Optimus Prime once just used to be one dude's name.  But then Rodimus Prime happened and then the franchise decided that there were a bunch of _____ Primes that came before Optimus, and that "Prime" was a title.  Thanks, Rodimus!  I'm not sure how facetious that thanks is.  Generally when the mythos is "grown" like that, it can be kinda irritatingly obtuse.  But I think I'm fine with it.  Usually.

It was decided in the Marvel comics, in the same brush stroke that decided that Prime was a title that we learned that the guy who came before Optimus Prime was called Sentinel Prime.  It was just a series of name drops, but there was a panel from the UK stories a while prior that showed a yellow and orange and red robot handing the Matrix to Optimus as the former was dying.  So that was probably Sentinel Prime.  Years later, the Dreamwave comics would show us Sentinel Prime's forearm as he died, defeated by Megatron.  It started to look like "we only get to see Sentinel Prime as he dies" was going to be a thing.  

As Animated, the IDW comics, the War for Cybertron video game, and then later the third live-action movie gave us Sentinel Primes, it became obvious that Sentinel Prime, as he was forced to have an actual characterization, had to live in contrast with Optimus Prime.  Optimus is the hero, and he kind of sucks up all the heroism in a room, and so Sentinel Prime became the jerk or the ineffectual leader or the secretly-kinda-genocidal-facist grandpa.  Y'know, pick something that Optimus does really well, make Sentinel the opposite of that, and demonstrate why Optimus needed to show up and replace him.

The Titans Return toyline, much to my inner 12-year-old's boggling, now has a sweet G1-style Sentinel Prime toy.  Despite having gone through so many iterations -- and despite obviously being Astrotrain painted to hopefully look like somebody else -- this toy still has a through-line to that first Marvel UK panel of the later-to-be-named Sentinel Prime.  He's still orange and yellow and red, though the ratio of orange to yellow's been flipped, and he still has those three rectangles on his lower ribcage.  That was one of the few bits of character design that managed to make it into the IDW reimagining of the original Sentinel Prime, those three rectangles.  Artist Alex Milne made them into a cockpit window split into three, and here on this new toy they're no longer a cockpit window, but that detail remains all the same.  The head (which now transforms into a tiny robot, Infinitus) harkens entirely to the IDW design, which covered up the mouth with an Optimus-esque mouthplate, albeit retractable.  The rest is, well, an orange and red and yellow Astrotrain.  

Despite essentially being a Voyager Class retry of the 2007 Deluxe Class Astrotrain, the larger toy feels less ambitious.  Its transformation, at its core, is pretty simple.  He's a robot, and then he pins his limbs together and he's a shuttle, and then he spreads out and he's an armored train.  There's some small panel flipping here and there to cover up what you don't want to see (along with covering up the entire torso in train mode with a giant pile of shuttle wrapped around it like foil on a potato), but it feel perfunctory.  

The packaging renders and early convention sample appearances led us to believe that his feet in robot mode are supposed to be train parts instead of the shuttle nose, but in practice this possibly not the best solution, as the instructions warn us to try the shuttle nose halves as feet instead.  Otherwise, the angle of the feet makes it rough to stand the robot on on uneven surfaces like carpeting, but the train feet are generally fine on a very flat surface.  I like trying to use those feet because they look "eviler."  Just lots of sharp angles.  The shuttle nose halves look like tap shoes, and as we all know tap shoes are benevolent.

As stated above, the head transforms into the tiny Infinitus.  I feel like his name and future Astrotrain's head partner, Darkmoon, were switched at some point.  Like, Sentinel Prime was in Dark of the Moon?  Doesn't "Darkmoon" make more sense for him?  And "Infinitus" could be a play on how Astrotrain is a space man, a la Buzz Lightyear with his infinity and beyond.  Anyway, Infinitus pops off the shoulders, becomes a dude, and is meant to pilot Sentinel Prime in vehicle modes.  He can do this either from the translucent orange cockpit on top of either vehicle or from the seat inside the wider of Sentinel Prime's two weapons.  Other Titans Return toys have a smattering of tiny pegs to apply your tiny head dudes to, but Sentinel seems completely devoid of them, unless I've missed one tucked away.  As such, he's missing a little play value.  I like sticking those little head dudes on the bigger dudes' shoulders and whatnot.  

Anyway, in the IDW comics, Sentinel Prime is gonna come back somehow and restore Cybertron to its former greatness probably.  They never should have let him host SNL.

Look, I'll tell you right up front, I'm not going to be objective here.  Powermaster Optimus Prime was my first Optimus Prime toy, which I received only after four solid childhood years of pining for any Optimus Prime toy at all.  I had an Ultra Magnus, and I immediately tried to color his white cab robot with red and blue markers.  (he turned out kinda pink and baby blue, because washable markers).  Whenever I had the chance to pick up a ne Transformer from the store, I would choose whatever red and blue one was immediately available as some sort of surrogate Optimus.  That's how I ended up with Crosshairs and Cloudburst.  My desire was strong.  And so when I tell you that my first Optimus Prime toy, the 1988 Powermaster version, was the greatest toy of all time, maybe take some of my mania and nigh-tangible desperation into consideration.

SO YEAH I'M PRETTY PUMPED ABOUT THIS NEW TITANS RETURN POWERMASTER OPTIMUS PRIME!

Sure, he's not an entirely new toy -- he's a heavy retool of last year's Combiner Wars Ultra Magnus, but hey guess what, I loved Combiner Wars Ultra Magnus, so at least I knew this toy was going to be at least that good going in.  Titans Return Powermaster Optimus Prime takes that Ultra Magnus toy and gives him a new semi cab, new arms, new shins, a new chestpiece, new shoulder cannons, and a new head.  Some of it functions/transforms the same, some of it doesn't.  For example, Ultra Magnus was a car carrier, so his trailer had a lot of open air spots so you could see the smaller cars you loaded on him.  Powermaster Optimus Prime has a box trailer, and so a lot of this toy's new tooling goes to creating the walls for the box that is his new trailer.  Ultra Magnus had extendo-arms, Powermaster Optimus Prime has fold-out panels under his new arms that form the roof of the trailer.  Instead of open air, there is now a series of trailer wall chunks that wrap around Optimus Prime's legs in robot mode.  And so on.

Unlike the original Powermaster Optimus Prime, the Titans Return version's cab doesn't transform into a smaller robot.  (Ultra Magnus's update didn't have that either, so no huge surprise.)  But, like the original, the new Powermaster Optimus Prime does have a third... base mode.  A third mode that is a base.  He's a triple changer and one of his transformation modes is a battlestation.  I'm trying to find a way to phrase this which doesn't imply he gets to touch your bathing suit area.  Let's start a new paragraph.

Powermaster Optimus Prime has a third base mode (DAMMIT) because Titans Return's deal is that everyone has a little head that can pop off and become a guy and live in the base modes of the Leader Class guys (like Optimus) or become the drivers of the Deluxe/Voyager Class guys and the much smaller Titan Master vehicles.  SPOILERS: Ultra Magnus didn't have a base mode, and so when they retoold Magnus into Optimus, the result is that Optimus Prime's base mode isn't terribly great!  He unfolds a little, pops a squat, and then the ramps you create out of his legs run right into his arms.  At least when transformed properly.  If you splay him out more, you can make those ramps run down onto whatever surface he's sitting on.  Eventually, if you have other Titans Return base mode guys (like Blaster and Soundwave and FORTRESS FRIGGIN' MAXIMUS) the ends of the ramps all connect and create a larger base.  

Likewise, Optimus Prime is covered with wee tiny bitty pegs that you can attach the little Titan Master head dudes to when they're dudes and not heads.  There's also seats and stuff, like inside Optimus Prime's new shoulder cannons.  (Optimus keeps the handheld rifles that Magnus had, the ones that combined into the staff of Magnus's hammer, but the parts that form the head of the hammer have been replaced by the new shoulder cannons.)  

Since Optimus Prime is one of the bigger Titans Return figures, he doesn't have just the normal Little Head Guy interaction as the smaller guys.  To make his combination more proportional, there's this whole helmet contraption that fits over the entire little head to make his head bigger.  If you flip up the helmet, he's got a tiny Optimus-like head with a mouth.  The helmet of this tiny head is designed after the original Powermaster Optimus Prime cab robot's head, which is a nice callback.  The tiny head transforms into the robot mode design of the original Powermaster little engine partner guy, Hi-Q, but he's called "Apex" now and his colors are kinda off.   During transformation to vehicle mode, the helmet flips down into the semi truck cab and becomes a seat which the tiny head Titan Master robot can sit in.

Anyway, I love this guy.  He's a great robot, a pretty good truck, a transformation I already really liked with some more complexity added, but with an admittedly terrible base mode.  Seriously, the ramps he has run right back into his own walls.  But, eh, let's face it, he's spending most of his time in robot mode anyway.  

Oh, and Japan is gonna heavily retool this guy AGAIN to make him look even more G1y, and I'm gonna buy the hell out of that one, too.  Just so you know.

I have a sickness.

It's Grabuge!  Yep, that's his name.  That's his name because Grabuge's American name, "Ruckus," wasn't an available trademark, so Fun Publications went for his ... French-Canadian name?  Sure.  Why not.  Grabuuuuuuuuuuuge.

Out of most of this series of Subscription Service guys, Gra-- RUCKUS is the one I am most grateful for.  You see, he was the original intent for the toy.  When Hasbro was figuring out Menasor and realizing that Wildrider was a trademark they weren't likely to get back soon, there was apparently a time window when they sculpted the guy to look like Ruckus, the 1988 Triggercon.  Which is, frankly, amazing.  Too amazing, apparently, since they either realized "oh shit this guy's name ain't available either" or "oh shit Menasor can't have a beige leg" and decoed the toy to look sorta like Wildrider and gave him the name "Offroad" and decided he was a new guy.  

BUT WHO WILL GIVE US THIS TOY AS RUCKUS???

Fun Publications will! 

(note: there were some people who were upset that if FP were gonna make a Ruckus, that they'd use this mold instead of, like, Swindle, and no amount of "BUT THIS SCULPT IS RUCKUS THAT IS THE ENTIRE POINT" would deter them from their folly)

Like a lot of this series of Subscription figures so far, Ruckus is...............80% paint?  For seriously, you see that beige crotchpiece and the beige torso midsection/combiner peg and the beige elbow/shoulder jointage?  Everything else is purple plastic!  The rest of his torso, painted.  The doors on his shoulders, painted.  The inside of the truck hood on his back behind his head, painted.  Yes, that's painted.  It's purple plastic under there.  Boggles the mind.  The entire roof of the car and bed of the truck, painted.  All the teal, painted.  There is a friggin' lot of paint here.

It makes me wonder what Hasbro's version of the deco would have looked like.  It would have used a tenth of the paint, that's for sure, and wouldn't have been such a slavish replication of the original toy's deco.  It would have had to adhere more to the plastic breakdowns of the toy, deco-wise, and probably very loosely interpret the original's color arrangements.  Sometimes I lie awake at night and ponder these things.

Because I have insomnia.

Transformers Asia Kids Day Platinum Edition Robots in Disguise Premium Grimlock and Bumblebee 2-Pack – Exclusive

You probably haven't seen me talk about many Robots in Disguise toys here, and for a pretty good reason -- I don't really buy many!   I mean, the cartoon's okay, and the toys look okay, but early on, before the toyline hit, it became apparent that I would be more frustrated with the toyline than I would find enjoyment out of it, due to my particular eccentricities.  

You see, it was going to be a pretty small line, as far as "real" toys go (the non one-step or two-step guys), and they were all going to be Deluxe Class-sized.  So I'm sitting there, looking at this coming line-up, realizing that if I was going to start collecting these guys, I was going to have to get used to having a Grimlock (who is very large in the cartoon) who was the same size as every other toy.  And that chafed my bum, I realized I could save myself a lot of storage space and money, and decided that I was cool skipping on it all.  I mean, minus Strongarm, of course, OBVIOUSLY.  Strongarm is great.

But at some point last year, Japan's version of the toyline decided to go balls-out and make everyone a properly-transforming larger Grimlock that's not a one- or two-step toy.   They grabbed Fall of Cybertron Grimlock (who may or may not be the same character depending on who you ask and how you look at things) and then retooled the crap out of it.  New torsos, new robot legs, new shoulders, new fists, new heads -- there was a lot of new stuff to make him look like Robots in Disguise Grimlock instead of "basically G1-style Grimlock" -- and kazam you have a Grimlock who technically solves my Grimlock Problem or, perhaps, my RID collection problem.  

And then Hasbro brought him over, put him in a Platinum Edition set with a redecoed RID Bumblebee, and now Entertainment Earth has him as an exclusive in the United States.  Entertainment Earth also sent me these two to review!  So here I go.

Let's talk about Bumblebee.  If you have a Transformers Prime Vehicon toy (from the RID subline, not the First Edition) then this Bumblebee's going to feel very similar as far as transformation processes go.  The roof folds up on the back of the robot legs, the arms pull out from the sides, and the rear bumper hangs off the back of the head.  There's a sword that stores underneath the car mode.  I got one the regular retail version in the take-home bag for Toy Fair 2015, but this is the PREMIUM EDITION!  Mostly that means he's in a more metallic gold-ish color instead of canary yellow and he has a handful of new paint operations.  There's black on his feet, there's red on his headlights, there's some silver on his sword... it's not a lot added here.  But he's not really the main attraction; Grimlock is.

Fall of Cybertron Grimlock was not a well-received toy, and the retooling present in this version sort of addresses the perceived problems.  His dino hips/robot shoulders accordion out during transformation, and it's incredibly easy to get them so untransformed that you can't remember how to inch them back turn by turn into the way they're supposed to go.  It's one of those things where you wish you could leave a trail of breadcrumbs for yourself to find your way back home, but this is a plastic robot toy's shoulder apparatus, so that's not really possible.  However, the retooling done to make Grimlock into another Grimlock removes the need to untransform the shoulders so much to get him back and forth between robot and dinosaur modes.  All the possibility for over-accordioning his shoulders is there, but so long as you temper yourself, you can probably avoid getting lost in the woods.  

The other thing people didn't like about the toy was how empty he is if you look at him from the bottom in dinosaur mode.  You know that scene in Pete's Dragon where they put a big sheet over the dragon and he runs around and you can see a dragon-shaped sheet and there's nothing underneath it?  No, you don't know that scene, because I'm really old and nobody has watched Pete's Dragon in thirty years.  But the toy is kind of like that, trust me. 

Honestly, that part I don't mind too much.  Like, I'm not gonna be shoving my eyeballs in this toy's underside anyway.  He's gonna stand upright on the shelf, not hanging around lying around on his back, exposing how little robot he has under there.  If you have a bunch of RID Mini-Cons, though, this problem is partly addressed.  There's ports tooled in there for you to fill him up with specific Mini-Cons.  I don't know what they are because, again, I haven't collected much RID.  But it's nice that you can do this if you have the toys available to you.  

The original FOC Grimlock also had electronic lights for when you open up his jaw with a lever behind his head.  This RID retooling has neither the electronics nor the lever to open his jaw, which is sad.  The new dinosaur head does have an opening jaw, however, with both the top of the skull rising a little and the jaw itself hinging down more.  You have to -- gasp -- use your finger, though.

Grimlock still comes with Grimlock's sword and shield.  They don't suit this version of the character very well, but you can pretty easily forget you own them.  I'm sure some other toy could borrow 'em.  

Unlike Platinum Bumblebee's seemingly scant bit of paint, Platinum Grimlock feels covered with it.  Lots of details here and there, from silver and green and charcoal to yellow.  That and the retooling is where all the money went, and it's all very pleasing.  He doesn't look unfinished, and I don't think I see any deco that my mind thinks is missing.  

If Platinum Edition Grimlock/Bumblebee pleases your noodle, you can find him on Entertainment Earth's website for sale!  

Hey, you guys!  Entertainment Earth has a fancy new exclusive toy set!  It’s one of those Platinum dealies where you get all the paint and whatnot, so if you saw Deluxe Bumblebee in stores last year and were like, okay, but what if this thing were painted, or if you saw Deluxe Grimlock and were like, okay, but what if this were scaled to Bumblebee correctly – these are your guys.

I will have one soon!  And I will talk about it too much then, I’m pretty sure.  You know how I am.

Yay, it's (Universe) Ramjet!  The original Universe Ramjet was some sure-whatever store exclusive redeco of Armada Skywarp, who would be otherwise entirely foregettable if he hadn't been used in very early Fun Publications fiction as a cosmic-level jackass.  Ramjet had been caught between dimensions too many times, and so his body was in a constant state of making and unmaking that resulted in him looking like he was bathed in Kirby Krackles while melting randomly and growing tendrils.  The original toy did not look like this.  He was just an unremarkable white/red/blue redeco of another toy, as I said above.

And so I grabbed a grill lighter and melted mine a bunch and then put some splashes of purple on him.  That's exactly the kind of embarrassing nerd I am.  A toy-ruiner.

Anyway, at the end of that storyline, he got thrown back into the space between dimensions and wasn't heard from again... until now!  When he has a new toy!  Weird how that works out!  Ramjet's back, from outer space, and I guess he's not structurally bonkers anymore.  Which is fine.  I don't need to take another grill lighter to another toy.

The new Ramjet is a retool of the new Armada Starscream toy (the one I really like), now retooled to have a head that looks like the Skywarp version of that toy.  (A Skywarp version of this Ramjet tooling will be sold later this year.)  Neato New Retooled Ramjet doesn't have all the retoolings that the original version did -- there's no VTOLs on his tailfins, nor are his nosecone wings trimmed.  But it still works.  

It's neat how the new finned head works with the toy.  The original head pushed straight down during transformation, but the remake folded the head face-down 90 degrees.  There's no room for a fin at the top of the head if you do that!  .... unless you make sure the neck balljoint is at the back of the helmet, allowing the headfin to still point up even as you push it down and forward.

New Ramjet is a sharp-looking toy, though packaging problems have kinda messed with many folks'.  The top layer of packaging foam was left out, and so many people's Ramjets had paint scratches across the tops of theirs as it arrived.  Mine was relatively lucky -- there's just a chip of blue gone at the top of one of the shoulder intakes.  If you look for this guy on the second market, make sure there's good pictures of him.

Or don't.  Having an awful finish is kind of his original motif.  
 

Man, this last bout of new toys sure are just better-decoed versions of stuff I have.  Well, whatever, have a G1 guy instead of a BW guy this time, for variety!

Japan is probably not too big on Skids.  He, like, showed up barely in two episodes of the original cartoon, with a line of dialogue each (performed by a different voice actor for each appearance in both English and Japanese), and Japan didn't get the Marvel comics where he had a spotlight issue and several other appearances.  His toy wasn't released normally over there, as it was available not separately, but only in a boxset with Sunstreaker and Buzzsaw.  And so it's not surprising that it took so long for TakaraTomy to put out their own version of our Generations Skids.  

It IS kind of surprising that it's such a perfect deco replica of his appearance in IDW's More Than Meets The Eye comic book series.  Like, I'm not sure that's released properly over there.  I think you hafta get it on iTunes or something.  I mean, there seems to be a small fanbase in Japan for it, but I don't think that's a widespread thing.  Honestly, I don't really know.  My knowledge here is spotty.  If someone wants to fill me in on Japan's relationship with IDW Transformers comics, that'd be neato.

But, yeah, instead of trying to deco Skids hardcore like the cartoon, they made sure to MTMTE him up, including painting pink stripes across his hood despite there not being any sculpting there to suggest a need for that.  Nope, he gets those stripes (and basically everything else) off his color model for an American comic. 

And so, obviously, I had to get him.  I mean, I'd put Reprolabels on my domestic Skids to get those necessary stripes and other details on there (as you can see in the photos -- that toy ain't stock), but this TakaraTomy version is so much more comprehensive in replicating the MTMTE color model than the domestic version + stickers.  He's got the black toes and the silver ankles and the red hands and tummy, and I adore the use of pink for the stripes, as well.

Addendum: After taking a photo of the new toy next to the old one with the stickers, I tried to remove the stickers to get a more fair visual assessment of the two toys unaltered.  BAD IDEA.  Those Reprolabels are not meant to come off.  You leave a lot of silver chrome behind, and I'll probably hafta get some serious Goo-Be-Gone to remove it, if I decide to at some point.  You can get the American toy carded on eBay for like $8, so I'm not sure it's worth selling the thing once I subtract the cost of the Goo-Be-Gone.  If it even works.  Meh!

Here is another post in our series of "i bought another beast wars toy because it was painted a little better than the beast wars toy i already have."  Today's subject: LG-EX Waspinator!

Like TakaraTomy's Generations Rhinox, so too was their Waspinator heavily metallic.  This didn't look nearly as weird on him, since wasps are all chitinous (I looked that up, thank you) and less leathery than rhinos.  But it meant his yellows were gold, and so even though it painted his face a little better than the domestic Waspinator, I passed.  I did reconsider a few times, but that version of Waspy's pretty popular and so he's hard to find on the secondary market.  ... thankfully, because then this version was announced.

Bye-bye, gold!  Hello, more-accurate yellow.  And, important to me, they've finally painted the bee stripes on his robot head antenna.  They don't tend to do that!  Probably because that's a hella lotta paint operations.  I mean that's... *counts* 12.  Twelve paint operations spent on 1% of his overall surface area.  If you've got a paint budget, you're not gonna blow it all on danged antenna.  But dammit, it's appreciated.  Thank you, limited-release convention exclusive!

My to-be-imminently-replaced domestic Waspinator has more differences to catalog, versus his replacement.  I love the darker green around his eyes.  I love the brown tusks on his cheeks.  I love his mouth having yellow in it.  

I do like the darker green replacing the lighter lime green plastic on his body.  It makes him a more uniform color, but the additional yellow paint operations balance that out, plus it calls attention away from how made-of-robot-parts his wasp mode is.  His thorax is now a homogeneous patch of dark green at a quick glance, rather than a jumble of green with some lime green biceps and fists thrown in there.  

I do kinda miss the Predacon symbol that was on the domestic version's beast mode.  Ah well.

Briefly, foolishly, I give my brain the luxury of believing that, yes, this is it, this is the best Waspinator, I don't need another ever again unless it's like a Combiner Limb or something.  And then I remember that, oops, oh, right, they've just started making Masterpiece Beast Wars toys.  In a year or several, we might have a Masterpiece Waspinator.  And once again, what was once sufficient will then be insufficient.  

But that's probably not for a while.  I can enjoy this one until then.

ADDENDUM: There is also a redecoed Rattrap from this set, but I didn't bother getting him.  Either he wasn't different enough or my current Rattrap is fine or any combination of the two.

I drew a Shortpacked! strip nine years ago about the arms race of more accurate Beast Wars Dinobot toys, wherein we're presented a toy, it's not painted so accurately for whatever reason, and then Hasbro and Takara go back and forth on the toy, with each subsequent release being a little more accurate but not ALL the way more accurate, and over the course of a decade or two get you to buy slightly better and better Dinobots.  It's a pretty good racket they have going!

COMPLETELY UNRELATED here is LG-EX Rhinox.  He's like the Hasbro Generations Rhinox I already had, but now he's brown instead of tan!  The tan was more accurate to the original Beast Wars toy, but less accurate to the television animation.  TakaraTomy's first attempt at this mold, released under their Legends toyline, had similar colors to this new LG-EX Rhinox, but the line-wide visual gimmick at the time was "make everything metallic."  That's probably more okay if your toy's, like, a car, but Rhinox is 80% rhinoceros hide.  And so he was this awful-looking metallic brown rhinoceros, despite otherwise being more accurate colors to the animation.  I skipped that specific release of that toy, preferring having the rhino hide parts be matte plastic rather than him looking to be made out of aluminum foil.

Well, good, because a toy convention over on that side of the world decided that they were going to give Rhinox (and Waspinator and Rattrap) another go, this time without the mindboggling metallic plastic.  So, like, problem solved.  Matte brown plastic!  Perfecto.  This time Rhinox even has his gums painted inside his rhino mouth, which is a nice (and show-accurate) touch.  Great work!  Thanks toy convention!

Other than the brown, the most obvious change is to the dual Chainguns O' Doom, which feature actual paint, rather than being solid unpainted plastic.  Rhinox is no longer trying to stop you with a pair of oatmeal cookies.  Also his hip joints are a little tighter, which solves another problem.  LG-EX Rhinox is less likely to faceplant.

Anyway, time to get rid of this older, tanner Rhinox before I end up with a Rhinox collection like I do my mountainpile of Dinobots.  

(note: my smaller, legends class groove has reprolabels stickers on it, so that's why mine has some extra detailing that yours might not have)

Last year, Hasbro had a "May Madness" where online retailers briefly carried Combiner Wars versions of Wildrider and Slingshot, who had been replaced by other, more interesting guys at retail.  Well, it's May Madness again!  Have some Deluxe Class Groove, who had been replaced by another, more interesting guy at retail.

I mean, the Deluxe Class-sized Groove that TakaraTomy made for their version of Defensor isn't bad or terrible, by Combiner Wars standards.  It feels and operates like all the other Combiner Wars Deluxe Class guys.  The same basic transformation steps and everything.  But, like, he replaced Rook, who is easily the best Deluxe Class guy in the whole Combiner Wars line.  He's got Hulk Hands, yo.  Hulk Hands.  And it's not like his presence removes Groove from the combined Protectobot form of Defensor, 'cuz there's a Legends Class Groove who becomes the chestpiece thing.  Groove can still hang out.  So, yeah, I feel like Hasbro made the right move, giving us both Rook *and* Groove.  

There are things to like about Deluxe Groove, though.  He has translucent plastic!  None of the other guys have a sprue set aside for translucent plastic.  So that's nice-looking.  And he has two handguns with little siren flasher things on them, again using this translucent plastic.  Guns with little flashers on them is a neat idea.  Maybe not the best idea for a character who's a pacifist, but whatcha gonna do.  It's weird that the pacifist is the one Combiner Wars guy who comes with more guns than he can hold.  (other than the double targetmaster club subscription guys)

But, like, man, that motorcycle mode of his.  Not good!  I mean, you have to remember that a bunch of the jets are mostly robot parts with some jet parts stapled on top, but Deluxe Groove's motorcycle mode still feels lacking.  His arms just ... sort of go there.  And the whole thing isn't terribly motorcycle-shaped, either.  It's just a long box with some motorcycle details sketched in.   Being able to cover up a small portion of this mode by pegging in his two new guns shouldn't be such a relief.   (Also, they're positioned so that if they fired, they'd blast his own hands off.)  

Anyway, this toy exists probably to vindicate the smaller Groove that mass retail got.  Oh, and to be retooled into Afterburner later on.  And sadly, probably never into Sideways.