Bot Reviews: Transformers: Age of the Primes Leader Megatronus the Fallen

The Legacy trilogy has concluded, and we’re onto the next installment of the modern Transformers mainline: Age of the Primes. The big premise of this toyline is that between continuing to make updates of characters from across the franchise’s history, we’re also going to get new figures of the Thirteen Primes, the first Transformers created by Primus to defend against Unicron. And, I’ll be honest, I’m kind of lukewarm on the concept. 

See, the Thirteen are a 21st century addition to Transformers lore, and it’s always felt to me like Hasbro’s simultaneously tried too hard and not hard enough to make them into a thing. Their cameo as dead guys in Transformers One’s probably the most mainstream thing they’ve been in.

Okay, a few of them, like Alpha Trion (who was retroactively made into one of them) and Alchemist Prime have had noteable solo roles in recent stuff, but as a group, most of these guys are still very ill-defined, and aren’t characters so much as they’re bullet points of backstory. See, I’m a character collector through and through, and the other Primes in this first wave, Prima and Solus Prime, are among the ones that haven’t really *done* anything, just sort of existed. But there’s a couple of exceptions, and today’s subject, The Fallen is one of them.

See, before we knew that his real name was Megatronus (which sounds dumb, if you ask me), and before he was the main bad guy of the 2009 Transformers movie sequel, The Fallen made his early appearances in the pages of Dreamwave’s comic book miniseries, War Within: The Dark Ages, by Simon Furman. Set on Cybertron in the distant past, at a time in the war when Optimus and Megatron had both gone missing, the miniseries saw The Fallen arrive on the planet, on a mission to perform a mysterious ritual deep beneath the surface. Honestly, like most of Dreamwave’s output, The Dark Ages wasn’t very good, but this early version of The Fallen really stuck with me, just because of the vibes the character had. We didn’t know his name, or anything about the Thirteen, because it hadn’t been written down yet. He was just this unknown thing from some other time, so impossibly ancient that everything about him had been lost from record, and it was impossible to understand what he was or what he wanted to do, and Transformers live for millions of years already, so that was really saying something.

The more we learned about him, the less interesting he (and the 13) got, so nothing else he’s appeared in ever had those exact vibes again. And the reason I’m reminiscing about this one specific story is because HasTak made the incredible decision to specifically base this new version of The Fallen off of his original Dreamwave comics design from those issues, like they were targeting me, specifically. So, fine, they got me. Let’s have a look at this elder abomination from before time began.

Robot Mode

Right out of the box, The Fallen confronts you with an impressive illusion: You look at him, and you go, whoa, this ‘bot’s huge. And, to be fair, he’s about a head taller than Kingdom Leader-Class Galvatron, as well as a bit wider. But, to scale him out with some other modern Leader-class guys, Kingdom Ultra Magnus is a head taller than he is, as is Studio Series Rise of the Beasts Scourge.The Fallen’s wavemate, G2 Universe Grimlock, is more like a head and a half bigger, and a good deal wider. 

There’s just something about The Fallen’s sculpt that communicates heft, size, and presence. On top of that, as mentioned above, it’s a nearly dead-on copy of how he looked in the Dreamwave comics, down to tiny little surface details, like his big, three-toed feet.

The Fallen’s whole design motif is that he’s a walking furnace-man, covered in vents and grills that reveal the flames burning within him. Uptop, he’s got a face that kinda-sorta looks like the Decepticon logo, mainly due to his forehead crest, but is dominated by a wicked-looking mouthplate with a vent on it, almost like a skeletal scowl.

He’s a pretty clean robot, too, with the only altmode bits on him being some neatly folded-up treads on his back, and a couple little weapons pods on his shoulders. In fact, the missile pod on his left shoulder is a seperate piece that you pop on out of the box, because it’s a comic detail.

Let’s skip ahead to a few of his accessories, because they’re important: The Fallen comes with four fire effect parts, cast in yellow and red soft plastic. They’re important, because in The Dark Ages, The Fallen was perpetually on fire. Like, he always had flames coming out of him. So, to replicate that effect, the larger flames go on 5-millimeter ports on his shoulders, while the smaller pair go in ports behind his head. It’s a wicked-looking set of effect, that really brings the character together, and I rarely have him out without them on. 

For colors, he’s mostly different shades of black, dark gray, and dark purple. I thought they added the purple for color variety at first, until I checked the actual comics pages, and nope, he had dark purple there, too. Also, as you can see in my photos, it’s a darker purple than a lot of the stock photography out there, so it blends nicely. 

The important bit of his color scheme, though, is that all the little vents and ports on his body have yellow paint, depicting those internal flames glowing. It’s, again, a wicked effect, that looks stunning against his dark exterior, and adding the orange-yellow flames only makes it better. 

For build quality, this guy’s really solidly engineered. You can tell he’s got a really high partscount, contrasting with how simple Grimlock is, but he manages not to feel fiddly, or loose. Everything tabs in, and holds together, and all of his joints are nice and tight. And he’s got some real heft to him, too. All those other modern Leader-Classes I mentioned earlier, Grimlock, Ultra Magnus, Scourge, and Galvatron? He feels heavier than all of them, in my unscientific “pick him up and wave him around” testing. And despite his weight, he stays stable in his feet, since they’ve got a wide footprint. 

I’d have been fine if his articulation was a bit limited, thanks to all the other stuff he’s got going on, but The Fallen’s shockingly bendy.

He’s got universal ankles, knees and hips, a waist swivel, wrist swivels, hands that open and close on mitten joints, and universal elbows. His shoulders are on universal joints, and have this neat feature where you can detach them a bit from his torso, to cheat a bigger range of motion.

Finally, his head’s on a ball joint with enough of a range of motion that he can look down upon lesser life-forms, a very important feature.

I honestly wasn’t expecting him to have the level of jointage he’s got, and it’s really easy to get him to do a lot of expressive things. 

For accessories and features, this is another area where I’d have been fine with nothing but the flame effects, especially since he didn’t really have any weapons or anything in the Dreamwave comics. But, again, they somehow found the budget to give him a giant pile of stuff, most of which is surprisingly complex. To go back to those flames of his, you can pretty much give the pair of shoulder-mounted ones to any other Transformer with 5-millimeter ports on the sides of their shoulders.

The smaller flames are a little more versatile, with 5-millimeter pegs on the bottom, and 5-millimeter ports on the backs of them. Sadly, they don’t have the kind of smaller hole-within-the-peg that a lot of modern Transformers blast effects have, so there’s a lot of guns that these flames can’t interact with. But any weapon with a 5-millimeter barrel on the end can instantly become a flamethrower.

Now, onto the rest of his stuff. Apparently, it’s all based on things that later versions of The Fallen used, not that I’m super-familiar with his later, less-good appearances.

Firstly, he’s got a big, blockly arm cannon, colored purple, silver, and yellow, called the “Requiem Blaster,” which sticks onto his arm perfectly on a 5-millimeter peg. There’s another pair of pegs on either side of it, too, if you want to make some ridiculous weapon combinations. It’s also got a little red logo on the top of it, which, according to the packaging, the The Fallen’s personal insignia.

It’s got a 5-millimeter port on the end that can host blast effects, but has another, cooler, undocumented feature due to his transformation: You can open the cannon up, and transform it into an even bigger, extended version of itself, in a one-step transformation that both feels and looks cool.

And he comes with a black gunbarrel that you can stick on the end of it to make it even more of a ludicrously huge cannon.

Speaking of that gunbarrel, it’s sculpted to look like the one that G1 Megatron has on his back. In a cool little feature, the 5-millimeter peg on this barrel can click sideways, so you can stick this barrel onto one of the ports on the Fallen’s back, again, echoing G1 Megatron. Or, use one if the ports on his forearms, for an extra gun.

Next up, he’s got a big knife.

It’s probably supposed to be a sword, but in his hands, it feels more like a Jason Voorhees-type machete.

It’s got techie sculpting on it, and a silver-painted blade, and just looks strangely wicked on this guy. It fits into his open hands well enough, but a flared base on the handle means that Transformers with closed fists can’t hold it, only bots with opening hands. But it’s also got 5-millimeter pegs on either side, so The Fallen, and lots of other bots, can used it as a wristblade. 

Next up, he’s got…a trident? Like Aquaman?

Or maybe it’s a pitchfork, since he’s kind of got a Lucifer thing going on. It came disassembled in the box, and I needed to fit the three-pronged head on the end of a purple baton.

That end has some silver paint on it, and is made with plastic so soft, that it’s a little bit warped out of the box. There’s a tiny little peg on the middle prong that you can use to mount a blast effect…Just not any of the ones he comes with, since they lack the right kind of connection.

Like the knife, it’s also got 5-millimeter pegs near its base, for forearm-mounting. Unlike the knife, it’s got the kind of handle any Transformer can hold. 

For another undocumented feature, the ends of the knife and trident are compatible, so you can connect them into a big, lengthy staff, making me think of the weapon his Bayverse iteration wielded.

And he’s got swivelling wrists, so he can totally Darth Maul it up with the full weapon. 

When it comes to storage, the instructions have you hang the trident and knife on pegs on his back, pointing downwards, and dangle the Requiem Blaster off of a port on the back of his shoulder, like it’s ready for a sneak attack.

Me, I like combining the melee weapons into their staff mode, and hanging them diagonally on his back, for what it does to his silhouette.

And that’s the thing with The Fallen: There’s enough going on with his accessories that he’s one of those figures with an aura of customizability.

I count 14 5-millimeter ports on him, all on his upper torso, including, interestingly, two on each forearm. He’s got enough going on with his own accessories that you can weaponize him up in a bunch of different ways, and that’s without even adding in more accessories. Basically, he’s got a lot going on.

Transformation

Speaking of having a lot going on, there’s his transformation. For a figure this complicated already, I’d have been fine with him having a relatively basic transformation, like on Grimlock, but that’s not the case here. Basically, you’re unfolding one set of treads from his back, flipping and folding his lower torso around to make the other set of treads, exploding his torso out into a bunch of layers, and re-forming it so his arms form the tank turret, around the Requiem Blaster. But that ain’t the half of it. There’s just…a lot of steps. Everything requires a bunch of flips, rotations, and little adjustments.

Here’s the thing, though: It’s really fun to do, and it’s surprisingly intuitive, despite all the steps involved. You grab a chunk of plastic, and you can instantly tell what you need to do. Compare this to the Galvatron (and Straxus) tooling, which has a similarly complicated transformation, but one where I’m always forgetting bits of, whereas I have no such problems on this guy.

I think the worst I can say is when going back to robot mode, I have trouble remembering how to get his torso back together in a way that doesn’t bump different parts against each other, but that really feels like a Me Problem.

Tank Mode

The Fallen didn’t transform in The Dark Ages, but a tank mode for him did appear in a Dreamwave profile book. However, the new figure’s tank mode doesn’t seem to be based on that one, beyond also being an H-Tank.

This doesn’t bug me, since it wasn’t used in the story at all, and his robot mode was nice and accurate.

So, in Transformers fandom parlance, an H-Tank refers to a common kind of made-up tank design you see a lot of bots change into, where the tank doesn’t really have a body, just a set of two treads with a turret in the middle, so it looks like an “H” when viewed from above.

The Fallen does have a fair amount of stuff between those treads of his, but they still dominate the shape of him. And it’s an impressively beefy shape, definitely feeling like a proper Leader-class vehicle. It does a kinda-sorta-okay job of pretending it’s not a re-arranged robot, with the biggest offender being the turret itself, which is really clearly two folded-up arms with a cannon jammed in between them. Still, it’s big, it’s mean, and it comes with spikes on either side of its front treads. 

For colors, a lot of his fiery vents are hidden in this mode, so he’s a lot more like a slab of black and purple darkness, with only a few dabs of yellow on the front and sides. It’s intimidating in a way the robot mode isn’t. You can also add flames to this form, again, with the two larger orange pieces fitting at the front of the turret, albeit in a way that doesn’t match how fire works at all.

Honestly, the sharp orange against the black makes it look like the tank’s got eyes, with the tank turret looking like an insectoid proboscis, which is a whole other level of freaky. 

For build quality, this is the first place where the figure really stumbles. The tank body itself stays together nice and well, but the tank turret does not. The problem is that the folded-up arms only plug into the Requiem Blaster via a couple of pegs at the back of the turret, and it’s very easy for these pegs to become undone when you move the turret around.

I’ve learned to start grabbing the turret from the back to stop it from coming undone, but honestly, this could have been fixed if there were also some pegs and holes at the front of the turret. It’s a rare miss for this guy.

For features, firstly, he actually does roll, albeit on four little squeaky wheels, instead of his (completely fake) treads. The wheels get the job done, though. Next, he’s got a fully rotating turret, and a barrel that you can raise and lower, though doing both of these things risks making the tank turret come apart. 

When it comes to accessory integration, I mentioned the two large flame effects that you can place near the front of the turret. As for the rest of them, the instructions give you the bizarre option to clip both his weapons, and his two tiny flame effect parts together on a long spear, and peg that spear to the side of the tank. Flames don’t work that way!

But there’s plenty of better places you can stash them. You can make him belch flames out of the back of the turret, or at the front of his treads, or out of his sides.

You can also split his sword and trident up, and mount them on his sides, or at the front of him, or on the turret. You’ve got options! He’s got eight visible weapons ports that you can arm up, and if you flip the front of his arms sideways, you can up that number to ten, by accessing the ones on his forearms.

Like the robot mode, it feels like he’s got a ton of flexibility to him. 

Overall

The thing I keep coming back to with The Fallen is how uncompromised he feels. There’s a saying, or rather, a shape in the business world, a triangle with “fast,” “cheap,” and “good” written on its corners. The idea is you can only pick two out of the three when putting out a product or service, and that one is sacrificed for the other two. With Leader-class Transformers, I think there’s a similar thing, but it’s a shape with a few more corners, and they say stuff like “size,” “high partscount,” “high articulation,” “Lots of color,” “a lot of accessories,” and a few other things, and it’s generally understood that a figure having some of them means it needs to give up a few others. But The Fallen is somehow hits every corner of the shape, with no compromises. He’s big, complex, poseable, and has a ton of features and accessories. Plus, he’s based on the first, and best version of the character.

Even if you don’t know who The Fallen is, he’s just an incredibly cool-looking figure, one with a ton of playability, and one that’s just very well-designed.

I said I’m not getting any of the other Thirteen Primes, but if they’re all as good as this one, we’re in for a fun line, indeed. As for The Fallen, if you have Leader-class money to spend, he’s absolutely, positively worth picking up, and I highly recommend him. Just maybe forget the “Megatronus” part of the name, like history was supposed to have.

For over 200 Bot, Non-Bot, and Retro Bot Reviews, click here to view my archive.