I very very very very very rarely buy non-Hasbro/Takara transforming robots.  As such, I am kind of... entrenched, I think the best might be, in certain expectations.  And I don't even know what those expectations are, really, since I so incredibly seldomly travel outside that box.  There might be all sorts of things, small things, that I take for granted.  Again, what are these things that I take for granted?  I don't know!  It is a strange world out there outside of my little world of robots from only one property.  It's like traveling to Canada.  Generally, our civilizations kinda work 99.999% the same, but there's always a surprise at what little stuff is different.  Like, their Taco Bells have fries, man.  Fries.

Anyway, this is Eagle Robo from Machine Robo, or as most folks here would know him better, Leader-1 from Go-Bots.  I may SHOCK you by revealing that Japan didn't get "Challenge of the Gobots."  They got Machine Robo: Revenge of Cronos instead, a 47-episode anime series with anime peoples and anime robots and whatnot.  There's no Guardians, no Renegades, just a buncha humans and robots fighting bad guys.  And everyone looks like their toys, because why wouldn't they?  "Leader-1" doesn't have a face with a mouth, "Cy-Kill" doesn't have a five-o'clock shadow, and they're actually both good guy robot mech folks.  You know how in all the Pre-Transformers stuff, all of the toys were good guys, even "Megatron" and "Soundwave"?  Same approach here.

There's now some new toys based on this old anime, and I thought, sure, I wouldn't mind having a modern-technology Leader-1-ish guy, and so now I have an Eagle Robo.  Size-wise relative to Transformers, he's essentially a large Deluxe Class toy.  He's got some die-cast parts.  And how intricate he is varies very wildly, depending on what part of him we're talking about.  

He transforms very similarly to how the original Leader-1 did it: Back 2/3 of the jet pulls down for legs, arms pull out from the sides, nosecone folks onto the back.  However, Eagle Robo tries to make this a little more complicated, but not all over.  The legs?  Still giant chunks you easily pull down from 2/3 of the jet, easy-peasy.  Nosecone folks back easy, too.  But, damn, this torso.  Someone spent a long time designing that part of the toy, and they had quite a few clever ideas, but it's all very small panels and flipping and flopping and cramming and it's definitely not very fun.  It pegs very nicely into place in either mode, but that middle part of the journey is not particularly rewarding.  

The result of your work is a great-looking jet, though.  A great-looking jet with Leader-1 chest vents piggy-backing on the middle of the jet's back, but a great-looking jet nonetheless.  There's not a lot of undercarriage junk, if any.  The bottom is a series of folded robot panels, sure, but they're flat folded robot panels that tuck up into the jet itself.  The jet has a narrow profile, as a jet should.  

The robot's weapon separates into missiles and... extra wing chunks?  Sure.  But they have a place to go, which is good.

The robot is less exciting.  The arms' jointing is kind of awkward, and the knees are so tight it's hard to bend them without getting lots of leverage.  There's less range of movement than one'd like from a product like this.

Frankly, the part that might excite me the most is the modular display stand that Eagle Robo and apparently everyone else in the line comes with.  You can assemble the display stand parts in countless ways, and the extendo arm that holds the figure over the ground is strongly ratcheted so you don't have to worry about the arm collapsing under any weight.  Which is good, because of the die-cast.  The more Machine Robo guys you get, the bigger and more intricate display stand you can build, in theory, since the parts are all modular.  But I only have the one right now.  Very unfortunately, the pegs are too large to be compatible with the toy-stand pegholes appearing on Transformers these days.

Eagle Robo, to me, exists in some strange Transformer uncanny valley.  There are many of the same principles that govern Transformers toys, but there's just enough that's off that I feel a little detached and wary as I go through its motions.  Not the toy's fault, obviously, but that feeling is there.  The choice of what kind of joints and where to use them, the structure of the toy itself, the general aesthetic... so much is close to familiarity, but just shy of it.  And you never know what the tolerance for roughhousing is on a toy that is 100% for collectors and doesn't have to withstand any child playtesting.  Am I going to break this if I force it? is a question you have to keep yourself guarded with.  Things did come off as I've tried to transform Eagle Robo, usually  the head and nosecone, but thankfully not in a way that they couldn't go back on.  Phew.

there, see, i tried something different, MOM

While I enjoyed the absurdity of Combiner Wars Cyclonus being a combiner torso for a giant Galvatron robot, there were a few things I disliked about the execution.  He was made by heavily resculpting Silverbolt, meaning the toy works from a foundation of a pretty stiff-looking robot.  Additionally, his reddish-purple -- nay, magenta -- color turned me off a little.  But he was rightfully huge enough to be Cyclonus, particularly for my More Than Meets The Eye shelf, and so I ignored these perceived flaws.

Unite Warriors Cyclonus fixes one of these problems!  TakaraTomy's extravagant redeco of that toy tosses out the magenta and returns to a more desaturated yet metallic lavender.  Indeed, TakaraTomy does their best to duplicate the colors Cyclonus has in the cartoon, and so their Cyclonus has a buttload of paint.  What's not paint is sparkly-fleck metallic plastic, and so he's kind of surprisingly pretty.  He's not exactly More Than Meets The Eye colors, but this is closer in many more ways than it departs.  

And what was already a great spaceship mode is moreso now, thanks to the hue shift and extra paint detail.  You wanna fly him around and make wooosh noises rather than use him to calibrate your CGA monitor.

The deco on the parts of Cyclonus that become the combiner Galvatron super robot guy is interesting to me as well, but I'll save talk of that for a later blogpost.  

Today is yesterday was May 15!  That's the street date for Victorion, sorta.  I mean, a lotta online retailers were allowed by Hasbro to start sell their Victorion stock, like Big Bad Toy Store and Entertainment Earth and TFSource and other places, but I got mine off eBay a few weeks ago from a seller who jumped the gun, and Amazon.com seems to have yet put up theirs properly.  I mean, you can still buy it from Amazon.com from various sellers, but there's no proper "actual $99.99 suggested retail price from Hasbro-the-seller" option yet like there was G2 Superion.  But, y'know, she's out there.

And she's damn pretty!  I mean, she's not AS pretty as she would be if they'd kept the bright teal, but the red and sea-green is still fantastic.  As I've said, Combiner Wars has been pretty heavy on the white-with-red, so something that's solid red-and-green is a breath of fresh air.  Victorion is like the similarly red-and-teal Perceptor, if Perceptor were a big combiner lady made out of six smaller ladies.  

Since Victorion was created to be sold as a boxset, Hasbro's done away with the hand-foot-gun weapons and tooled her some individualized parts.  She has new giant feet parts with ratcheted ankles so she can stand with her feet at a splayed angle.  She also has new not-so-giant hands which have articulated fingers at the knuckle.  (same as the standard Combiner Wars hands, weapons peg through a stigmaga-hole on her wrist)  These weapons do stow when not in Victorion mode!  The feet are supposed to peg into Pyra Magna's ladder assembly, and the fists are supposed to slot into the feet.  There are little grooves on the feet that are super easy to miss, and I had trouble finding them even after being told they were there.  But they keep the fists snug in place, so they do their job.

You could also give the fists to somebody else, like Rust Dust the motorcycle girl who I haven't really reviewed individually since she has no retoolings unlike everyone else in the set.  But once she is granted Victorion's fists, she becomes... The Tickler!

Also, all the individual components' weapons combine into a giant, very ornate sword.  These parts are also new!

And, of course, the head is new.  It's very tall, very detailed, and very meticulously painted.  I like it.

Since the limbs are interchangeable, there are multiple ways of going about doing it.  You can have the helicopters as arms and the cars as legs, or vice versa.  You could also make her not symmetrical, I GUESS, but why???  Personally, I prefer using the helicopters as arms and the cars as legs.  Since the new hands are so much smaller, they kinda look a little ridiculous attached to the ends of the cars-as-arms.  Like she's wearing giant, flowing sleeves.  Plus, with cars as legs, it means she can do tough stompin'.  

She's pretty amazing.  I recommend her.  

Needlenose showed up in mailboxes two weeks ago, and we're starting to get the second Figure Subscription Guy in mailboxes today, so I figure that means he's free game to talk about now.  (The order of delivery is supposed to be kept hush so to allow folks a small surprise when theirs arrives.)  

Anyway, Needlenose (and all the other guys in his "wave" of subscription service guys) was created out of one of my wet dreams, I'm pretty sure.  A buncha 1988 Decepticons who combine into a larger robot?  Heck yeah.  It's weird that Fun Publications keeps on making these toys that are clearly just for me, given how prone I am to talking shit about them.  I'm starting to think all my actions are consequence-free!  What an awful thing to learn.

Needlenose is a straight redeco of Combiner Wars Firefly.  (well not THAT straight, 'cuz Needlenose has a husband)  It's a redeco that works pretty damn well, probably because of how distinctive Needlenose's color scheme is.  If you have a gray jet guy with a yellow face and lavender arms, you've probably got a dead ringer for Needlenose.  

Nearly the whole toy is gray plastic.  Only one sprue is not gray plastic, and that's where he gets his blue elbows, knees, and crotch from.  Everything else is gray plastic painted over.  The blue nosecone?  Paint!  The blue legs?  Paint!  The entirely lavender arms?  Paint!  This is some strong dedication to making Needlenose look as much like his original toy as possible.  Plus the green stripes?  Metallic.  It's pretty.

Needlenose was a Double Targetmaster, and so he comes with redecoes of Generations Scoop's Double Targetmaster guys.  I understand why this is so, and I suppose it would be worse if they weren't included here, but... man, I hate this tooling with a passion, whether it be with Scoop or Adventure Roadblock or the BotCon 2015 versions.  Why?  The plastic tolerances are always such that the 5mm peg piece is 300% more likely to pop out of joint than fit into anybody's fisthole.  It is an extreme annoyance.  

And good news, we're getting these guys again with Spinister in some number of weeks!

grmghgrmgl

The inclusion of these guys also means he's got twice as many weapons as he has hands.  The toy already comes with two weapons -- the Fist/Foot dealie for combined mode and the smaller weapon -- and now there's these two other guys.  The two guys can combine into a single weapon, but he's still packing way more heat than is convenient.  

I shouldn't spend so much time talking about my hatred for the Double Targetmaster dudes.  I do really like this toy.

We found out that Victorion was gonna have a pair of twin sisters in its roster not too long after we found out OUR kids were gonna be twins.  And so I have a special place in my heart for them.

There was a lotta bellyaching about there being two reuses of the Alpha Bravo helicopter mode in this set, generally the the tune of "how is hasbro so stupid to use this mold twice," but, like, that's what people voted for. Clearly the helicopter was desired a bunch, since it won the vote on two of the limb's respective polls.  I'm cool with it, even beyond the YAY TWINS! aspect, because the helicopter's one of the better toys in the Combiner Wars moldset.  Probably why it got a lot of votes.

The helicopter twins are Stormclash and Skyburst.  Stormclash is the one with the shades or goggles or whatever you want to call them.  The one with the nonseparated eyes.  That's one of the nice things about this set is the face diversity.  Some have goggles, some have masks, it's nice.  We don't get a lotta girl Transformers with goggles or masks.  

Beyond the different heads, the two have a mirrored sculpt and deco.  They're kinda like Tomax and Xamot that way.  (they also finish each other's sentences)  One has a patch of red on one side and the other has a patch of red on the other side, and so on.  Like the cars and Pyra Magna, both have new forearms and chestpieces, the latter of which is where the mirrored sculpt is actualized. 

They both have big feather-like swords that become the two halves of the combined weapon's blade.  

One downside is that since the Hand/Foot/Guns are not included in Victorion, as she has newly tooled hands feet, and weaponry, the helicopter twins in helicopter mode don't have any landing gear.  I mean, I guess they don't have any landing gear regardless, since an HFG isn't a landing gear, but I was kind of using them as that with my other versions of the mold.  Without them, they kinda just lay there on the ground, like a flopping fish on land.  Oh well.

Short break from the Victorion folks because I have an embarrassment of Combiny Guy riches and I wanna skip around a bit.  So here's "Wandering Roller"!

TakaraTomy didn't release the new Protectobot, Rook, with their Defensor box set 'cuz they wanted to make a new Groove leg for their market.  Which is pretty sad for Japan, because Rook is one of the best Combiner Wars guys.  Well, that absence is fixed now, I guess!  TakaraTomy was like, okay, so there's all this extra tooling we haven't used yet because it wasn't G1 enough, so we gotta find a way to repurpose it all into a single combiner team guy we can sell.  Waste not, want not, and all that.  Using all the parts of the Combiner Wars buffalo.  

So TakaraTomy grabbed our Cyclonus/Galvatron torso dude and decided, hey, this guy is nabbing dudes from across all the various Transformers timelines to be his limbs.  Which is a solid idea, A+, much approve.  And one of these guys is our Rook mold as IDW Publishing's Roller.  Now, Rook's sculpt actually doesn't really look much like IDW Roller, who is a distinct entity from that little nontransforming Roller guy that Optimus Prime keeps in his trailer, but Rook does transform into a six-wheeled armored vehicle like that nontransforming Roller guy, so I think that's where that connection was made.  In IDW, nontransforming trailer-pet Roller was named in honor of character Roller after the latter went missing.  (Hence the name, "Wandering Roller.")

Out of all the other limbs in this set, I'm talking about Roller first because he's got such an interesting conglomeration of colors.  He's mostly silver in vehicle mode, which makes sense if he's supposed to be emulating the other Roller's vehicle mode, but in addition to that silver, in robot mode is added a rich dark brown, some striking Chef Boyardeeish orange, some metallic blue, and some dark forest green.  That mix of silver, brown, orange, blue, and green is not really a mix you see on many Transformers, if on any other Transformers, and it's a welcome diversion from the sea of white and red that most of Combiner Wars/Unite Warriors has been.  I heart it.

I'm not really sure where the green comes?  IDW Roller has all those colors except the green.  In fact, it should be more of the teal if it were being accurate to IDW Roller's design.  It's kind of odd.  I mean, I'm not saying not to use the green, since I like how it looks, I just wonder what its inspiration is.

Sadly, Wandering Roller does not come with any Kremzeek juiceboxes.

Here's some car ladies!

Back when we were doing all our online voting to determine Victorion's attributes, I guess folks voted for cars!  So here's two cars, one made from each of the Combiner Wars car toolings.  But, you know, with retoolings.

Jumpstream is the one with a face!  She was originally Breakdown/Sunstreaker/etc, but now she has a new head, a new chest/tummy, and new forearms.  Oh, and she comes with that new shield, too, which attaches with the rest of everybody's new accessories to form a new giant sword.  Jumpstream is here to be the cute one, I guess.  Look at those large, wide-set eyes.  

Dustup is the one with a ninja mask!  She was originally Dead End/Streetwise/etc, but now she also has a new head, a new chest, and new hands.  Apparently the new tooling budget thought it was very important that everyone have smaller, thinner hands.  Dustup comes with a... blade weapon thingy, like maybe what the Klingon use?  Don't look at me, I get all my Star Trek information second- or third-hand.  That thingermabobber also helps form the giant Victorion sword.  Take a look at that vehicle mode of hers (the one without the spoiler) -- all that red?  That's paint.  Dustup's got a shitload of paint.  

(okay fine the tall, thin strip of unpaintable nylon plastic down the middle of the doors isn't paint)

Jumpstream's red in vehicle mode is also all paint, but hers is a less impressive amount.

I like these two well enough, but Pyra Magna is a tough act to follow.

Is this... is this the first Voyager Class-sized lady Transformer since TM2 Arcee in 2001?  I must be forgetting somebody, right?  Being a dad uses up a lot of your braincells.  

Anyway, I got Victorion (early) (from an eBay seller) and I was originally gonna just talk about them all in one go, but I realy like Pyra Magna and so I'll talk just about her, why not.  

It shouldn't be too surprising that I find her to be the stand-out among the set, 'cuz the base Hot Spot mold she was retooled from is pretty swell.  Hot Spot's OTHER retool, Onslaught, is a little better than Hot Spot, and Pyra Magna steals from one of his helpful retools, the heels in the back of the feet which aid stability.  (Not, like, high heels, but just long-ass rods that jut out from the back of the foot.) 

But because Pyra Magna is mostly Hot Spot, that means she's large and awesome and can do all sorts of crazy poses.  She comes with an axe (made out of two of the parts that become the combined robot form's sword) and that kind of helps you want to pose her doing more things, like swinging and double-handed holding and whatnot, which is kind of a bonus over the original tooling's guns.  

New parts include new forearms and hands, a new head, a new chestplate, new combiner mode chest parts that also feature in vehicle mode, and of course the new combiner mode's head.  Between all those and the new red and sea-green color scheme, she looks like her own bot.  

Tell you what, I miss that teal that the sea-green was back in early production.  Every toy should have teal.  And orange.  Every toy should be teal and orange.  And this toy was like halfway there, but then they decided teal and red were too bright together and took away my teal.  They should have desaturated the red if they had to neuter one of the colors!  Teal is the best.  I was robbed.

According to an image in the instructions, you should peg the combiner mode's new feet into the ladder stuff on her back.  So that's a place to put those.  I didn't see anywhere in the instructions that say where to put the combiner mode's new hands.  Dang, I guess someone's gonna hafta hold those.

There is a misassembly problem, though!  An oft-forgotten step in transformation to robot mode is zig-zagging the knee struts into a configuration that locks into the top of the shins.  Part of the knee struts were assembled upside-down in both legs, which makes a little nob point in the wrong direction and keep this locking in from working.  Kind of annoying.  Not, like, a dealbreaker, but definitely annoying.  At worst, since the toy's knees are stiff enough that the locking in isn't terribly necessary, the misassembly makes her taller, which is actually kind of a neat feature in itself.  She can go look down her nose at Hot Spot and Onslaught and (soon) Bludgeon.  At best, you can just snip those nubs, I guess, and transform her the way she was engineered to be.  Or maybe you're supercool and can remove rivets, i dunno.

I bet Pyra Magna could remove rivets.  She looks capable of things.

When I look at photos of other people's Masterpiece Ratchets, theirs appears to be different colors in places than mine.  It's weird.  Maybe mine used to look like that, too?  He arrived in the mail on Tuesday, I opened him up, I blacked out, and when I woke up he looked like this.  The oddest thing.

If you haven't been paying attention here long, then I should tell you that Ratchet is my jam.  He was the star of the first comic books I ever read, and I guess that sort of thing tends to leave an impression on you.  There's an argument to be made that the Marvel Transformers comics are ultimately the story of Ratchet.  When the stories get their most heated, it's Ratchet who's there, delivering the emotional punches.  Hell, he goes up against Megatron (badly) more often than Optimus Prime does.  And, well, it makes dramatic sense, right?  Optimus Prime versus Megatron is a battle between a pair of equals.  But put the pitiful but resourceful doctor up against Megatron?  That's an underdog.  That's an uphill battle against an unstoppable evil.  That's drama gold.  

I think Ratchet was also on the cartoon.  He sounded like Papa Smurf.

My love for Ratchet is so great that I purchased this okay-ish looking Masterpiece toy.  As you can see, its proportions are kind of wonky.  It's hard to turn a van cosplaying as an ambulance into a faithful recreation of the original character model of his robot form, which was a pile of boxes wearing a windshield glued to his tummy.  Ratchet had no wheels on him, no other identifying vehicular parts.  That tummy windshield was it.  And so speaking of  uphill battles: this toy's engineering!

I mean, it does a valiant job.  It does its level best to hide all the windows and all the wheels and all of the EVERYTHING so you could get a pile of unremarkable white boxes.   The entire roof and back window fold in on themselves and get stuffed inside the torso.  The lower third of the vehicle does its level best to tuck inside his legs.  The only remaining visible vehicle parts other than the desired windshield on his chest, are the windows on the back of his forearms and the two fairly visible hip-thingers.  A commendable effort all around, really.  It doesn't result in a perfect Ratchet robot mode (as according to the model sheets) but I'm not sure that's actually possible in a world with real physics.

He comes with a billion little extra accessories.  They're from the cartoon.  Who cares.

Back in 2004, the official Transformers convention was run by different people.  One of their last gasps was releasing mockups of toys that would-have-been if they'd kept the license and Fun Publications hadn't taken over.  One of these toy concepts was RID Megatron/Car Robots Gigatron in red and gold with a new Beast Wars Megatron head.  Dubbed "Transmetal 3 Megatron," he would have come with a rubber ducky accessory with a 5mm peg and starred in the then-current Transformers: Universe comic books as the reincarnation of a post-Beast Machines Megatron.  

It was an okay idea.  At the time, I was lukewarm on it.  I have never liked RID Megatron's toy very much, and I liked Beast Wars Megatron as a dragon (instead of a T. rex) even less.  And so I was pretty okay with the toy not happening because of the change of licenses.  Back then Beast Wars Megatron was not a distant memory of a beloved favorite character, forgotten and buried under decades of subsequent franchises.  I didn't need another right then.

But I'm much more than okay with one now.  I miss Megs, and I'm super happy to get a new toy of him.  I've suffered a Beast Megatron drought, and this toy is a fresh glass of cool water.  

In the meantime, other people kept up demand.  They kept asking Fun Pub when they were gonna make this guy.  And their answer was always "eehhh we dunno" because, well, frankly, it wasn't their idea, and it makes sense to me that they'd rather do their own ideas.  You don't take over a license from somebody else and crib their notebooks, you make your own notebooks.  And so it kind of makes sense, in Fun Pub's final BotCon, to finally put this guy out there, as a bookend.  So as the previous licensee ended, so too will these guys.

If only they had made more than, like, five of him!  Jeez!

Anyway, yeah, this toy is pretty nice-looking.  He's still a toy that has ... nine?  ten? modes, and all but one or two of them are garbage.  But the robot mode is pretty fucking great, and the dragon mode is pretty okay.  The jet mode and the gargoyle-mode-you-can't-do-anymore-because-the-snout-was-removed-to-fit-megatron's-head and especially the car mode... they are not very good.  And you can make him into sort-of-a-hand, which is neat, but, like, there's still giant wings on it and that kind of ruins the illusion.  But, again, robot mode is beautiful.  

Some problems I should mention: He's started to immediately shed his chrome for some people.  Me, I put some clear nailpolish on him before I even transformed him, to stave this off.  So think about that.  Maybe in a few months when everybody's TM3 Megatrons are completely chrome-shedded, he'll come down from the like $800 he's going for on eBay.   Also, the forward-movement ratchets on hips can be... frightening.  Like, squeaky-this-is-gonna-break frightening.  So I had to open him up and sand off some nubs.  He also was erroneously given a Dinobot spark crystal instead of a Predacon one, probably because the Dinobot spark crystal tooling is the only spark crystal tooling that still exists.  There's a Predacon logo sticker that's sold separately that can cover this up.  So, like, keep that all in mind before plunking down major cash for him.  

He doesn't come with the originally-planned rubber ducky 5mm accessory.  There was a normal-sized rubber ducky sold at the convention, but, like, it's just a normal rubber ducky with the BotCon logo stamped on it.  

Okay, since this toy has like six (five?) modes, and I need a wall of text to fit all the pictures in, let's *sigh* talk about the convention comic these guys featured in.

Ever since "The Agenda" aired, the legacy of G1 has been used as a cudgel to beat any possible new life out of the Beast Wars cartoon.  For a good two seasons, Beast Wars gave us new characters in a new setting that divorced us so far from what we knew about Transformers we had really no choice but to submerse ourselves in these new possibilities.  And it was pretty glorious!  But then we got "The Agenda" and a hook back into G1, and it's like a switch flipped.  Beast Wars-the-cartoon was now chainganged to this fucking monster and was going to be devoured.  Everyone had their "this is how the old war ended, this is how the era of the Maximals began" story, and you want to know the secret?

They are all bullshit.  

Knowing that stuff is antithetical to what makes Beast Wars great.  To the Beast Warriors, G1 was the stuff of legend, a distant terrifying-yet-glorious past that is best left to the imagination.  ...sort of.  Some people's imaginations leave much to be desired, and those're the kind of imaginations that keep getting fucking put in charge of writing Beast Wars stories.  They decide, one by one, that each character/toy in the Beast Wars needs to be some guy from G1.  Sure, Beast Wars Grimlock was explicitly the G1 guy on his packaging bio.  We'll let that slide.  (but does he have to be on the Axalon????) Okay, there's a Soundwave, so maybe that Soundwave is the other Soundwave, even though that Soundwave is a goddamned bat/gator Animorph toy!  Hey, did you know that Magnaboss shared its components names with some G1 guys?  Well, you're in luck, because now Prowl, Silverbolt, and Ironhide from G1 are in Beast Wars.  Oh, there's ANOTHER Beast Wars Prowl?  Hey, guess what, now they're BOTH G1 Prowl, simultaneously, with one being a clone of the other!  

Was that already kind of annoying?  Well, this comic and the accompanying profile cards gives you more.  Two of the members of the Tripredacus council are probably old Decepticons you know!  Under-3 might be a famous Autobot!  Autobot Inferno might be Beast Wars Inferno!  There is so very little Beast Wars left when you get done with all this shit.  It's not even clever.  No one's going to be handed an award for noticing two completely different guys have the same name.

Did you like the enigma surrounding the Great War and the reverence the Beast Warriors had for the Autobots and Decepticons of the past?  Well, too bad, because everyone in Beast Wars was around for those years and were important and sharing the same space.  Remember when Beast Megatron was entering the Ark and everyone comatose onboard was large and special and magical, and the whole event felt like an intrusion upon sacred ground?  Well, fuck that, now Megatron knew those guys and was once as large as them and they hung out all the time and he bossed them around because he was in charge.  Beast Wars Megatron himself was a Decepticon.  Everyone in the Beast Wars was either an Autobot or a Decepticon.  All the show's talk of "our Decepticon/Autobot ancestors" is taken out behind the shed and shot.  

It just makes the universe so... amazingly, pathetically SMALL.  This comic book's universe is so small, you guys.  Did you like the mystery of the 300-year-span of time between G1 and BW?  Well, good news, turns out there wasn't anything new to know.  You already know the cast.  They were the guys you already knew, and some of those guys are also the same guys as the other guys, secretly!   You weren't missing anything.

I think how little regard the comic has for its alleged source material is made clear in the following: 300 years ago, Optimus Primal was already on board the Axalon (which is G1-robot-scaled), serving as its captain, and already going on exploration missions.  With Rattrap.  WITH RATTRAP.  After the comic was released and objections about Rattrap knowing Primal for that long were raised, the response was, "Well, they never say EXPLICITLY how long they knew each other!"  The fuck they didn't.  It was abundantly clear in their every interaction in the cartoon.  Rattrap's entire first season arc is buried in the idea that he starts out with zero regard for Optimus Primal and then over the course of the Beast Wars slowly warms up to him and respects him.  At no point does Rattrap literally say "I've only known you for like two days," sure, but he is constantly degrading and belittling Optimus Primal.  He places no value on his commander's life or on the lives of his fellow crewmembers.  He only cares for saving his own skin.  This is a guy who has served with Optimus Primal on this same ship for THREE HUNDRED YEARS?  How the hell was he not fired 299 years, 11 months, and 29 days ago?  "This your first day on the job or somethin'?" he asks.  "You sure you're cut out for this commander gig?" he asks.  The apologists say he's being sarcastic.  Is the entire first goddamn season's character arc also sarcastic?  

This informs my final point: This comic book feels like it was written from the Wikipedia article about Beast Wars.  It's like somebody's bad book report.  There's some attention to surface detail ("Rattrap doesn't outright say how long he's known Primal!") but there's no proven familiarity with the actual material as it is viewed in-the-moment.  But that's okay, because all what made Beast Wars great is obviously secondary to making it connect to G1.

That is sarcasm, by the way.