Off are molds that have been used to death, but the newest and least reused mold is the one with all the issues. His legs won’t stick together in limb mode. His shoulders don’t really tab in at the front end of the tank mode. It’s a tank that doesn’t want to maintain its tank shape. The hole the hand foot gun plugs into is very, very, very loose, so he has trouble supporting the weight of the combined mode. And these are problems on top of the inherent mold problems! Poor Brawl. It kind of makes me wonder, now that the Combiner Wars Computron is out, if the mold is even worse as Nosecone, since Hasbro didn’t even change anything with the mold for this fourth use. 

 

In combined forms, all three look pretty good. Superion looks like a combined robot made from airshow planes; Menasor looks like an amalgamation of cars featured on 90’s t-shirts; Bruticus looks like something ridiculous. Color-wise, Superion at least makes sense, despite not having a very good overall look; the other two, man.

It is hard to say who these sets are aimed at. As has already been stated, while you may not have bought every single mold in the line, or completed every combiner team, the chances are good that if you bought seven figures from this entire line, you got essentially one of everything that it offered. The only real variation comes amongst the torso figures, and even then, there is so far one unique torso bot. Generation 2 was the successor to the original, born in 1984 Generation 1 Transformers toyline, closing out the 1980s and beginning the colorful and xtreme 1990s. Some of the line was comprised of G1 toys slightly modified to accommodate some pretty late 80s/early 90s-rific concepts, such as the sound effect box. Remember the Pocket Revenger? That big keychain soundbox that made a couple of weapon noises, like a machine gun and a hand grenade explosion? The general idea behind it, if it can be called that, was that this pocket noisemaker would provide you with relief from tense or stressful situations by imagining that your pocket arsenal was actually riddling the source of your displeasure with rifle fire or dispersing their physical state via explosion. Because nothing spells relief from road rage like pointing a black piece of plastic at another motorist and pushing the flamethrower button several times. That’ll show that guy!! G2 Starscream and Ramjet each got a simplified soundbox, some of the Autobot cars got big missile launchers, and Inferno got a water gun….. yeah. The rest of the G2 line was actually populated by new toys, new molds and new characters which in some instances made return appearances in later lines, like the Cyberjets, which would be reused a few times. G2 would also provide a couple of the G1 combiner teams repainted.

Another major element of the G2 line was an affinity for real bright, really 90s neon color schemes, to better appeal to the tastes of xtreme and radical 90s kids, who would accept nothing less than the most extreme and totally awesome merchandise. Everything in the 1990s was neon, like some grotesque 1950s, “World of Tomorrow” vision gone awfully wrong. I had a neon pink Rude Dog t shirt in the early 90s. I loved that shirt; kids at school made fun of me for wearing pink. All of G2 had some pretty bad color schemes, but by far the worst were the unreleased Menasor and Defensor, both having attained legendary status. Bruticus and Superion were actually released, and to complete the total contrast with Menasor and Defensor, can actually be had fairly cheaply on the collector’s market. I own several iterations of the G1 Combaticon molds, and I think the G2 version was the cheapest one to obtain, although not the easiest to find. The paintjobs on these figures are not as hideous as the original G2 toys are generally represented as being; I think that is due to the fact that the original G2s, coming out in what, 1992, were smaller, less intricate toys that were basically painted in block sections, and so ended up being large swaths of this color, clashing with a large piece of this other color, and the combos were bad. These toys being references to those garish originals bear much the same color schemes as their predecessors, but being larger, more detailed toys with more physical area, the color palattes are able to breathe, so to speak: it’s possible to get more of the secondary colors spread throughout the toy, so there is something more of a balance present, and as a result, these are basically figures with bad paintjobs rather than the things that people will claim are torturous to look at, but are themselves mainly just ugly. 

For all of the crap that the so-called Geewunners get online for liking things from their childhood Transformers experiences, the G2 nostalgia crowd generally seems to get a pass for pining over the same toys. I’m not trying to tell someone else how they should enjoy their collections, and I am a very nostalgia-driven man, but how much better is this Bruticus compared to the original G1 color scheme Bruticus, really? You prefer it or you had it as a kid, fine, those are perfectly valid reasons. I guess maybe the real issue then lies with me: I’ve always seen the G2 reuses of G1 toys as novelties, or oddities, kinda before we knew what ‘repaints’ were. The G2 toys were in many ways the first of the Universe-style toylines, reusing and perhaps slightly modifying previously released toys as either something new or a new-er version of an existent character.

So, the verdict. Again, these three sets contain figures we’ve already gotten a few times over, and are basically niche repaints. At the full price of $100, I think these are easy passes, baring they hold some personal nostalgia or you missed out on them the first time or something else. What that ‘something else’ would be, I can’t say. Even if you missed these original releases at retail, and somehow then missed them on the secondary market, Takara’s Unite Warriors line has been releasing boxed sets as well, so it has been more than possible to get a full G1 combiner via multiple avenues. They don’t come with any exclusive figures or anything of that nature. I guess I don’t know who these are aimed at, but I do know that at $70-80 (maybe), these are good deals. The toys, as we already know, are good figures all-around, even though they are starting to feel pretty long in the tooth by now, but there aren’t any surprises in these boxes. For $100, unless you don’t have one of the full teams or have some personal connection to the G2 version, I’d say they aren’t really worth it. But at a discount, if you love combiners like you should, these are good, satisfying pickups. 

There’s not been any word on a G2 Defensor, and that is a good thing. It is beyond obvious that I loved Combiner Wars, but if there aren’t going to be any new characters or molds or teams, it’s time to let this go, or at the very, very least, stop re-releasing the same eight molds.