TFC Toys Poseidon: Mentarazor

Amidst the chaos and bustle of moving, it was decided that a distraction was necessary. For Christmas, my wife got me half of the TFC Toys not-Seacons set, and I bought the other half. So, as has been mentioned in passing since mid-December, I have been in possession of the TFC Toys Poseidon team, but like so many other cool figures obtained over the last three or four months, there hasn’t been time enough to deal with them. The original intent was to take pictures of each member of the set and begin reviewing them in February: I was successful with four of the six, and then, our moving plans took shape.

So, let’s try to take a look at the first member of the team to be released: Mentarazor, the Seawing stand in.

General notes on the TFC Seacons: they are large figures. Large in the same way that the Hades team members are larger, like larger Voyager class figures; maybe, if you remember it, dear reader, the Ultra class that apparently was phased out after the Generations 2.0 line with Onslaught, Powerglide, and Silverbolt. So, big figures. Everything about the set in general is big, and Poseidon is going to be HUGE. At present, the combination for Poseidon is going to have to wait until after our move is complete, but I’d spent time looking around our current place, trying to find somewhere to put the combined form, and couldn’t find anywhere large enough to hold it. Third party combiner weapons are big already, but the sword that Poseidon carries is enormous. Like, ridiculously so. The boxes for these figures are absolutely gorgeous, throwbacks to the Japanese G1 style boxes of the 1980s, and the figures are packed in thick foam inserts. Each figure also comes with a real nice tech spec card, and the instructions contain chapters of a comic which features the team. In terms of plastic quality, the Seacons are on the same level as the Hades figures, so, lighter, thinner plastic that doesn’t seem less sturdy or durable, even though that is the response that your brain comes to the first time or two you hold one of the figures in hand.

The five (!) smaller figures is capable of five (!!) transformations, so that each figure is capable of a robot, sea monster, arm, leg, and weapon for Poseidon mode. Some of the weapon modes really are just slight modifications to the sea monster mode with some blasters sticking out of the mouth, but hey. This is asking a real lot of a transforming robot toy, you know?

(The original plan for each figure entry was to show pictures of arm and leg AND weapon mode, but this plan was abandoned in the interest of time. There are plans to show off each of the five weapon modes in the eventual Poseidon meta-article, but I feel like toys capable of such complexity really should be shown off in a way that acknowledges that complexity. Currently, there are no plans to combine Poseidon due to space and time limitations, and, as of this past weekend, all six of the figures have been packed for our move at the end of March. Whatever further photo decisions there are to make will hopefully be made prior to our move, and then, once the dust settles after our move, the decision can be implemented and Poseidon can be combined, and maybe we’ll have a separate entry to examine the various limb and weapons modes. –mr)

Let’s get specific with Mentarazor. The main colors on the figure are black and a very light grey, with hints of the Seacon teal here and there, as well as some translucent plastic in yellow and green. Mentarazor strikes a terrific profile thanks in large part to the manta wings that hand off of the robot back, and the head sculpt is right on the money with any detailed versions of the Seawing head, most notably, like Dreamwave’s More Than Meets The Eye guidebooks. In fact, if you are familiar with those, Mentarazor looks like the picture of Seawing stepped right off of the page and took physical form. The figure is overall posable, which is pretty neat considering some of the things the figure does with its panels. The feet, for instance, are comprised of two panels on the ends of ball joints that lock together in the middle, yet are capable of movement and such for posing and provide a real stable, flat foot. A bit of a surprise, considering they are two pieces that connect together: but each is on a ball jointed arm that allows movement forward and backward, as well as providing an ankle for the robot. This by itself is kind of a design marvel. The Seacons in general are really well engineered, Mentarazor probably the least impressive of the bunch; but little things like the foot design are attention getters, even on a mostly simple figure.

The robot mode is awesome. Just awesome. It looks great; it’s well-proportioned and poseable; it’s a detailed sculpt, but a subtly detailed one. There is an animal face – or at least, eyes – in the chest, if you look for it. The wings over the shoulders really do strike a great and fairly regal profile, and they feature a transformation step that makes them look different enough from the wings of the beast mode to feel impressive. They can be posed a number of ways, including fanning out from the body more or being tighter and closer. The head sculpt is sharp, with a big, light catching translucent yellow visor.

Accessory wise, Mentarazor comes with a pair of fold-out blasters, each with a fin shape on the top. These attach to the monster mode, but are real large and kind of awkward in the robot hands. The fold out parts are longer blaster barrels, apparently intended for the fourth weapon mode that each Seacon has, but the regular blaster modes of the handheld weapons look lame and stubby. The issue with the blasters, in general, across the set, is that they are just too large to look good as handheld weapons for the robots. And it’s an unwinnable situation for the figures: the blasters are as large as they are so that they complete the looks of the weapon modes for the five smaller Seacons. Too small, and the weapons wouldn’t work in weapon mode; too large, and they look clunky in individual robot mode. It really is a no-win, but it’s fine, more or less, the way it is. There is a picture online of Mentarazor wielding the blasters connected by their barrels as some kind of wicked-ass melee weapon, like a scythe or something, and it looks friggin’ AWESOME. (first thing I’m doing when I open the box with these figures in it post-move. Absolutely FIRST THING. –mr) The other accessories Mentarazor comes with – useable with the figure itself, but tons of stuff comes in the box – besides the pair of blasters is a small blade weapon that actually serves as the very tip of the manta ray tail, and isn’t easily wielded by the robot, and also doesn’t plug into the tail of the monster very securely. Mentarazor also comes with some melee weapons which combine into the Poseidon sword, a pair of scythes or tonfa blades and one of the Poseidon feet, which will serve as the weapon stand for the blaster mode, a callback to the G1 pieces which provided the same blaster mounting.

Monster mode requires some imagination, but is a technorganic manta ray, kind of half beast and half machine, more like a hovercraft-type vehicle or a submarine than anything animalistic. Mentarazor is the one member of the team that doesn’t have an alt mode that really invokes whatever type of sea life it’s supposed to be. While this doesn’t hurt Mentarazor on its own, it does cause it to look a bit odd amongst the others. It wouldn’t have been an issue at all if the rest of the team went with this kind of vehicle-evoking-beast aesthetic, or even perhaps a Cybertronian equivalent to the animal forms they’d later adopt, a la pre-Beast Wars type figures, but none of the rest of them do. It is a cool alt mode, regardless of what it actually “is,” working both as some kind of vehicle and a beast, each kinda equally requiring the same measure of imagination. The fan blades in the wings rotate, a nice detail, and the blasters attach to the tops of the wings, adding tail fins to the vehicle or dorsal fins to the animal.

Something that is kind of amazing, and will be mentioned with a few figures in the set, is how much work these toys do via leg transformation. Animal parts are stored away in the legs during time spent in robot mode, and the legs provide a whole lot of the shells of the beast modes. Mentarazor does perhaps the least amount of this work, but essentially folds the entirety of the robot mode into the legs in order to become the alt mode. This is a transformation that takes a few times to get used to, as the figures’ knees are attached to arms that fold inside the shell of the lower leg, and if things are not positioned correctly, the upper leg won’t collapse inside the lower leg enough, which leads to the rest of the figure not aligning correctly, and thus, being unable to correctly complete the transformation. This can be real, real frustrating the first time or two, until it is noticed, after which it is no big deal; but it is a step on all five of the smaller figures, so it is one that is better mastered quickly.

Mentarazor does have a pretty bland transformation, and a pretty meh alt mode, one that really does depend on how well the various plates and pegs line up. It’s one of those “good enough” kind of alt modes, and it’s plainness is mitigated by the notion that this figure is basically a warm up for the rest of the set, all of who will replicate certain steps of features of Mentarazor and will all be much more impressive than Mentarazor. The real stand-out moment of the alt mode is when you realize that the manta tail is made up of independent segments, allowing some posability, but also a pretty amazing step, both in terms of engineering and manufacturing, seeing as many official, mass-production Hasbro figures don’t even have this jointed of an appendage.  It’s something like this tail that makes you think that there’s a quality action figure experience coming from not only this entry, but the rest of the set as well. I fear this sounding overly dramatic, but this moveable tail is the kind of thing that makes you hold a $100 figure and think, “yeah, worth it.”

At this point, there is very little mystery in terms of whether or not one figure of a combiner team member portends the release of the rest of the team. By now, many 3Ps release images of renders or shadows of the entire team when announcing a new set, instead of the way things were in the infancy of the 3P combiner boom, where images of individual figures would surface, and then there’d be some level of uncertainty as to whether this would be a one-off or not. The Seacons never made much of a splash in official US Transformers fiction, and their real claim to notoriety, fiction-wise, is as an army of drones under the command of Turtler in Super God Master Force. (yes, the Underbase Saga in the comics. I didn’t forget. –mr) So there is something strange about the idea that someone might want only a third party, high quality Seawing for their collection, barring a personal affinity. But this is a good third party Seawing, and it functions excellently as a stand-alone figure. As far as I can tell, Poseidon is the first TFC Toys combiner to abandon the Energon-style peg and port system in favor of a new, square peg system, which makes the combiner ports on the limb figures far more inconspicuous than those of previous TFC combiner figures, as there’s just an open square under or near the robot head.

But, Mentarazor has the distinction of being the weakest of the Seacons. Usually, that would be followed up with a “not because of itself, but because of the rest of the team.” And while that is partly true, Mentarazor’s lack of team-compatible alt mode is a drawback with the rest of the team; not one that is a fatal flaw, but definitely one that makes him stick out from the rest of the group. The robot mode is totally awesome, but the alt mode sends a lot of mixed visual signals. But, if this is the starting point for the set, you just know some really tremendous stuff is coming for the rest of it.