My dislike of the live action Transformers movies is predominately due to the terrible storylines, but there's also how the designs generally lead themselves to some pretty crappy looking toys. Ever since The Bumblebee Movie, at least the design side of things have improved. There's been some decent transforming figures, and ThreeZero has the defacto market dominance over the non transforming side of things. One of their most recent releases is the long awaited DLX class Arcee.
So the DLX level of figures I'm kind of familiar with, with my Iron Man purchase. Size wise, I'd say this is as close as we're gonna get to 1/6 scale figures if we treated Optimus Prime as a 6 ft. tall guy and used him as a reference. To that end, Arcee is about 8 inches tall. As with the DLX line, there's a good amount of die cast used for the figure, though it's mostly in the skeletal structure, though some exterior parts are metal as well, such as the feet.
As the figures are of differing size, there are several price points as well. Arcee is among the smaller DLX Transformer figures, and retails for about $170 USD.
Accessories in the box are as expected for this sort of product, which is basically the figure, a bunch of hands, the characters accessories (twin lasers and boosters) and a stand.
This figure is one of those that comes with an alternate head. ThreeZero doesn't seem to do multiple expressions for a character, and an alternate head generally means a battle mask or something, like with Bumblebee. In the case of Arcee, there was a head sculpt that was based on, as expected, her look in the move... it's just that because her face is only visible for a split second and as such wasn't that pretty to look at. People I believe got angry and as a result ThreeZero made a second head which looks like a cross between the actual head and the eventual head in the sequel movie. What's adorable is that the original head looks kind of like that African skeptical kid meme.
Both heads, however, require you to put on an antenna. I've found that you can just shove the tab into the hole, just like God intended, rather than go through the painstaking steps identified in the manual, which includes unscrewing the top of the head. Speaking of unscrewing, that's how you access the battery compartment for the LEDs. I wish I had batteries to test them out, as photos I've seen show that the blue eyes really pop.
Out of the box, you can truly admire the work put into the design and manufacturer of the figure. Like with all the other designs, Arcee features many, many, MANY non standard shapes, and I'm guessing that Hasbro must have sent reference models or something because to CAD this from ground up must have been a nightmare. There are a few modifications to the body in order to accommodate the articulation,, most notable being the now two segment chest as opposed to a single part. There's also a strange deviation of the hips though the things look about right, and I suspect this had to do with insufficient space to put in the hip joints. The result, however, is that she could have looked even more thicc.
I enjoy the more recent live action designs as while they still maintain those otherwordly mechanical bits, there's more solid panels to them, so the designs don't look like some random line drawing someone doodled while drunk. Those mechanical bits are well represented in the figure.
For frame of reference, here's a size comparison to MP Arcee as well as the Yolopark AMG Pro Series Megatron figure.
Articulation and on a related note, balance, are very good with this figure. You're still going to need to use the stand for more dynamic poses, but the heft of the die cast along with the lovely ankle supports and articulated toes allow for a larger number of dynamic, free standing poses.
Like with many of the blatantly jointed figures, Arcee was designed with slight body transformations built in to allow one to maximize the range of motion (and avoid paint scrapes). Typical joints are present along with ab crunch, mid torso twist and pivot, and butterfly joints. Range of motion in the head and neck are pretty good, though tilt isn't quite enough to do true Prone poses. Boosters on her back have some articulation for purposes of positioning to represent various stages of deployment. I wish the butterflies actually did backwards motion. Pauldrons look a bit odd when the arm is up but it's not connected to the body even on the CG model so I'll let that slide. There's sadly no actual wrist joint, just a ball joint so hand articulation can be somewhat limited.
The forearm pieces rotate to allow the elbow to bend, which I suppose is a design limitation as I've seen CG of Arcee arms bent with the panels in place. But at the same time I feel that ThreeZero may have misinterpreted the forearm design or just felt like sticking with the preexisting frame, as a slight modification to the design would have allowed for things to remain as they should have.
There's very little to be unhappy with when it comes to Paint Applications. Most of the work on the figure is incredibly solid, though I did spot either a paint flaw or rough handling issue causing a slight blemish on the silver collar, and panel lining that I'm pretty sure was done using a Gundam Marker rather than the bottled stuff.
Perhaps more interesting is despite being painted from top to bottom, there's still some missing paint applications. I've only seen a few stills from the movie, and even from those I can tell a few things are missing, like the pink on the inside of the elbows. Makes me wonder what else missing. Also, the Autobot sigil on the chest is too small compared to the CG model.
Build Quality is exceptional, as with the other ThreeZero die cast products I've handled. The joints are nice and tight, and seeing how they're built into the die cast metal frame I expect they'll stay that way for a long time. Even the smaller joints used to secure the moving panels do not feel flimsy in any shape, way or form. The weapons fit into the hands nicely, which are made of a more flexible rubber. All of the pieces, despite their irregular shaping, did not feature any blemishes.
Arcee is a fantastic figure both in terms of engineering and production qualities, the pros of which heavily outweigh the cons. Even without the Transformers branding it's a very well done release that wouldn't look out of place in a generic Anime/Sci Fi. At this point I think some vendors still haven't gotten their shipment so getting one isn't impossible, but I did notice that despite being recently shipped the actual ThreeZero webpage lists it as being sold out already, so the obtaining of a figure might become a challenge pretty quickly.
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