Bot Reviews: Transformers: Earthrise Deluxe Arcee

Regardless of anything else that happened in 2020, it was at least Arcee’s year. The famous Autobot in pink got a new Studio Series figure, a new Cyberverse figure, a really neat third-party figure in the form of Ocular Max’s Azalea Protoform, she’ll have a Masterpiece out soon, and, finally, there’s this new Earthrise release.

Between being the first recurring female character in the franchise, going under-represented on the toy side of things until the 21st century, sometimes receiving a questionable treatment by both her merchandise and her fiction, and generally, having the original “slender lady figure somehow becomes a car” design, new Arcee figures tend to undergo a lot of scrutiny, especially when they fumble the ball as hard as the Masterpiece one.

To sum it up, the MP really doesn’t look good on multiple levels (this is important later, I promise). The rest of the MP line goes for cartoon accuracy in its designs, and she goes for anime-fanservice-cheesecake-pinup design for no good reason, which also leads to a figure with a ridiculously massive backpack of alternate mode parts, apparently to facilitate this. Let’s put it this way: Quite a few War for Cybertron Trilogy figures openly borrow sculptwork and engineering from their Masterpiece figures. I’m very, very thankful that Earthrise Arcee doesn’t. Nonetheless, Earthrise Arcee very much stands in the shadow of that figure, as the sane, sensible, normal-on-main alternative.

Thanks to spotty distribution (forgivable in 2020), Earthrise Arcee’s proven to be very hard to find in stores, though, if you miss her, she’s getting a straight re-release in 2021’s Kingdom line, so she’ll be available again. This Arcee’s got a lot to prove, and makes a few controversial design decisions of her own, so let’s see how she holds up, and how she compares to some of her other releases.

The Backpack Thing

So, let’s get the big thing about this Arcee’s design out of the way: Her animation model wasn’t really concerned with being something that could translate into a transforming toy easily, so most modern transforming takes on her wind up being saddled with big backpacks of car parts the character didn’t have, since all that stuff has to go somewhere. The Thrilling 30 toy had one, and the Masterpiece has a massive one. Ocular Max’s Azalea managed to not have one, but that was thanks to a Masterpiece-level engineering budget (which makes the actual Masterpiece look worse, natch).

Faced with the prospect of having to make the design work at a Deluxe-class level, Earthrise’s designers opted for a controversial solution: Just pop it off. So, this version of Arcee has a backpack of car parts that’s detachable, to the consternation of some.

There’s an important distinction here: Modern takes Arcee that aren’t trying to be the G1 design shouldn’t have backpacks anymore, since they shouldn’t have to be a “female body with a pile of car parts to hide” design to begin with. Titans Return Arcee is a good example, whereas Cyberverse Arcee really didn’t need that backpack when they literally could have just made a design that didn’t need one.

But Earthrise Arcee, like the rest of the War for Cybertron Trilogy, has a really specific mission statement: Be the original cartoon animation model as much as possible on a mainline Generations budget, and in that light, I’m more than fine with the detachable backpack of stuff, since it makes this design work, and results in a better-looking robot mode.

(Also, a personal bugbear: People need to stop doing photo shoots with this figure and leaving the backpack on most or all of the time. It’s supposed to come off, to make the figure look more accurate and generally better!)

With that out of the way, let’s look at the rest of her.

Robot Mode

This is a straight-up G1 Cartoon Arcee, directly ripping her character model from the animation and translating her to plastic. For scale, she’s almost exactly the same height as her Thrilling 30 incarnation, making her stand eye-to-eye with shorter Siege deluxes like Sideswipe and Prowl, and accurately scaling with recent mainline versions of the Animated Movie Cast (including the upcoming Studio Series 86 versions).

The sculpt on her body’s pretty dead-on, and is the first time an official Hasbro figure has done this. Even the Thrilling 30 figure had a weird, sort-of-fanservicey design, giving her an oddly humanized belly and lower torso, like a model wearing a swimsuit, but not this one. Sure, it’s still obviously the figure of a lady in robot form, but only as much as it needs to be, which is to say as much as the original was.

All kinds of tiny details are replicated here, like her funky multi-part collar, and the little rectangles on her stomach. She’s just way cleaner and humanoid than the T30 version, and thanks to the nature of the transformation, actually manages to have better proportions than Azalea Protoform.

What remains of her backpack is still a bit bulkier than the two lone pylons of her cartoon model, but takes up a heck of a lot less real-estate than any of the other official ones (Azalea still has her beat in that department, though).

If there’s one thing I think they didn’t nail, it’s her facesculpt. It looks good and characterful (G1 Arcee may have been a warrior, but had a very soft side) but doesn’t quite nail the look of her animation appearances. Of course, the T30 one didn’t either, but I think it was closer.

Also, maybe this is just me, but this time around, her semi-open hands came out looking a little clawlike, to my eyes. Plus, when viewed from behind, she has a ton of unsightly gaps in her legs and torso, not to mention four cuts in her thighs when viewed from the front that I really wish they’d found a way to cover up.

In terms of colors, Arcee is once again incredibly animation-faithful, in a light pastel pink and white colorscheme, with bits of grey. It’s the exact same shades of pink and white as both the Titans Return and T30 versions, though laid out in a much more animation-accurate way than the latter, including her strange, grey lower stomache. It’s actually impressive how close they got it, with only her pink feet, and solid pink forearms differing from her official color model. Well, that and her head, which once again eschews a light pink face and painted lipstick in favor of being solid white, another thing other versions of her got right instead. Also, I wish they’d painted her lower torso the entire way around, instead of stopping halfway, and leaving her backside entirely white.

One area in which they decided to intentionally depart from her character model is her feet, which they decided to make really long and bulky, in the name of stability, something I appreciate, because she really does stay up super-easily.

That leads to the other big selling point of this version, aside from screen-accuracy: Her poseability. She’s got the full War for Cybertron Trilogy level of articulation, including ankle tilts, a waist joint, and even includes bonus bits like thigh and bicep swivels. The ankle tilts took me by surprise, as it doesn’t initially seem like she has them, and they work kind of like ratchets, clicking between positions instead of smoothly tilting. Also, thanks to her transformation, while her wrists don’t swivel, they can tilt inward and outwards, and she even has a bit of backpack articulation, where it’s mounted on a tight joint, so it can be slightly tilted out of the way if need be. Something about her clean, humanoid sculpt really highlights this articulation more so than the average War for Cybertron Trilogy figure, making her looks really dynamic and expressive in most poses, and fun to mess around with.

Unfortunately, she’s a little bit under-armed, coming only with a single, small, diminutive-looking pistol. Strangely, it’s cast entirely in transparent grey plastic, with no paint. Not really sure what they were going for, here. Still, she can hold it just fine, and, strangely, it’s got a peg sculpted into its side that lets it plug into her backside, for a quick draw.

Her other big accessory is, of course, her removable car backpack. It comes packaged attached to her, and needs to be removed via a kind-of-stiff system of pressing down on a switch on her left side, and sliding it out downwards. It’s equally tight to install as it is to take off, but at least this means it stays on tight when you transform her.

After taking it off, the backpack undergoes a transformation into a hoverboard mode, that involves a scary step: The panels her two car mode mode wheels are attached to need to rotate from being all the way inside her backpack, to all the way outside it, a process that involves a bit of “am I going to break this?” levels of force, plus a panic-inducing snap, but no, you’re supposed to do that, and it is supposed to sound like that.

As a hoverboard, this is still pretty plainly a chunk of the back of her car mode, just with her tires flopped outward, like some sort of drone-style hovering propellers. That being said, there are a pair of tabs on it that are specifically designed to peg into her feet, letting her ride it with one leg forward, pre-posed. Plus, the whole thing’s stable enough that it works like a figure stand for her on top of that, letting her peg one foot in and assume a variety of poses. On one hand, it doesn’t look like much. On the other hand, at least they came up with a function for this disposable chunk of car rather than “set it aside,” and it, once again, manages to be fun to mess around with.

Since I had them on-hand, I tested this Arcee’s compatibility with Thrilling 30 and Titans Return Arcee’s gear, and I’m pleased to report she can use the accessories from both figures. The Thrilling 30 version’s swords happen to look really good with her, as you can see above.

My most pleasant discovery was that she can actually hold T30 Arcee’s weapons properly, not awkwardly, the way the original figure did. In fact, I’ll probably chuck her own pistol into my bag of accessories and just give her this set of guns.

Speaking of accessory compatibility, one War for Cybertron feature that she seems to be lacking is the line’s weapons ports, with only a pair of holes in her feet if you want to add parts from other figures. On one hand, they presumably didn’t want to break the sculpt up more than they did. On the other hand, I’d assumed she’d be able to combine with Cog to produce her shoulder-cannon configuration from the Siege TV show. Oh, well.

Transformation

For starters, you attach her backpack, and it stays on the whole time. After that, no way around this, this is a pure shellformer. Basically, you unfold her combined backpack into a car, and crunch her robot mode up to fit inside it. That’s what you get when you’re trying to imitate a physically impossible transformation on a mainline budget.

90 percent of this transformation is easy, but it’s the other 10 percent that’s a pain. Basically, you need to figure out a way to compress her robot mode legs in a way that doesn’t let them drag on the ground, and the instructions don’t really show you how. Even a lot of online galleries I’ve checked out can’t figure it out. Reader, I tell you now, I spent about half an hour messing with it, and finally figured it out. Here’s how they go:

Pay really close attention to where her knees, swiveling thighs, the tops of her shins, and her feet specifically are in relation to everything else. Also, no matter how hard I try, I definitely can’t get a panel on the left side of the car mode (but not the right) to sit flush, and I suspect I lost the QC roulette on this one.

Vehicle Mode

The one advantage of this transformation is it results in this version of Arcee having the most animation-accurate altmode any release has had thusfar, lacking the clinched midsection both the T30 version and Azalea have.

Yes, the swoopy, retro-futuristic Barbie Dreamcar-looking vehicle is once again reproduced in near-perfect detail and color, save for those side panels that, once again, don’t stay flush.

They did make a couple odd color choices, namely missing some of the grey paint on the model’s front and sides. And, strangely, the swooping fin-like thing uptop is made of that same clear, grey plastic as her gun. In this mode, it’s revealed to be used on the car’s windshield, as well.

Gimmick-wise, this car mode doesn’t do much except roll, though, as mentioned before, if you get the transformation right, it does roll really well. Aside from that, there’s no weapons ports or anything, putting her behind the Titans Return and T30 versions, but her grey gun can easily clip on the car’s underside, at least.

Overall

This is a strange, vexing figure. Compared to previous iterations of the character. parts of it are clear, excellent upgrades, but other parts are definite downgrades, in a way that makes the whole thing a sidegrade, basically. It goes without saying that this is infinitely better than what we’ve seen of the Masterpiece, at least.

Another thing I’ll get out of the way: In the category of Best Deluxe Arcee, the Titans Return exclusive version still wins overall, simply due to everything about it working really well. But if we’re talking about “best specific update of G1 Cartoon Arcee,” then I’m just comparing it to the Thrilling 30 version and Azalea. In that case, robot mode is a clear, direct upgrade, incredibly poseable, stable, well-sculpted, and animation-accurate. The detachable backpack leads to a much more streamlined robot mode, and it’s just fun to pose and handle. On the other hand, the T30 one still has the best transformation of the three, compared to the complex Azalea transformation, and Earthrise Arcee’s fiddly panel-forming. And when it comes to the vehicle mode, the Earthrise version may be the most accurate, but the other two hold together better, and do more things.

So, is this version worth it? It depends on what you consider important. If you prioritize the robot mode, then I’d say this is worth getting. But if the transformation and vehicle mode bother you, you might want to hold off, and keep your other versions instead.