Posted May 2, 2013 at 7:59 pm
It seems like Hasbro's trying to shove Ultra Magnus into their own cartoon programming through sheer force of action figure market saturation.  We got the Cyberverse Ultra Magnus, then the Voyager Class Ultra Magnus, both based on the same design, followed by a Fall of Cybertron Ultra Magnus, and... okay, two more Ultra Magnuses?  Oh, and these are actually based on the design from the cartoon?  All right, then.

Seems like the way to get ol' Mags into the cartoon was to make him a partial rebuild of Optimus Prime's model.  Likewise, that's how this Beast Hunters toy works.  It's a retool of the "Robots in Disguise" Voyager from last year, which is a toy I didn't own, so it was new to me, at least.  And unlike the First Edition Optimus Prime I did own, this version tried to get stuff to transform into what it actually transforms into, rather than having a bunch of fake kibble.  The chest windows become the real windows (such as they are), the air foil shoulders become the real air foils... that sort of thing.  Though for some reason the toy doesn't get to keep the smokestacks.  They're in the instructions, but not included with the released toy.

Also, because Ultra Magnus has new gigantic shoulders, Ultra Magnus's truck mode has new gigantic Ultra Magnus shoulders sticking out the back of the cab.  In robot mode, they can point forward and launch missiles.  The missiles can store all sorts of places.  There's clips everywhere.

Weirdly, Ultra Magnus's retool seems to be based on the Japanese "Arms Micron" iteration, as it's got the Mini-Con peghole attachments still there on his forearms.  Maybe it's not really THAT weird, if TakaraTomy permanently altered the tooling to put those in.

Oh, and Magnus comes with a winged jetpack!  It seems to be the same design that Beast Hunters Optimus Prime has, with the X-shaped wings and the metal shard tail.  It clips up over the back of Maggy's shoulders behind his head, and it's amazingly snug.  You kind of have to overreach the whole mechanism to get it to fit in.  In truck mode, it just pegs into the hitch and you set the Forge of Solus on there.

(Yeah, he comes with a tiny Forge of Solus.  Because Magnuses these days have hammers, and so I guess any hammer will do?)

It was hard to choose between this Magnus and the upcoming Premium Edition Magnus.  Premium Magnus comes with a much better Forge of Solus, plus my mental image of Ultra Magnuses is "they are huge."  However, once Magnus showed up in the cartoon proper, I saw he was represented by being a Voyagerish size.  Cartoon scale won out and I got the smaller version.  Also the least expensive!  That helps!
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