(Femme-Bot Friday #51)
As a general rule, I'm happy to buy the same mold multiple times if each one represents either a different character or a different version of a character that I'm particularly keen on. What I won't tend to do, except in certain circumstances, is take Hasbro up on its offer of cynical repaints of the same character in the same mold, just because they want more of my money. With very few exceptions, I'd be reluctant to buy repaints that happen for plot reasons... though limited edition repaints tend to get a free pass.With Hasbro's Robots in Disguise (2015) line, I've not only ended up buying more of the toyrange than I'd imagined at the start, but I've subsequently replaced several of them with Takara Tomy's TransFormers Adventure versions due to their vastly superior paint jobs. One such example is Windblade, whose RID2015 toy was absurdly underpainted and barely resembled her on-screen counterpart. I even concluded that write-up wondering about Takara Tomy's version, which I acquired almost a year later.
Is it as significant an improvement as I'd hoped..?
Vehicle Mode:
The big surprise is that jet mode is very little different from Hasbro's. Notably, the red paint on the legs is denser, making for a slightly better colour match to the red plastic, and the grey plastic has been replaced with more black plastic. The knees are painted in an almost identical sky blue, the nose and cockpit are much the same, with the windows painted black and the top surface of the nose given a coating of silverish-white that should have wrapped around at the tip. The underside and the intakes - which should have been painted black - have been left untouched, and the only paintwork unique to the Takara Tomy version are the little swooshes on the wings, that start around the fans and curl out to the wingtips. Very disappointing, thusfar... and it doesn't help much that the robot's hands and shoulder armour are painted black, though they are very slightly less noticeable as a result. It's very rare for Takara Tomy to release a figure with an improved paintjob that still needs the Reprolabels set to 'complete' it, but even those stickers don't fix the nose... I'd be less upset about this poorly-executed repaint if they'd at least painted in the yellow 'eyes' Windblade should have on the nose, just below the cockpit on either side... and it strikes me as a little odd that Takara Tomy didn't simply mold the nose section in black plastic, then add the small amounts of red, white and yellow paint where necessary.
Much like the Hasbro version, she has a deployable landing wheel at the front and her toes substitute for landing gear at the back. Additionally, the sword in its scabbard can be attached to the underside to work as one long landing skid, just like the Hasbro version. Curiously, the card art on both Hasbro and Takara Tomy's version of this figure depicts Windblade wielding two swords, but each version only comes packaged with one...
Robot Mode:
Much to my relief, robot mode is more of an improvement than jet mode... yet, even here, it's still missing something. Black paint has been applied to the shoulder armour, but the cyan trim has been left off, despite the sculpted detail indicating exactly where it's needed. The upper arms remain unpainted, so her biceps switch from black at the elbow to red at the shoulder. I could ignore that on Hasbro's version as they tend to skimp on paint... on this version, it looks as though she's been misassembled with parts from another version of the toy. Somewhat like the nose section in jet mode, had the shoulders been molded in black plastic, adding the red and cyan trim would have required less paint overall.
The bolero jacket-effect armour on the chest features its black paint as well as the blue trim featured on Hasbro's, but it hasn't got the red swirls coming in from each side - possibly as a result of the reduced space due to having the opening in the middle increased to accommodate those radial code stickers that were a thing for this toyline. More of the waist is painted silver, and there's a block of black paint on the groin but, aside from a couple of changes to the head, and the painted hands, she's essentially much the same, and only barely improved. I can't say I was hoping for paintwork on the undersides of the wings, or on the fins on the backs of her forearms, but I thought maybe the collar would be painted, and that the legs would feature the swirl details and the red tips to her kneecaps.
The head is also not as good as I'd hoped. It's more extensively painted, certainly - the comb is painted gold, the 'hair' bunches on the sides of her head are painted, and her tiara is painted cyan - but the gold on the central detail is absent, the forehead has been painted black rather than white, the 'hairpins' aren't painted, and the detailing of the face looks awfully amateurish. It's not just the shapeless splodge of red in the approximate area of her lips, it's the fact that the white paint doesn't even fully cover her chin. Attention to detail is normally Takara Tomy's selling point, but they've really dropped the ball with this one. I know it's not the best head sculpt to work with, and the art style of the TV show doesn't really lend itself to intricate detailing, but this is far less impressive than I'd expected. The face on the Hasbro version looked unfinished, but this version ends up at an unhappy midpoint between looking gormless and downright sinister - shades of Hexadecimal from ReBoot, almost.
On the upside, the blade of her sword has been painted pink, though the fan emedded in the hilt isn't picked out in any way, so even that isn't a massive improvement.
I've already covered both transformation and articulation in the original's write-up, so there's no real sense getting into that again here - the only changes to this version are 100% cosmetic. It's enough of an improvement that I don't regret the purchase... though owning this version does make me regret first picking up Hasbro's version all the more.
Granted, none of the Robots in Disguise (2015)/TF Adventure figures I've picked up have been exactly mind-blowing, but Takara Tomy's improvements to toys in other lines have seemed more substantial, so it's strange to see a line like this given such short shrift, long before the 'Unification of World Brands' became a thing (publicly, at least). Then again, RID2015/TFA was intended as a toyline for a younger demographic than the ongoing Generations/Legends lines, so perhaps my expectations should have been correspondingly lower.
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