Bot Reviews: Transformers: Titans Return Deluxe Windblade with Scorchfire

Windblade was the first, most complex, and most successful creation of Hasbro’s fan-vote campaigns for its Generations lines. In 2013, the fandom was tasked with creating an entire character out of a series of online polls, deciding everything about their appearance, name, design, personality, gender, and more, with the resultant creation getting her own Deluxe-class toy in the Thrilling 30 line the following year, as well as an ongoing role in IDW’s Transformers comics. Since her debut, Windblade’s become a bit of a breakout favorite in her own right, going on to make the jump to multiple Transformers TV shows, and plenty more comics. So, with all that in mind, it’s a shame the actual original figure they put out in 2014 wasn’t very good.

I really wanted to like that first figure, because I liked the character on so many other levels, but it just wasn’t great. Rather than do a big, long writeup, I’ll sum it up this way: It was nearly impossible to stand her up, thanks to weirdly-designed collapsing heels, her wings were a strange, fiddly affair with no obvious “proper” robot-mode position, the fan on the back of her head was supposed to detach, but broke off if you tried, her headsculpt was…not great, and generally, the whole figure had an overly-complicated, over-designed, fragile feeling to it.

Fortunately, Windblade’s subsequent popularity that plenty more figures of her followed, albeit mostly gimmick toys, or simplified Deluxes for the Robots in Disguise and Cyberverse lines. But in 2017, there was a brand-new redux at the mainline level, in the form of this Titans Return figure. Well, I say brand-new, but the figure shares a few parts with Titans Return Scourge and Highbrow, but is mostly a new tooling.

Either way, this version of Windblade felt a lot like it was setting out to specifically fix the problems of the first one. Standing in the way of that, though, was the wave it came out in, which wound up being a bit hard to find, and it showing up for a single hot minute in Canada was what snagged me my copy back in the day. Regardless of her rarity, let’s see if this version managed to finally do the character justice.

Scorchfire

As was the style at the time, Windblade comes with a small Titan Master robot that forms her head. In Scorchfire’s case, some of her parts are apparently from Fracas (Scourge’s Titan Master), but she’s mostly a new figure.

Also new is the character, who as far as I can tell, isn’t based on anyone, with her tiny headsculpt showing off a fairly unique-looking head with a big, round goggle-visor. That’s about all that’s unique about this robot, though, since there wasn’t much room to play around with the tiny Titan Master format. Scorchfire’s got almost no paint on her robot form, as was, again, the style in Titans Return, save for a big glob of white on her head that picks out her goggles and facepaint, and it’s kind of a messy-looking bit of deco.

Outside of that, she’s about what you’d expect from the scale: Poseable at the neck, shoulder, hip and knee joints, though her legs are fused together into one solid mass. The real selling point, though, is folding her up into a cube, changing her into Windblade’s head.

This headsculpt really, really works with the format. See, a line-wide issue in Titans Return was that every robot head had this big cube of folded-up robot parts behind it, and that worked better on some heads than others. And on Windblade, it actually works pretty well, thanks to her headsculpt’s black “hair” sort of absorbing the black cube into itself.

And let me tell you, whereas the Thrilling 30 figure had kind of an odd, awkward headsculpt, this makes for a really nice-looking Windblade face, one that seems to have been directly inspired by how Sarah Stone drew and colored her in her initial IDW Comics miniseries. Of course, there’s still the conceptual oddness of her looking like a geisha with a painted face, black hair, and hairclip, but she pulls it off well. In particular, her face has an expression I’d describe as somewhere between stern, a little sad, and a little bit wondering, which fits with her character’s role in IDW’s comics.

They may not have painted the Titan Master robot much, but they went wild on the deco on her robot face, with its white face, red makeup accents, blue eyes, blue head crest, and gold hair clip. There’s a lot of paint, but it all came out clean, fortunately, and looks really nice.

Robot Mode

Being a relatively new character, Windblade’s character design has been fairly consistent across the franchise, no matter the continuity, which makes this figure interesting, because they chose to change her design up a little bit. Granted, the broad strokes are correct (a lady with VTOL jet wings and a geisha motif), and the torso, head and forearms are pretty direct copies of her usual design, but on this version, her legs, wings, backpack and shoulders are all a little bit different in sculpting, not that that’s a bad thing.

She’s got interesting proportions in this form. They look pretty standard, right until you look closely, and notice she’s a bit bulkier than usual, with thicker legs and broader shoulders. Again, it’s not a bad look, and the bits of chunk to her suit this figure.

The only bit of chunk I don’t care for is the whole giant cockpit on her back. While basically every version of her has it hanging there, this version’s got a particularly large block of plastic, and I wish they’d found a way to have it take up less real estate.

In hand, this figure has almost an entirely different handfeel to the Thrilling 30 one, which was made up of a lot of tiny, thin parts. This one, on the other hand, feels like it was made out of blocks of solid, chunky plastic.

A big part of this is her wings being a couple of solid pieces pinned to her torso, instead of a mixture of parts on a couple of tiny rods. She’s made out of that kind of glossy, airy plastic they used in the Prime Wars Trilogy lines, rather than the kinds of materials War for Cybertron’s figures are made out of, so it feels a bit different from current figures, and makes her feel not as sturdy as she could, though again, being made out of so many solid chunks of plastic sure helps compensate for that.

Windblade’s colors are pretty much her usual straight red and black, some of it painted, some of it cast in the plastic. In fact, her fairly simple two-tone colors (which aren’t a bad thing, mind you), are what probably freed up the deco budget to put so much color on her face. She’s not entirely two-tone, though, with a silver Autobrand on her chest, and a little bit of blue around her collar, but that’s basically it.

A big improvement in this version is that, thanks to her more conventionally-styled, non-stiletto feet, she can stand really well. In fact, mine came out of the package with a loose knee, and even with that, she could still stand fine (I tightened a screw later on to fix it). That being said, her substantial, chunky backpack makes it hard to get her to stand on one leg, or do any kind of pose where her feet aren’t planted firmly on the ground.

For poseability, this is pre-War For Cybertron, which means no ankles or wrists. She also lacks a waist, unfortunately. Outside of that, she has the expected Deluxe-sized joints, and I particularly appreciate her swiveling thighs, even if she’s a bit troublesome to pose with her backpack. Speaking of her backpack, her wings, instead of having no defined position, have exactly two, thanks to the single pin each of them is on: Straight, or swept back. I prefer the visual of her wings swept back, though keeping them straight does make her more stable. All that being said, her chunky build combines with her slightly limited articulation in a way that makes her feel less dynamic than she should. Luckily, her accessories help counter that.

Almost every iteration of Windblade that gave her accessories has armed her with a specific curved purple energy sword, sometimes with a scabbard included, but the Titans version opted for something different, giving her two oversized translucent yellow blades, painted in silver. They’re somewhat unlike her to use, being a lot more brutal-looking than her usual elegant weapon, but they look good. I do wish they were sculpted a bit sleeker, without the mess of sticky-out bits near the handle and on the blade, but they look nice enough from a distance. More importantly, they’re fun to pose and twirl, and easy to make look dynamic. ‘

They do make me miss wrist swivels, though, as they’d have gone perfectly with these swords. If you want, you can also clip them together, and have her hold the assembled blade like some kind of Cloud Strife-esque Buster Sword, though you have to pick between the two handles.

As a nice bonus, there’s bespoke peg holes on the back of her cockpit, letting you stash them behind her back, a feature I appreciate.

Here’s another nice bonus: If you happen to have the sword and scabbard from the original toy, like I do, then the sword still fits perfectly in her hands, though I admit it feels a bit undersized on this figure.

Not only that, but there’s a slit in the side of her thigh that lets you mount the scabbard there, same as on the original toy.

I’ve got no idea if this was deliberate, or a coincidence, but the Takara Legends version runs with this, and comes with these two accessories instead of the other swords.

Transformation

Again, this is basically the opposite of the Thrilling 30 version’s fiddly “line up all the little tabs” kind of transformation, to the extreme. In fact, I’d describe this version of Windblade as being Generation One levels of simple.

You pop the head off, fold the cockpit into where it went, pull down the legs and flip them around, then adjust the arms (and a couple other small things), and just like that, you’re done.

Jet Mode

Like the robot mode, this is a slight twist on Windblade’s standard design, mainly due to the forward-swept wings, and the almost insect-thorax-like back end. Speaking of that, this is definitely a jet mode that’s strong at the front, and weak at the back, because that back end does nothing to pretend it isn’t a pair of folded-up wings, with some hands clearly hanging out of the sides, and her torso clearly visible from the bottom. At least the wings and cockpit look good.

Also, it holds together very well, and feels solid and blocky in-hand in a sort of 1986 G1-and-after kind of way that I find satisfying, especially compared to the fragile, fiddly nature of her original version.

For colors, she’s again, almost entirely red and blue, with the only variation being a clear yellow cockpit upfront. It’s just varied enough to avoid making her look plain.

For features, firstly, Scorchfire can ride in her cockpit, though she tends to rattle around unless you press her in properly. Windblade also has a single tiny tab on either side of her jet body, for Titan Masters to perilously stand on her.

Beneath her, she has a single landing-gear leg that folds out, to keep her balanced on your table.

Finally, her VTOL fans can rotate.

While it does look a bit silly, you can clip her swords onto her wings, as wing….blades. Or, put them on in reverse, and pretend they’re seeker-style null rays.

Their strangest feature, though, happens when you clip them together into one sword, which reveals a seat for a Titan Master to sit on, with the whole assembly clipping on above her cockpit.

As a seat, it’s kind of silly, but as a railgun, it’s pretty convincing.

Overall

While this is a definite improvement on Windblade’s Thrilling 30 release, it’s still kind of a flawed figure, between her strange proportions, too-simple altmode, and a few other small things. Still, there’s a lot to like about this figure. It’s pleasantly chunky, has a pair of cool weapons, and evokes the character herself really well.

I’d still recommend it in 2021 if you want a Windblade, and it still stands as the strongest version of her on the market.

Well, technically, her Takara Legends release is slightly better, coming with a little more paint, her classic sword and scabbard, and a Targetmaster partner, though I didn’t consider it enough of a difference to re-buy it, and if the Titans Return version is cheaper to obtain, go for it. Speaking of that, this figure is currently kind of expensive on the aftermarket (like 90 Canadian dollars on eBay!!) , so I’ll add the asterisk of “it’s good, but not break-the-bank-on-scalper-markup levels of good.”