The term "cursed" is thrown around a lot in the toy collecting world, though generally it applies to poorly made figures where the QC is so bad it's laughable. But sometimes, an idea is so bad it really shouldn't have been allowed to gestate at all.
That's the way I feel about pretty much every single Transformer crossover. Not the ones where non Transformer companies make figures or whatnot (though some of those should never have been greenlit), but rather the actual ones pursued by Hasbro/Takara Tomy. Where they take a figure and apply window dressing from another pop culture icon in hopes of peddling their wares to a new target demographic.
Some of it was just gaudy looking, but generally harmless. But I firmly believe that someone was smoking something STRONG when the Street Fighter stuff was approved, because there is no way anyone thought these actually looked any good. I think the fact they never got past one wave of releases probably spoke to how well these figures were selling.
As seems to be the norm for Hasbro, their release features an additional art box that, well, kind of sucks. It always does... I don't know what it is with Hasbro. It's not a lack of talent or resources. - it just feels like they just don't care. The front of the box is about the same but the rear is where you see the biggest difference.
I'll let you figure out which one is which.
In the instance of this Ken vs. Chun Li set, the two repurposed figures are Titans Return Hot Rodimus for Ken, and Generations Arcee for Chun Li. If you're familiar with those figures, you'll know exactly what each of these comes with. Even if not, its basically just weapons - these were general release figures and didn't feature any special parts. The funny thing, at least for me, is that if these were based on the Legends releases, then Ken/Hot Rodimus ought to have come with an additional mini figure, but instead they ended up giving collectors what the Hasbro release has.
I guess at least Ken has a nice metallic red paint on his blasters, which is more than I can for the stuff Chun Li has to work with.
While Ken has prettier guns, in the battle of which one looks worse, I think Ken takes that one by a landslide. I'm not sure what it is, though I suspect its the monotony of the colour scheme combined with the garish amount of flesh colour paint.
Up close, things just get worse for Ken. Don't get me wrong, it's not like the flesh coloured paint apps on Chun Li's arms are great, nor are the bracelets, but at least it's a consistent colouring, as opposed to random flesh coloured patches for Ken. Both of them feature soulless eyes, though, so at least they have that in common.
What they SHOULD have done is the one thing that was right with Ken - how the Titan Master is decoed correctly, and those should have been the characters, plugged into an appropriately coloured body without the flesh coloured parts.
Articulation is better on Ken than Chun Li... of course that's always been the case for Hot Rodimus vs. Arcee. Arcee effectively lacks a waist as well as thigh twists, so her legs are really just for propping her torso up. Like with most mainline figures, you'll get some decent poses out of the two, but don't even consider that you'd pull anything off that looks game accurate.
Paint wise, well I can't say the actual paint applications are bad per se. Even the flesh tone, which is thickly applied because they just have to in order to get the proper coverage, so I'm guessing there's a structural reason they didn't use the same flesh coloured plastic as her upper arms. It's main the colour selection that annoys me.
Build Quality though... that's a weird one. For whatever reason, both my figures featured loose joints. Ken featured loose hips, whereas Chun Li has a really loose neck. My best guess is that after being used and resued so many times, the moulds for those parts is suffering from degredation and well, this is what happens.
It's either that or I got the short end of the QC stick.
Naturally, the questionable colour palette carries over to vehicle mode as well. There's honestly no real winner here in my min, though I suppose Ken wins this one on account of looking less ridiculous.
So there you have it... honestly I have no idea which collectors were leaping for joy when they heard this. It's obviously a cash grab, but you know, I'd hoped that they were going try a bit harder than what we ended up with.
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