So as of about 10 days ago at HasCon, it's official: Power of the Primes, the third and final leg in the Prime Wars Trilogy, will return to combiners! And we're fine with that - or so say the row of Combiner Wars boxsets RAC has in his room. Combiner Wars was fun, and produced some good toys... but it wasn't perfect. There's room for improvement, and he thought of some areas that it'd be nice to see Power of the Primes address. Keep reading!
Joint tension is a very difficult balance-beam to walk, particularly with ball-joints like the Deluxe hips where the slightest variation in molding can cause looseness and floppiness - and where, conversely, too much tension can be catastrophic. Slug's hip joints look very much like any other Combiner Wars style Deluxe's, so we know the same approach is being taken in terms of basic structure. But the devil's in the details, and we just won't know until we have finished figures in our hands.
The solution? Tough to say, but a guess is more redundancies in terms of pegs and tabs. And less tabs that require super-precise tolerances in order to work properly. Volcanicus, the Power of the Primes Dinobot combiner, also integrates extra combiner hands into the torso to add mass, so hopefully it'll also improve stability as well.
Power of the Primes is already working on that with ratcheting ankle tilts and dedicated hands which seem to even have jointed wrists! But the other big thing that needs to be worked on is the hip articulation of the torso. The ratchets need to be strong enough in both directions, and have enough positions to not make posing awkward. If those hips can be worked out, we could be looking at more dynamic and stable combiners.
The big exception on the US side was Victorion, who combined the entire team's gear into an incredibly impressive sword. More of this, please! TakaraTomy was getting the knack of this at the end of their Unite Warriors run as well, with Computron and Ruination/Baldigus having combined weapons that were able to mount some, if not all, of the rest of the team's weaponry. Yeah, it looked kludgey sometimes, but it's a nice feature to have. The only question is whether you can do that when you have to divide the accessories cost between five figures, and not as part of a boxset. But even if you can't, we need better...
So, more places to stow stuff discretely would be good. Or possibly, I'd actually be happy with less weapons variety, more duplicate weapons between molds, (and less weapons with one hollow side) if it meant that you got a symmetrical look out of your stored weapons. It's a small thing, but it'd make a big difference.
One of the things that many people wanted added to the line, we know we're getting right off the bat: beast modes! While that has the chance of its own stagnation - and we fully expect base Dinobot bodies to be reused for Terrorcons wherever possible - that still means that in the waves we know about we'll have cars, jets, and dinosaurs and monsters in the mix. Granted, the Jets are modded Combiner Wars molds... but Jazz is new, and represents some progress in even the most basic car combiner limb's body type. We're hopeful!
Taken together, you might think we're not looking forward to having combiners back. But we are! Combiner Wars made for some fun toys and easily the best take on the concept since the 1980s. With a few years to polish the format and think about how they could improve on it, we're expecting Hasbro could work some real wonders this time around. We'll find out in a couple months!
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