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.
