Age of the Primes Onyx Prime

Thusfar, Age of the Primes looks like another toyline that I'll skip almost entirely, with exceptions being those that are either holdovers from Legacy (more likely their 'Retro G1' remixes) or figures like this one, which fits about as well into TransFormers as did the live action movie Dinobots or TLK Megatron.

I have to confess that my knowledge of the Primes is pretty much non-existent, both in terms of who they are and how/why they entered the lore... But, if I had to guess, it was probably Furman (and I'd be right). The idea of thirteen Primes representing aspects of Cybertronian physiology or society isn't inherently bad, per se, just... superfluous... And their introduction into TransFormers media really highlights how astonishingly easy it is for a moderately proficient writer to define authority figures and get a whole community of people to accept them as gods in a religion.

Nevertheless, we're currently at a point in the Age of the Primes line where there's only a couple more of The Thirteen to go - Quintus and Amalgamous, both of whom sound interesting in theory, but look terrible as toys - and I'm highly unlikely to add them to my collection... Let's see if Onyx Prime can help us ascertain why that is...

I'll start this by giving an overview in each mode, in reverse order of elegance... meaning we'll start of with the absolute worst option...

Primary/Secondary Beast Modes:

Onyx Prime is billed as 'the Lord of the Beasts' and, as a result, Hasbro/Takara Tomy's designers tried to cram in references to every single creature of the face of the planet, both real and Fantasy... He appears to be based, largely, on the Ken Christiansen design from The Covenant of Primus, at least in certain details. Unfortunately, at the Hasbro end, we have Mark Maher on design so this mode is equal parts quirky and clunky. A six-legged beast was always going to be tricky, but Maher's tendency toward boxiness is remarkably subtle here, mostly kept to the inner workings and concealed behind the veneer of extravagance given to the sculpt.

The first thing that struck me about this toy was its almost unremitting brown-ness. While it's somewhat true to Christiansen's art of the character, my impression was that he's supposed to be bronze, copper and gold, but this thing just goes straight for a dull, earthy brown for the majority of its parts. Painted accents of gold and silver contrast against the darker brown, gunmetal and black plastics used for joints and other key parts but, these highlights are few and far between.

The wings are probably the most interesting part of the design and, for the sake of durability, are molded largely in a deep brown rubbery plastic with a spray of gold applied to the undersides. From below, they look as though they're formed from metallic blades except for some fur and claws around the mid-wing joint. From above, this organic detail is supplemented by leathery, veiny, bat wing-like panels with bony 'fingers'. They're somewhat articulated, but the choice and range of joints is strange: they can swing up and down through about 90°, but those stopping points are neither perfectly horizontal nor perfectly vertical. They can tilt forward by maybe 10°, which is all but pointless (in this mode, at least), and then there's a hinge just behind the corner of the wing that allows the upper portion of wing to spread out, though an ugly gap is formed if they're spread to their fullest extent, making them appear to be two separate winglets. Given the sheer majesty of Kingdom Airazor's wings - a figure from just four years ago - Onyx Prime's wing's feel ill-conceived and clumsy, particularly for toy released in 2025 in the so-called Leader class range, and on one of the much-vaunted Thirteen Primes.

The wings are far too bulky, and the great brick of plastic by which they attach to the body is clear evidence of Maher's untidy influence. The ugly, split hump just behind that, necessary though it may be for transformation, is lazy and, while there's a groove inside it that looks to be ideally positioned to accommodate the shaft of Onyx's spear in this mode, the shaft is too long without an additional hole to push it into, inside the beast's shoulders. Thus, the only 'weapon storage' option available is to split the shaft and tip, then plug them in on top of each other above the tail, and hanging off at the back. The tail, which becomes a bow mainly for centaur mode, tabs into the underside of his butt-plate though, curiously, there's a matching slot on the back of the pelvis.

In so many ways, this isn't the ideal mode in which to assess the toy. Its very awkwardness - six legs crammed into a space barely adequate for four - makes for a beast mode that appears to be fighting itself for every movement. This must have been identified at the early stages of design, because another configuration - where the central pair of legs are swung up under the wings and wrapped around the shoulders, plugging into the large, unsightly and otherwise redundant tabs on Onyx's pauldrons - has been revealed as an unofficially official alternate transformation.

Strangely - and strongly suggesting that this 'full' beast mode wasn't inspiring anyone with confidence - this is supplemented by another slight variation whereby the robot's arms are swung out to the sides, allowing the hooves to peg in more or less as they do in robot mode. Either way, the fact that its front legs end in what are undeniably just hands, while the back pairs are each hooved makes him look ridiculous, and the arms are neither long enough nor well enough articulated to serve adequately as front legs of a four-legged beast... which is a shame, because the rear legs and the mid-legs are actually reasonably well-designed, for a change. The only serious let-down in terms of his poseability is the crotch plate, which forces his back legs to spread out too far. The other joints in the back legs are somewhat better than the usual attempts at digitigrade, and are at least adequate for an equine beast.

This mode's head, though, really feels like an afterthought. It's Mark Maher through and through, with its clumsy, angular design - neither fully dragon-like, nor appropriately fantasy-style. There's also concept or comic book art where this form has a bird-like head. The most complementary thing I can say about it is that it looks somewhat like a cheap knockoff of TransFormers Prime's Predaking... but cast in the most unflattering shade of brown imaginable, and with minimal paintwork to bring it to life. The red eyes and the silver fangs and jowl-horns are the very least one might want... and yet that's all there is. Making matters worse, the neck is rigid, and the head is mounted on a ball joint which allows for little more than rotation.

Centaur Mode:

Thankfully, Onyx's primary form - at least as far as concept art goes - is his centaur mode... which is certainly... striking... but looks rather compressed in its body, such that the front legs are far too close to the back legs. It seems to me that a better idea would have been to allow the body to extend and have the wings fold down to conceal the worst of his thinness as the flanks of a true, wingless centaur... but that darned concept art depicts him with wings. Instead, the splayed wings are employed to conceal the now comically oversize backpack, because his not-dragon head simply folds back behind his shoulders.

All the more weird, while a tail is still appropriate to this form, the idea is to unpeg it, unfold it... and use it as a bow, with the spear as an arrow. Here, again, the shaft is far too long, and it's not entirely clear which way round the bow should be held. Conventional wisdom would suggest that a bow, being essentially convex in design, should be held as such and, sure enough, that's the only way it really fits in his hands... though even saying that it fits is a stretch, because the slot in his hands for the tab on the bow is on his fingers rather than the palm, so it looks more like he's balancing the 'bow' on the tips of his fingers. Meanwhile, arranging the arms so that it looks as though he's drawing the bow is an exercise in frustration. However, if it could be connected the other way round, more in the style of a compound bow, that would give the spear shaft a bit more clearance. Unfortunately, the bow's tab is too close to its back, so the thickness of the bow itself prevents mounting it 'backwards'.

One thing I find quite impressive about this mode, versus the previous, is that in swinging the torso back 90°, both the chest plate and the crotch plate move into their appropriate positions, allowing both pairs of legs to adopt more natural poses, though the back legs are significantly longer than the front legs, which limits the options for stable poses. That said, the figure as a whole is well balanced enough that it can adopt a 'rearing' pose without any additional support.

The span of his shoulders looks rather awkward, particularly with the joints fully exposed and with so narrow a torso. This could have been mitigated if the pauldrons were jointed such that they could swing in closer to the body, and it's also possible to disguise this by hinging the shoulders forward on their butterfly joint, but that just makes it look odd in a different way. On top of that, the arms are just far too long for this mode - hanging halfway down the thighs of the front legs - not to mention overly bulky due to the chunky vambraces.

The head sculpt is a true curiosity... it's basically the robot mode head collapsed down so that his face is behind a hybrid bird mask, yet with the chin-strap/lower mandible exposed, which reminds me of nothing more that some of the recent Predator variants, whose masks don't cover the entirety of their face. The eyes are picked out in red, with the tip of the beak and the visible teeth painted silver. The only other variation in colour is the darker brown antennae, which appears to be paint. Curiously, the head has its greatest range of motion in this form, since the jawline doesn't clash with the collar.

Robot Mode:

And, finally, we come to Onyx Prime's true 'robot' form... which, after the previous two, feels pretty pedestrian. It doesn't even look that different from his centaur mode, except that the front legs are now wrapped over his shoulders, with the hooves pegging loosely to the chest. This increases the bulk of the upper body and conceals the awkward shoulder joints without significantly impeding anything but the butterfly joint. He stands on just two legs now - the beast modes' rear legs, with a bird claw heel spur to counterbalance the expansive backpack - but they remain awkwardly digitigrade, with the hooves facing forward.

It's in this mode that it really hit me how piss poor and miserly the paint job is. There are tiny spot applications of gold on the pauldrons, with absolutely nothing on the vambraces. He has silver-painted kneecaps and blobs of gold on the lower leg joint, while the hooves are painted glossy black... but every other bit of sculpted detail on the limbs, both mechanical and organic, is bereft of paint. The torso has silver paint across the collar - matching up somewhat with the applications on the ankles of the centaur's front legs - two shades of metallic brown (one bordering on copper) with gold applied to details that resemble eyes and a beak. The only other paintwork is applied to the crotch plate, which features silver at the top, gunmetal on the sides and two applications of gold running down the centre. Given that the existing artwork of Onyx Prime features a lot more gold, gunmetal and rust-like colours, the amount of brown plastic left unpainted here is pretty ridiculous... and the metallic swirl component to the plastic just isn't enough to mitigate this.

It's a real shame, because there's a wealth of sculpted detail, from armour panels to areas of fur, all of which could have been improved substantially with a touch of paint, even just a dark wash to add a bit of contrast here and there. The tail/bow in particular has a mixture of organic and mechanical parts but, while the matte black plastic does catch the light in some interesting ways, it's clear that it should feature some metallic paint. I suspect I'll be adding paintwork of my own to this one... or possibly ordering the ToyHax labels...

In this mode, he can't wield the bow as effectively due to the loss of his butterfly joints and, somewhat surprisingly, the tail cannot be used as a sword, so it ends up plugging back into his butt-plate. He can, however, wield the spear - or, to give it its proper moniker, the Triptych Mask, reimagined here as a spearhead and mounted on a staff. This 'mask'/spearhead is the one and only component of this toy that features Onyx Prime's unique insignia... and it's a tiny little thing, nestled in the rectangular recess in the spearhead's socket. To be fair, though, it looks as though attempts were made to incorporate design elements from the mask onto Onyx Prime's head, chest and crotch plates... though they're only vaguely similar, and they got the lion's share of the paint, where the spearhead got just three applications of gold-ish paint. The spearhead is molded in a curious shade of brown that my eyes want to interpret as purplish, which really doesn't work... but, then, nor does the rubbery plastic used. Making matters worse, it's only painted on one side, which is typical for Hasbro, but feels like another huge cop-out on so simple a Leader class toy.

The only change to the head sculpt is that Onyx's robot face gets pulled out of the bird face by the jaw and, majestic though it may now look, lowering the jaw restricts the head's range of movement considerably because the chin clashes with his collar at even the slightest turn unless the head is tilted back to its ball joint's fullest extent. It's such a bland, featureless face, it's a massive disappointment, even over the six-legged beast mode's clunky head. The whole face is painted silver, with the eyes picked out in red, so this version possible operates with four eyes. Also, intentional or not, it's possible to unpeg his chest plate and swing it up in front of the robot's head, but then it has no articulation at all and leaves the chest looking rather plain.

As one might predict, after looking over the photos, Onyx Prime's transformation is hardly one of the most complex the toyline has ever seen. If you leave the centaur mode's front legs wrapped over his shoulders, transformation is very much in the vein of early Beast Wars toys where you pretty much just put the robot on all fours and then flip the beast mode head over. Unfurling those extra legs isn't too difficult, but navigating them out of the wing mounts (where they're loosely tabbed in on each side) and around the pauldrons can be a pain. The wings don't get involved in transformation into any mode, and the six-legged beast's head only really pops fully into place in robot mode, since the proximity of centaur mode's rounded butt forces the head into a slightly different angle and position. My favourite aspect of the transformation is going to and from centaur mode, where the torso and crotch plate swing into place with an almost satisfying click, though it's not immediately apparent that it's supposed to click into place.. I'm curious as to why the crotch plate is attached where and how it is, since it interferes with the six-legged beast mode's back legs, and is above the robot mode's waist joint... which brings us to the articulation issues.

Because, while he's mostly quite well articulated, certain choices in the design and engineering sorely limit what you can actually get out of him. Starting with the waist, it theoretically has the full 360° range, but the addition of the largely superfluous, bulbous butt-panel and the aforementioned crotch plate, both attached above the waist joint, reduces this effectively to near zero. Similarly, the arms can theoretically rotate 360° around the shoulder but, even with the wings folded fully back, they won't do that without first dislodging the centaur mode's front hooves from their position over the shoulders. He can raise his arms out to the sides just a little over 90°, even with the pauldrons tilted up, but the joint itself looks like it's capable of far more. His bicep swivel is just above the elbow, so his vambraces clash with the upper arm at certain points in the elbow's 90° range of bend, with two soft detents along the way. This clash has a habit of popping the rotation joint out of the upper arm, and there are signs of plastic stress inside the joint's socket. The wrists rotate freely and the hands can open, but the four fingers are a single piece of plastic. His legs don't have it any easier, with only about 45° range forward-to-back without shifting either the crotch plate or the butt-plate, though they do swing out to the sides a little past 90°. His thigh rotation is largely unhindered, and then the knees have about 35-40° before they hits their two soft detents, followed by another 30°-odd of free movement, amounting to a little under 90° range in total. The lower-leg joint is almost identical - two soft detents about mid-way through its sub-90° range. The ankle tilts have a range of about 45° inward, and the heel spurs can just about be used as additional support for posing, as long as they're not taking his full weight.

In centaur mode, his arms can make use of the butterfly joints to swing forward and back, clicking into place in two positions in either direction, while the full 360° rotation of the shoulder is made available. The jointing of his front legs is a little odd, with a separate piece joining the upper and lower leg, hinged at the top of the lower part, but about a third of the way up the thigh. The hooves are only hinged, with about 90° range. In all modes, I rather wish the silver kneecaps were separate pieces that would both facilitate greater range for the knee and allow them to fold up slightly, onto the front of the thigh, for robot mode.

As mentioned earlier, the wings are also rather frustrating. What articulation they have isn't too bad, but the lack of a joint to rotate them forward/backward over the shoulders, away from the vertical, makes finding a good position for them, particularly in robot mode, next to impossible.

Majestic and visually striking as this beastly Prime tries to be, it's actually a rather simplistic mess. I can't help but think there's an inherent flaw in the idea of multiple 'Primes' representing aspects of Cybertronian life, and Onyx is - if you'll pardon the pun - a prime example. As the first Cybertronian to have a beast mode, Hasbro theoretically had free reign to create anything... but they tried - and failed - to adapt an existing design because it's already well-known and has been used (after a fashion) in the comics. Iconic as Christiansen's design may be, even that was a missed opportunity. By giving Onyx Prime any kind of traditional robot mode, the lore neglects to properly explain the likes of Ravage, or any other character whose robot mode is their beast mode. Why would Cybertron as a whole have any quadrupeds or avians if the beast element has only ever been what a 'normal' robot transforms into?

This character was just begging for a beastial robot mode along the lines of an Eastern-style dragon, or something like a Kirin, or even just the iconic Christiansen centaur that transforms into... something else. Due to the way this was approached - with undue reverence to a design at least twelve years old (and used just a handful of times in the IDW comics, almost ten years ago) rather than Hasbro making their own choice about what Onyx Prime is - Age of the Primes Onyx Prime is more of an action figure that can be rearranged into vaguely beast-like forms rather than a defining moment in TransFormers lore.

And that's my problem with the Thirteen Primes in a nutshell: Hasbro have failed to produce anything unique and interesting with what was already a dull and superfluous concept. Even the Prime Wars Trilogy managed to do something interesting and unexpected, even if it wasn't that great or even remotely unique. In Age of the Primes, the Thirteen are consistent only in their mediocrity... from the nonsense 'vehicle' modes (Prima, Solus and Alchemist), to the lazy retoolings of already lazy molds (Vector), to the wilful nonsense of a partsformer which, instead of being able to transform into anything, can only transform into a collection of nothing (Amalgamous).

My only real reason for acquiring this was to see if it could pass as being something other than a TransFormers toy... something different enough to fit into, if not create, its own universe... Had it been a better toy in and of itself, perhaps it would. It'll be interesting to see if Hasbro repaint this in blue, gold and silver to represent IDW's Shockwave disguised as Onyx Prime... If they do, I may be tempted to trade this one in for a version with a more impressive paint job. Now that I've got this post out of the way, I'm certainly going to add a little paint of my own to this.

To round off, I'd like to highlight that this thing is sold as a Leader class toy, now costing about £55. Way back in the spring/summer of 2017, I opined that Hasbro might be looking to pull a fast one in their cost cutting, and change the way the size classes are applied. I wasn't 100% on the money but, as I noted in the follow-up post three years later, I certainly wasn't wrong. Deluxe class has remained largely consistent, albeit with the updated G1 Mini Autobots being substantially smaller Deluxes, but there are toys that are effectively Deluxe class being sold as Voyagers, and Hasbro are no longer even trying to hide their avarice by chucking in pointless accessories, the way they did with Studio Series 'Leader class' Shockwave.

And now, another five years later, Onyx Prime is a Voyager class toy - both in terms of size and engineering complexity (though I'm inclined to think I'm being overly generous on the latter) - being sold at a vastly inflated price point.

I know I'm going to be in a tiny minority in disliking this toy... but, to me, it represents everything that's wrong with Hasbro, at the very least since Chris Cocks took over.