Bot Reviews: Transformers: Legends Voyager G2 Megatron with Noble

Generation 2 Megatron’s various technicolor tank toys were always so much more interesting than his usual greys and silvers. I’m glad the modern tradition has been that each new Megatron that changes into a tank gets his usual tired classic colors remixed into a wired 90’s homage at some point. Since I’ve looked at both Generations Selects Combat Megatron and G2 Megatron, I might as well go back and finish off the trio, with the first of these three vibrant Voyagers. This 2018 version of Megatron is from Legends, Takara’s catchall Generations-adjacent line that ran from Thrilling 30 to Titans Return. This particular figure is homaging Hero Megatron, his second Generation 2 toy from 1994, which scaled down the previous year’s tank design into a purple-camo’d Deluxe-height figure, with an air-bellow missile launcher.

That being said, this new figure is kind of a Russian nesting doll of homages. According to the manga it comes with, this is also simultaneously Beast Wars Megatron, and so contains homages to both Beast Wars and Beast Machines. 

As for the tooling itself, this is a repaint of Hasbro’s Titans Return Voyager Megatron, which had a few problems. This was in the middle of an awkward era where molds were not only pre-planned to be painted up as multiple characters, but were sculpted as a hybrid of the two characters, with details from each. So, this Megatron was also meant to serve as the tooling for Blitzwing, hence why he also had a jet mode. Meanwhile, his Titans Return release (which I had, but sold), was mostly cast in an unpainted plastic that was this kind of milky, whitish grey that washed out a lot of detail, and just did not look good.

Basically, this Legends version is an exercise in how much a new coat of paint can help fix a figure, and the answer is, quite a lot.

Titan Master

This is going by Japanese Transtector rules, so this little fellow is just Megatron himself (and also, might be Beast Wars Megatron, if you’re going by the Legends manga.) While it’s a little indistinct thanks to the size, the sculpt itself is actually based on Blitzwing,  what with the cockpit chest and goggles, but the helmet happens to look Megatron-like, so he passes the squint test well enough, especially with his colors. Unlike Scorchfire, Takara’s Titan Masters got that premium paint job, so he looks nice with his silver helmet, red visor, purple arms, and black torso, in a way that’s a lot like the original Beast Wars Megatron toy.

Aside from that, he’s the same as every other Titan Master, with shoulder, hip, and knee joints, though the knee joints on mine are oddly tight.

Fold him up, and you have a G1-style Megatron head that is an immediate example of Takara’s paint budget paying off.

All this color really highlights how this is a good headsculpt, with a mean mug, and nice colorful eyes. I particularly like the sculpted lines on his face. It’s good stuff, and it looks nice and vibrant with its silver helmet, lavender face, and red eyes.

Noble

So, this transforming accessory is something of an obtuse pull for this guy. Since he’s doubling as a Beast Wars Megatron homage, he comes with a tiny Beast Machines character. In that series, Megatron cast aside his organic components, only for them to form their own entity, a biological Transformer that changed between an eyeless dragon-like beast, and a humanoid wolf. In this case, this little version of the character is a repaint of the transforming accessory that came with Titans Return Fangry (one of the line’s single-packed Titan Master heads, which all came with transforming mounts like these).

Out of the box, he comes in his dragon mode, which itself hosts another homage (I told you, like a nesting doll). This four-legged dragon in red resembles TM2 Megatron more than Noble’s monster mode, making it a companion piece to Ape-X-Arms from Convobat, styled after Optimal Optimus.

No matter what he’s supposed to be, he looks good in cherry red, with bits of gold paintwork, and a silver Decepticon logo on his foreleg. He’s kind of adorable, though the sculpt’s a bit broken up by the big handle sticking out of his neck, and his hollow body where his altmode head hides.

He doesn’t do much in this mode, but all four of his legs have articulation at the body, though his back legs are on a fused joint. While you can move his wings and neck, they’re transformation joints that look unnatural in motion. Still, the whole thing looks nice.

As a feature in his form, Mini-Megs can ride on his back, albeit a bit shakily, and it forces the altmode head out of Noble’s torso a bit. Speaking of the altmode, to transform him, you stand him up, swap his head out, wad up the Titan Master and use him to fill in his torso.

See, on the Beast Machines show, Noble totally changed colors between modes. No toy could do this, so his Beast Machines Deluxe just had a dark blue head and torso, the rest of him still being red, so this is homaging that figure, specifically.

Honestly, this works really well as Noble, despite being sculpted as a tiny Fangry. Once again, the unlimited Takara paint budget adding pink to his nose, and silver beneath his eyes really helps. My only criticism for something this simple is you need to have a Titan Master to wad up in there for this mode to work at all, otherwise his torso is empty. Oh, and his dragon head is just hanging off of his back. And his tiny realistic hands kinda weird me out, I guess.

For his last feature, you can fold him up into a three-barrelled gun.

This is very much a “pretend really hard” mode, like the rest of these Titan Master accessories were, but it’s a neat extra. I wish that his handle actually pegged in, instead of hanging there loosely, but in practice, it doesn’t actually interfere with figures holding him. Anyway, finally, onto the main figure.

Tank Mode

Right out of the gate, this tank mode is a lot messier than Siege or Earthrise. It’s still recognizable as a tank, but it’s oddly proportioned, with its small cockpit, and full of chunks of other modes, like the jet wings trying to hide at the back and front of its treads. It’s not as much of a rock-solid slab as the later two tanks, and the fact that he feels light and airy thanks to the kinds of materials Prime Wars Trilogy figures were made out of doesn’t help.

That being said, the colors are doing some heavy lifting here, and they’re certainly lush. He’s a nice dark purple, with some black camo, bits of silver, and blue treads that pop nicely against the other colors, along with the clear blue screen on his turret. Niceness aside, the supposed camo deco is so split up by the panels and parts he’s made of that it isn’t really camo in most places, just random bits of black that are used in the other modes. He’s got no surface area for tampos or stickers either, forbidding him from homaging the labels on his original G2 tank. On top of that, I wish he had a bit of orange on him, to reference the bellows the G2 tank had. But all of that aside, none of it can stop that deco from, at a basic level, just looking good.

For features, the tank rolls on four tiny wheels beneath the sculpted-in treads, and the turret rotates, but does not raise. You can lift the clear blue plastic bit on the turret, and sit a Titan Master beneath it, with the blue acting as a windscreen.

He’s also got a second, oddly-shaped gun as an accessory that you can stash at the back of the tank, or you can mount it above the turret’s barrel, for a silly-looking double-barrel that can hold a second rider, since that odd shape is to incorporate Titan Master seating.

Transformation to Jet Mode

Years later, this transformation is still hard for me to figure out, thanks to all of the parts that flip, spin and rotate on struts, and all need to go a specific way.

I found myself referring back to the instructions, The most difficult part was figuring out what the heck to do with the tank mode’s treads, which I needed to use photos to solve.

Going back to the tank is a bit easier, though, simply because there’s a lot of clips and pegs that serve to guide everything to its correct position.

Jet Mode

A.k.a the mode that’s only here because of Blitzwing. Most of this mode is a pretty standard Seeker-esque fighter jet, with a familiar-looking cockpit, wings and tailfins. It’s trying really hard to look sleek and aerodynamic, but it’s burdened by having to carry folded-up tank treads (with visible fists) beneath each wing, and an entire tank turret for undercarriage.

To be fair, it feels like this was about as sleek-looking as they could get something with two other modes at this scale. On the other hand, it can be a challenge to get his folded up tank treads to stay in place, and they’re something I find myself fiddling with a lot

Again, the colors are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and his purple, black, and grey look really nice, along with the clear blue cockpit, giving me a vibe somewhere between “G1 Skywarp” and “G2 Ramjet.”

His jet’s top surface does get interrupted by an upside-down radical sticker, but that’s a choice I personally made (though, something’s going to be there upside-down regardless, even if it’s just a faction symbol)

For features, his underslung tank turret still rotates. More importantly, though, his Titan Master can now ride in his jet cockpit. Amusingly, instead of opening like a regular cockpit, it opens like a mouth eating the pilot.

Also, the pilot needs to keep their arms down in order to fit in, since it’s a tight squeeze.

For other features, you can take his extra gun and clip it to the back of his jet mode, for another weapon, and an incredibly dangerous seat.

If that wasn’t dangerous enough, he’s got a pair of tiny pegs on his jet body, for two more Titan Masters to stand on top of this presumably airborne and fast-moving jet.

Transformation to Robot Mode

Putting him into his robot mode is probably the easiest transformation he goes through, since it’s all about stuff unfolding instead of collapsing, and it’s a lot more intuitive and obvious than his tank and jet modes are. Still, the wing and turret parts on his back just kind of hang there, and I felt the need to check the instructions to verify that was really all I did with them.

Robot Mode

These colors are trying really hard to distract you from how weird his proportions are. Megatron’s got a strangely long torso, legs that are bit too short, gangly arms, and a pinhead, as well as the same kind of messy appearance his other modes have. On the plus side, his beefy torso and big arms almost make him look like a swollen bodybuilder, which kind of fits the attitude of the era he’s homaging.

In an attempt to make him less pinhead-y, you can pop out a couple of spring-loaded pylons on the sides of his head, though they’re meant to make him look more like Blitzwing, block his head articulation, and don’t really help anyway.

 

He’s also, as I mentioned above, kind of messy at the back, particularly with his folded-up wings that don’t lock down.

These colors are doing heavy lifting, again, featuring a lot more grey and silver, a bit of camo on the chest, and some new tiny bits of blue.

This is probably the mode with the best color balance, where every color compliments the others. And it all comes down to the focal point of his chest.

By default, he’s got a G1 Decepticon tampo on there, but he’s got optional stickers for G2 Decepticon or Beast Wars Predacon symbols, or what I went with, a big rectangular label loudly proclaiming that he rules, with tiny kill-count tally marks in the margins, homaging the original toy.

This one label almost makes the entire figure for me, it’s such a perfect expression of 90’s G2 cheese. Be careful if you’re applying it, though, it’s a foil sticker, so you’ve only got one shot to get it on straight, and get it on without air bubbles, or it’ll shred coming off.

His articulation is decent for the era, having most of the expected joints, but he lacks a waist, or ankle and wrist joints (not that those latter two were standard at this point). They’re all nice and tight, and despite his proportions, he’s pretty stable, thanks to the spurs on his ankles made of folded-up tailfin.

For accessories, you’re supposed to combine his two guns, and mount them on his arm as a G1-style fusion cannon. And it works, and looks alright.

But real G2 fans know that you need to mount that round cannon on his shoulder like the original toy, and put the other half in his hand to reference the original toy’s smaller gun.

Of the three Voyager G2 Megatrons, he’s the one that handles this feature the best.

Oh, also, he can hold Noble as an extra weapon.

Overall

On one hand, this version of Megatron’s messy in all three modes, all of which are just a little compromised. But considering all that the base mold was trying to do here (be a triple changer that could represent Megatron and Blitzwing at the same time on a mainline budget), it’s pretty admirable. And I keep bringing it up, but these lush G2 colors do a lot of heavy lifting to make the whole thing come together and work. This is definitely better than the G1-style Titans Return version, and probably better than either Blitzwing.

I’ll admit that the later Siege and Earthrise repaints are absolutely stronger base molds, when it comes to Mega-tanks, but this version is trying to do a heck of a lot more than his later two cousins, and that’s before getting into the layers of homages this repaint added (being a G2, Beast Wars, and Beast Machines homage) plus the extra features of the Titan Master, third mode, and weapon buddy, make him more interesting than the two later efforts to me. Being a Takara-only release from a few years back, he’s definitely rarer and costlier than the latter two, but I think he’s worth tracking down, if you can find him for a fair price. You gotta respect someone that has the confidence to tattoo his chest in a way that tells everyone he rules.