Well, it's finally here - the Hasbro Pulse Victory Saber set. Just about a year late.. no big deal. It's just a figure set of a highly anticipated Japanese G1 character that we all prepaid. I'm sure Hasbro will deliver, or at the very worst, do their usual job and get the job done with generally acceptable results.
Well if you've been following with reports of people inspecting their sets, you'll know that is completely and utterly wrong.
As discussed, this set is one of those crowdfunded ones on Hasbro Pulse. Retail price, as it were, was $179.99 USD, plus sales taxes and and a reasonable $29.99 for shipping (especially in hind sight, as the box is admittedly very big - to big for my standard lighting arrangement). The packing job was decent, featuring a brown shipper box which encases the goods, which are wrapped in an art slipcover that was protected by tissue paper. The art itself is alright, and I appreciate the effort of the embossing on it...
But lets be honest, it's pretty lame compared to the standard art that I'm guessing will be used for Asia side release. The finish also seems to smudge very easily, which is unfortunate if you handle you boxes with anything less than those fancy art gloves.
Continuing in, the actual contents of the box are protected by this cardboard with some more art, as well as the manual. For those who are curious - no, there's no tape or anything. The only tape is on the shipper box itself.
From here, things are pretty straight forward, with three trays, each carrying contents as photographed. I have to say, for a set like this the quality of cardboard and plastic trays is pretty bad, basically being on par with their mainline releases. Perhaps even more annoying is the use of plastic straps, which not only makes the packaging not collector friendly, but also can lead to potential paint damage.
So you have your four figures - Leader/Commander sized Star Saber, Voyager sized Victory Leo, and the two Micromasters Holi and Fire. To condense this review, I'm simply going to say that from an out-of-the-box perspective, this is your typical Hasbro transformer product. These days, they're generally fine, but you'll find a few annoying QC issues you wouldn't find in a pure TakaraTomy release. There's some paint flaws, paint apps missing, foreign matter under the chrome, and some questionable tolerances. The stand is also incredibly flimsy, and I'm honestly surprised it holds up to the actually supporting the combined figure.
Am I annoyed by these? Yes. Am I surprised by this? Absolutely not.
Both Star Saber and Victory Leo are technically triple changers, though technically in the case of Star Saber, it is the V-Star that coverts into a "base mode" that is just as bad as all the other recent ones. Not entirely sure why Hasbro bothered to make it official - there's no 5 year old kids that are going to be playing with this set. The Victory Leo secondary alt mode is a flying cannon of sorts, which in itself looks dumb but at least it's official canon, and I'm guess is more of a by product of their combination into combination into jet mode.
Articulation is again not earth shattering, but within the realm of what I'd expect from a glorified mainline release. Star Saber and Saber feature very robust articulation, hitting the major points, even featuring wrist articulation. Even Micromaster Fire features a waist joint. Victory Leo doesn't have a waist due to the splitting mechanism that facilitates his forming into Victory Saber components, which is understandable. Brainmaster Saber is effectively a tiny brick.
I do wish that Star Saber had better ankles, though, as this affects Victory Saber and its ability to pose.
Questionable base modes aside, the various alt modes are pretty solid, and what I'd expect from a mainline release - generally resembling what it's supposed, though there would ideally be a bit more detailing, or in this case, size. Victory Leo looks so tiny next to Star Saber, but I guess the trade off is that combined mode isn't completely out of whack.
Combination into Victory Saber (jet or robot) is generally well thought out. It's not quite MP level, but it does seem like some concepts were taken from the Sentai playbook, and additional brackets and tabs were built in to help stablize the combination.
Combined Victory Saber robot mode is fairly tall, being approximately the same size as the MP release... which I'm thinking will never actually be completed, or they'll develop a new version which is smaller.
So everything sounds good so far.. why am I so salty?
Two things - firstly, we have these stickers. which fit on Victory Leo's middle wing segment, like so:
So I did a bit of digging, and it sounds like Hasbro did the wise thing and chose to use a tougher plastic for this section of the wing due to durability. This plastic, known as POM, is apparently difficult to paint. OK, fine, I get that. But why am I the one putting the thing on?
Oh right, it's because the stickers are super flimsy, can be damaged by either scratching or just taking it off the backing, and takes considerable effort to align correctly. So the way I see it, it was Hasbro cutting costs on both labour and, more importantly, the need to supply an infinite number of decals to workers because there's a pretty good chance they'll destroy a few in the process, as I nearly did.
It's either that, or this was a last minute change and they only swapped to this plastic material because prototypes kept breaking or something.
The second issue, however, is the one that really grinds my gears. This is the first time I've ever bought a toy, let alone a premium figure from a company that knows what they're doing, that literally forgot to cut out a piece of plastic that allows the toy to fulfill it's basic function, which in this case, is the ability to properly transform.
So I had to sit there, for an hour, whittling away at plastic with a screwdriver, Exacto Knife, and a file to carve a cavity into the jet form which doesn't look that great, but at least lets me get the job done. On a $180 USD figure, of which there are only about 25,000 or so.
So somehow, Hasbro managed to meet my expectations, and at the same time, fail to meet expectations. The price, combined with the general eagerness for fans to finally own a figure of this character set the expectations pretty high, Expectations that weren't quite met, sadly - it's pretty upsetting when you can grab a mainline release off a Walmart shelf and at least be reasonably assured that it would be able to transform properly.
Despite all my issues, though, I actually consider myself lucky, as there are customers with an even larger range of issues, including one poor bastard who was missing parts - good luck replacing those if Hasbro customer service doesn't reply favourably.
I guess if nothing else, I'm mentally prepared for Deathsaurus.
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