It seems like it was forever ago, but Takara’s Unite Warriors line once released a
completely random, out of left field box set of repaints in the form of the
bizarre and wonderful Grand Galvatron. Several subsequent sets have passes and
there was nothing else quite as strange. Until Megatronia came along.
Megatronia is a totally strange combiner team consisting
of five of the six members of the Victorion team, and exists, it seems, solely
to allow Takara to get some mileage out of the new heads and parts that were
used in that set. The team is comprised of leader, torso, silver firetruck and
“Empress of Destruction” Megaempress, built from spare Megatron parts and
basically being a crazed girl version of Megatron; pink helicopter and
Starscream fangirl Lunaclub; blue helicopter and Soundwave disciple Moonheart;
purple sports car and former spy in the employ of Shockwave Flowspade; and
yellow sports car and black market Swindle associate Trickdiamond. The four
limbs serve as the royal guards to Megaempress, and could conceivably be seen
as female versions of the male Decepticons they admire or were associated with.
Let me begin by saying they totally dropped the ball by
naming Megaempress “Megaempress” and the combined form Megatronia, instead of
switching the names around. Megaempress is totally a female version of
Megatron, and is painted in a really stunning silver. Character wise
Megaempress is simply a gender swapped version of Megatron, substituting charm
and wiles for ruthless charisma. The firetruck ladder serves as a fusion
railgun, and she is armed with a giant ax/pick melee weapon as well. The
weapons of the five figures combine into a pretty giant sword, as they did with
Victorion also. Megaempress is such a good looking figure, I’d say the best of
the set, and is alone worth buying the set for. We’ve gotten this mold several
times now, as Hot Spot once, Onslaught twice, as Bludgeon from the TFCC once
and as Pyra Magna from the Victorion set. I don’t own the last two, but I have
to say that Megaempress here is the best use of the mold, visually, out of all
six. The head is terrific looking, and looks a lot like the Megatron head from Cybertron Megatron, with the overall
look then referencing Cybertron Galvatron.
This is an absolute win of a figure: clever and interesting as a character,
simply gorgeous to look at. A real eHobby-back-in-the-day kind of figure, and
that makes me love it all the more.
Lunaclub and Moonheart are the two helicopter figures, each
with new heads and some new forearms, as well as new chest tooling. In the
Victorion set, the helicopters are intended to be twins, and Lunaclub and
Moonheart keep that going visually if not in characterization. The new forearms
mean the helicopter modes loose the large missile racks, but frankly, it’s
about time, as that was getting to be real boring. I think these forearms would
have looked better on earlier choppers like Blades, just to remove the
absurdity of a rescue helicopter being stacked with explosives. Each of the
four limb figures has command over an element, Lunaclub controlling fire and
Moonheart water, and the helicopter pair each wields a pretty large sword which
combine with the other weapons to form the Destopia sword. More on the sword
later on.
Flowspade is ANOTHER repaint of Combiner Wars Dead End, making this the 3,000th use of
that mold. I still say it is my favorite Combiner
Wars limb mold, but still, even I’m tired of it by this point. The paint on
the figure is really beautiful, a nice, soft lavender and a good, solid black
that make the mold look brand new, kind of in the same way that Combiner Wars Trailbreaker and
Smokescreen did with their molds. In robot mode the lavender is a main color,
in contrast to its accent role in vehicle mode, and wow does the figure pop
with it. The new head for the figure is again from the Victorion set of new
heads, this one being a pretty clear reference to the G1 character Nightbird,
who was in a few minutes of one episode and somehow became a big deal in some
remote corners of the fandom. It’s a nice head, really crisp and distinctive in
its sculpt, and the way the lavender is pulled up onto the faceplate and top of
the head presents a really unified look. Something that I felt was really
tragic about Victorion is that heinous color scheme, and how it truly does ruin
the look of the molds for me, from pictures at least. Flowspade’s weapon is
some type of curved blade, or maybe like a bow, which is what it looks like to
me, called the “Tornado Cutter,” serving as a clue that Flowspade had power
over wind.
Final member Trickdiamond is a repaint of the Breakdown
mold, a good but somewhat fidgety mold. Another black sports car, this one with
really strong yellow in all the same places as Flowspade, I think Trickdiamond
is the third best figure in the set. While the Breakdown hips are still kind of
a pain, the overall figure looks great in both modes. She is armed with the
“Quake Shield” and controls earth, whatever that means, since earth is generally
the fourth element. In fiction, the shield gives her some ability to produce or
control seismic activity. It is worth noting that both Trickdiamond and
Flowspade each have new chest pieces, their bibs not being shared with any
other version of this mold as far as I am aware. Trickdiamond has a new head as
well, but I have a hard time placing where it originates from. It has a sort of
Princess Leia vibe, and I’ve seen people online say it’s supposed to Moonracer
or one of the female Autobots that aren’t Arcee who make a four second
appearance in the G1 cartoon as the girlfriend robots of Optimus Prime. It’s
kind of an odd head, as it’s oval shaped and kind of flat in the back. It looks
good from the front, but if Trickdiamond turns her head, it’s not such a good
look. 
The weapons of the individual robots combine to form the
formidable Destopia sword, which has the power to split planets it half. The
sword is large, and weighty: it’s fairly surprising that Megatronia can hold it
up. But, as a set of repaints that come at the end of a toy line, the
Megatronia molds are surprisingly sturdy, and I don’t want to say that Takara
made all new molds, these are probably the most solid set of these molds I’ve
ever owned. And there molds are no spring chickens, man: each one having been
used again and again over the course of not just Combiner Wars, but also Unite
Warriors several times. The helicopters alone got seven uses combined
between the two lines, not including Lunaclub and Moonheart, who together make
the eighth. All of the joints are nice and tight, so much so that upon first
getting the figures out of the box I found myself being cautious with them, as
they were so solid I was afraid I might break something. 
Combined mode looks excellent as the robot form is mostly
black and silver with the highlight colors from each individual limb member.
The set comes with the hands and feet that debuted with Hasbro’s Victorion,
which is a real nice upgrade over the standard Combiner Wars hand foot guns, and helps to set Megatronia apart
from all of the other combiners that are now posted on my various shelves. The
parts do store on Megaempress’ firetruck mode, plugging in to the ladder. The
new combiner head is a tall one, but it has a strong and clearly female face
sculpt. It’s cool, because Victorion first and then Megatronia are the first
two female combiners in the Transformers mythos, and it is very nice that they
aren’t just sporting male combiner heads with some lipstick or something. I
know that the head is being reused here, but it is a unique and different head,
not just a large robot head: it’s distinctively female, and looks every bit as
planned out and made with quality that any of the other combined mode heads do. Missing from the group is a Legends class figure, so Megatronia has no chest
plate like Victorion has, but it doesn’t actually detract from the overall
look. Maybe it’s because there’s some color on the chest panels that fold out
from the ladder, unlike on Defensor, but Megatronia looks good without any
additional piece. 
The new hands are nice, but don’t offer too much. They have
fingers that can be opened, but the weapons still peg into holes in the fists
rather than be held by wrapping the fingers around them. So, I guess they’re
fairly cool, but they don’t do or offer much, other than looking like actual
hands, something that the standard line-wide hand foot guns never really
managed to do. The new feet on the other hand (??) are a welcome upgrade. The
have an ankle joint which allows the figure to take a wider stance than the
flat and unyielding hand foot guns do, and not to say that Megatronia is able
to strike dynamic poses or anything, but she can stand a bit sturdier than
other combiners. I get why these hands and feet weren’t released with
individual Combiner Wars Deluxe
figures, because they don’t add anything play pattern wise, but it would be
real nice to have a set of these feet for the other combiners. The hands do
have opening fingers, but there’s very little to do with a feature like that,
so it’s not much to get excited over. They still have a peg hole for the
weapons to fit into, so the fingers don’t actually grip anything. The hand foot guns would be fine but these
new feet could really improve the overall appearance and stability of the other
combiners.
I went back and forth and back and forth on ordering this
set. I don’t remember when it was, but whenever the tease came out about this
set, I thought “oh boy, female Decepticons!” and was like immediately
interested. This set is just about everything that I loved about the spectacular
Grand Galvatron set, so there wasn’t much convincing that I was going to need
to buy it. It was, and still is an expensive set, and the preorder ran me $170
at Big Bad Toy Store; prices were practically identical everywhere else. The
price was the thing that had me wavering, as it is a set of repaints and a
not-really-a-character group of characters. At least Grand Galvatron is made up
of characters who are characters. But my love of this concept and line(s) has
been very well documented, and so a new addition is practically certain to end
up on my shelves.
I have no idea if Megatronia is something that people like,
or if it’s at all popular. I saw a few sets at C2E2 last month, and it does
not seem like online stores have sold out of her, the way Grand Galvatron did.
As I said in my article on Platinum Liokaiser,
the biggest issue this set faces is that it is more repaints from a line
absolutely stacked with repaints.
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