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Dave's Transformers Age of the Primes Rant: Leader wave 2

The Thirteen Onyx Prime (Winged Centaur/Dragon triplechanger)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/AoP/LOnyxPrime

Packed with reships. Where Megatronus got to be a Leader due to the importance of the character, I suspect this got the size class because accomplishing the transformation at any smaller class was impossible (and judging from TFWiki, they didn't exactly pull it off here either, fortunately
I got mine to work without any kitbashing).


CAPSULE

$55 price point, although likely going up if you buy it in 2026.

The Thirteen Onyx Prime: Bold design, three good modes and one glorified fan mode, but it really needed better QC than Hasbro seems able to enforce.
If I could be sure you'd get one that passed more checks than it failed, I'd recommend this. As it stands, one to pass on if your budget is tightening up in light of price hikes.


RANT

Packaging: Same basic size and trade dress as Megatronus, with the back showing all three official modes without actually naming them (I'm guessing it's supposed to be a griffon or hippogriff when fully beastified). The
relic inset is a staff labeled "TRIPTYCH MASK" which feels like a label that should go to what's on his face? Unless he holds it in front of his face
when transforming, I guess. The instructions add another altmode that is
more purely draconic than the beast mode shown on the box.
The art on the front shows robot and centaur modes, while the art on the left side shows the griffon mode. The little cartouche on the front clearly shows a griffon as the third mode, which I guess establishes what they think
it is. (Also, I will try to be consistent in my spelling of "griffon" in
this review, but there's more ways to spell it than the name Jared.)

Backstory: Onyx Prime is in that middle ground of having appeared some
in media in this form (more or less), without being particularly prominent.
To be precise, he had a few lines in the IDW G1 comics before he was killed
and his identity stolen by a time-displaced Shockwave. This contradicts his Covenant of Primus backstory, but the IDW continuity tended to treat that as
a pile of lies told by Alpha Trion for Reasons. Either way, Onyx was the patron of beastmode Cybertronians, hence the Power of the Primes version
being a pack-in with Titan Class Predaking.
In addition to the intentional contradictions, the highly spiky and busy art of the Covenant tended to obscure the fact that the original design was a centaur, and some of the comics art portrayed Onyx as bipedal. This was
later retconned by the comics into being a clue, the bipedal version being Shockwave in disguise (he couldn't fake the extra legs) and the quadruped
being the original. This toy splits the difference and lets you choose
either number of legs for "robot" mode, with the griffon and dragon being purely altmodes.

Multiformer note: Once you get more than two official altmodes, things start to drift a bit, since some of the official modes are going to require more imagination than others, at which point you enter Gigatron territory of being able to make as many modes as you want. Basically, Onyx Prime is a robot, a sattigarian centaur, or various mythical beafties.

Apropos of nothing, I gotta say this toy has a very Saint Seiya vibe
going on.


THE THIRTEEN: ONYX PRIME
Assortment: G0488
Altmodes: Centaur, Griffon, Dragon, Etc.
Transformation Difficulty: 12 steps (robot to centaur), 19 steps (centaur to
griffon), 8 steps (griffon to dragon)
Previous Name Use: None that was sold separately
Previous Mold Use: None
Origin Universe: G1/Aligned

Packaging: Four double ties (two crossed over the torso, one on each
wing) and three single ties (waist, shins) hold the robot to the tray. The folded up tail/bow piece is held in the lower right by a tray fold, the spear shaft is held very securely in the upper left by a tray corner fold, and a
pair of ties hold the spearhead in the lower left corner.
The package renders show the bow as being golden plastic, but the actual toy uses unpainted black plastic for that piece. There's a few other color disagreements, but they can be chalked up to playing with brightness and contrast levels.
The "get it in proper robot mode" instructions seem to assume the robot head would end up tilted too far back, but forget to mention the heel spurs.

Robot Mode: Aside from the hooved digitigrade legs, this really looks
like it stepped out of the Saint Seiya (aka Knights of the Zodiac) series,
with metallic armor themed after Classical Zodiac characters, and lots of
wings and spikes and swooping details. The figure has a vaguely horse-like tail, and horse forelimbs draped over the torso like backpack straps. In
terms of colors, I expect they were going for a sort of aged bronze look,
most of the figure only very faintly metallic but of a design that suggests
it was once highly polished. The wings have distinct elbows with some
feathers attached to the "forearm" parts and some to the upper parts, which lets them furl or spread. Robot mode is supposed to have them furled, with parts meshing well enough to make them look plausibly like single pieces.
While the feathers are blades, there's fur detailing along the leading edges
of the upper pieces, and on the back there's a more bat-like membrane molded
on the upper (and when furled, outer) parts. If you unfurl the wings,
there's more bat fingers and membranes, which is weird since on a bat wing
the lower part is just membrane with no fingers...the wings have two thumbs
and eight fingers each, he's kinda messed up that way.
The exact height depends on how much you straighten the horse-like legs, but if you pose them using the mid-range ratchet points (see below), the
figure is 7.25" (18.5cm) tall at the head, fairly typical for modern Leaders. The wingspan maxes out at about 10.5" (27cm) but in the recommended furled configuration folded back at the middle notch of the root hinges the width is closer to 6.5" (16.5cm). The wings work pretty much the same in all modes, with centaur mode preferring maximum span. The colors are mostly faintly metallic bronze, dark brown, and black, with accents in silver and
yellow-gold. There's black plastic on the hands, front hooves on the chest, the hips of those horse limbs that end up in the armpit area, and the tail.
A dark gunmetal plastic that looks black under normal room lighting is more common, used on the spear haft, shoulder joints, hip joints, backpack core, robot shins (the short bits between the knees and the "backwards knees" ankles), heel spurs, the hinge behind the chestplate, and a bit of the
mid-leg of the horse forelimbs wrapped over the torso. A darkish brown
plastic with faint metalflakes in it is used for the back pieces of the
wings, the upper arms, the center of the chest, and the beast head stuck on
the back. The "feathers" of the wings are blade shapes made of rubbery dark brown plastic, held sandwiched at their roots between the brown backplates mentioned earlier and brown front plates on the top sections but bronze front plates on the lower sections. The big spearhead is also made of this rubbery brown plastic, although it's thick enough to not feel as floppy as the feathers. (Note, the feather blades can warp a little and make it a minor hassle to fold the wing parts back together after being extended.)
Everything else is slightly metalswirled dull bronze plastic.
The most obvious paint is silver, which is on the face, the top of the chest, the fetlocks of the hooves on the chest, much of the front armor
skirt, the kneespikes, and a pair of spikes at the "thumb" location atop each wing. There's a yellowy pale gold paint (that looks silver under low light)
on the beak and teeth of the mask, the center of the chest, the centerline of the pelvis skirt, details on one side of the spearhead (the three panels of
the triptych?), details on the shoulderpads, round parts on the wing
"elbows," and either side of the high ankles. Dull bronze paint (a little
more metallic than the plastic) is used on the center of the chestplate, and the fronts of the feathers but it fades away towards the feather tips. The front of the rigid feather holder in the top section of each wing is also painted bronze. There's brown paint (not metallic at all) on parts of the helmet. Both the robot eyes and the eyes of the helmet are red. Onyx's
sigil is printed in gold on the collar where the spear haft enters the spearhead. The hooves on the robot feet are painted gloss black.
The neck shaft is hinged at the bottom and a ball joint with the socket
in the head at the top. The waist is a smooth swivel, but since the armor skirt in front and back is attached to the abdomen, it keeps the waist from doing more than wiggle unless you lift both skirt pieces up all the way. The wings have shoulders that bend back in the flapping direction with three
stable positions (0 degrees, 45 degrees, straight back) as well as hinges
that let them sort of shrug a little. The elbows of the wings are hinges
with about 90 degrees of range. The arms have pinned hinge and swivel shoulders, with shoulderpads that are hinged to lift up as the arms do, but
are otherwise attached to the shoulders so they rotate with the arms. Bicep swivels (mine have issues, see below), elbow hinges, wrist swivels, and a mitten joint for the fingers. Hinge and swivel hips secured with screws
rather than pins, upper thigh swivels, hinge knees that are mostly smooth but have a single stable ratchet position about halfway through their range, high digitigrade hinge ankles that similarly have a single stable notch halfway through their range, and ankle hinges to keep the feet flat. (Disclaimer: horses are actually unguligrade, not digitigrade, but the addition of heel spurs on the robot mode I think makes the legs digitigrade.) I suppose one other point of articulation is the helmet visor, which can snap shut over the face to create a more bestial head for centaur mode.
The hands can hold 5mm pegs with or without the fingers closed over
them, but there's also slots in the inner faces of the fingers to allow the tabs on the spear or the bow (tail) to attach. It's kinda awkward using this to hold the spear, though. There's similar slots on the backs of the wings near the shoulder hinges for storage of the spear in pretty much every mode, plud one on the back of the pelvis and another on the inside of the buttskirt for storing the tail in different modes (this does mean that the tail can be held very awkwardly in either hand as a sword or something without opening it up into bow mode). There's 5mm sockets in the undersides of the heel spurs, but don't trust them to handle much torque as they're not pinned hinges.
BTW, for those curious about the tabs and slots for purposes of making accessories, the tabs are 2.0mm by 5.0mm, although some of the slots are a tight fit (or made of rubbery plastic so they can flex a bit).
The spear, which becomes an arrow in centaur mode and is supposedly the Triptych Mask, is made of a fairly simple haft and a very ornate head that
does plausibly look like three pointy masks stacked on top of each other.
Well, not anthropomorphic face masks, more abstract like the weirder Bionicle masks. The spearhead piece is a single chunk of slightly flexible brown plastic that is almost the same on front and back, with two main differences. The connecting collar has a 2mm by 5mm slot on one side, and that side has no paint (I probably have a paint close enough to the right shade to fix that part, though). The slot is there for fold up storage mode, attaching it to
one of the tabs on the shaft. The spearhead is a little over 3" (just under 8cm) long on its own with a 5mm socket at the base. The shaft is mostly
smooth with a diameter of 5mm, with a small collar at the top end, and a sort of cross piece of 2mm by 5mm tabs on either side about 2cm from the top end. The bottom end is a sort of blunt spike that narrows again where it meets the shaft (I am resisting making a comparison to the shape of other things, but IYKYK). The shaft is about 4.75" (12cm) long, and the combined spear is a little over 7.5" (19.5cm) long. There is enough room between the tabs and
the collar at top for the robot to grip this part of the haft without using
the finger slot, and the figure has sufficient range of motion for a
two-handed grip.

Unfortunately for a large toy like this, there's a lot of issues
regarding the joints and connectors, making it too easy for parts to fall off or the figure to fall over. I don't have the same problems listed on the TFWiki page, which suggests it's less a consistent issue and more a matter of really bad quality control even by Hasbro standards. Problems I encountered included, but are not limited to: bicep swivels popping out really easily
when trying to work one of the stiffer joints in the arms, hip hinges are
very loose (tightening the screws does nothing, I'll probably have to
dismantle the joint entirely and thicken something), the hooves don't stay tabbed in place on the chest and rely on the hinge friction of the centaur forelegs to remain where they're intended, heel spurs will pop out entirely
if forced more than a little bit past flat feet angle.

Transformation: Other than pushing the robot face up to close the
"mouth" of centaur mode, I figured out that particular transformation without needing the instructions, just the package render. Hexapod griffon was similarly reasonably intuitive, although the robot arm bicep swivel issue reared its annoying head during the process. The fourth mode is more or less just putting the centaur forelimbs back in something like their robot mode position. In fact, it's pretty quick to go directly between bipedal robot
and quadrupedal dragon.
As with a lot of beastformers, most of the transformation involves repositioning limbs, although this one has the added step of bending the
torso to get centaur mode. Probably the trickiest bit by intent is that the robot shoulders need to be moved back and forth on extra hinges to let the centaur forelegs move in and out of their robot/dragon mode positions.
During this, there's a good chance the biceps will pop, or the shoulderpads. There's a lot of stuff that probably would work better with pinned hinges rather than snap-on.

Centaur Mode: So, the Thirteen were originally envisioned as a sort of zodiac for Cybertronians, and in unpublished work characters got a sort of horoscope reading based on the Primes. However, for the most part the
Thirteen did not map obviously onto any human zodiac...but here's the glaring exception. A bow-wielding winged centaur? Yeah, this is Sagittarius. If robot mode is the most blatantly "Knights of the Zodiac," then this is the
most straight up "Classical Zodiac" in appearance. For best stability, bend the knees and ankles of the robot legs (now the rear legs) as far as they'll go. There really isn't anything to do about the skinny chest, though, and
the removal of the forelegs from the torso also makes the wings look absurdly far back from the rest of the torso. Just standing there, the height at the head is about 6.5" (16.5cm) with the wings being unfolded to reach a total height of 9" (23cm).
Yeah, as neat as the CONCEPT of this mode may be, the execution is kinda lacking. The hind legs need to be collapsed all the way, so their
articulation is functionally nil, although at least it's stable enough that
one foreleg can be lifted up without the figure falling over. The tail unfolding into a bow and being held using the finger slot on the right hand while the arrow/staff attaches on the underside using another 2x5 tab and
slot was clever and lets the figure hold it as if nocking an arrow, but the arrow isn't centered on the bow, and the lack of a hinge on the wrist makes
it hard to find good poses other than the one on the box.
No new plastics or paints, and while the forelimbs do have lots of
joints (pinned hinge and swivel hips, pinned hinge knees and high ankles, pinned hinge hooves) there's only so much you can do with them unless you use external support on the figure. A rearing up pose is possible if you're careful, though, and folding out the robot mode heel spurs can help a bit
with it. http://www.dvandom.com/images/OnyxRearing.JPG (and this is
obviously going to be taller than 9"/23cm total).
The bow is just the unfolded tail (I need a knife to do this, my nails aren't strong enough) with no paint, total length is 7.75" (19.5cm). It's really only meant to be held in the right hand using a tab on the top near
the center hinge, and there's a slot on the other limb a centimeter or so
from the hinge for attaching one of the spear's tabs. You just sort of hover the left hand near the back of the shaft as best as you can to look like it's holding the arrow nocked on an invisible string. Hopefully the arrow has boomeranging abilities, otherwise he's throwing his relic away. If you want
to just stick with the spear, put the tail in the same place the griffon and dragon modes use, rather than leaving it in its robot mode position.

Griffon Mode: This is a hexapod...eight-limbed if you count the wings. Like the centaur, it's only stable in a limited range of limb poses,
especially if you want to get limbs of three different lengths to cooperate. Frankly, I'm not even sure why this is an official mode, it really feels like
a fan mode on the way between centaur and "dragon" modes. The robot head is covered up by the chestplate, which helps some, but it leaves the sides open
in this mode (the centaur forelimbs cover up the sides in dragon mode). In terms of articulation, the robot shoulders are bit limited because the transformation hinges are folded all the way forwards to make room for the centaur forelegs as a second set of legs, but since only three legs really
need to be on the surface at once you have more possibilities for where the other legs go. In this mode, the tail is attached directly to the back of
the pelvis, which would get in the way for robot mode.
9.25" (24cm) from snout to tail tip, the beast head is more draconic
than anything else, with two fangs on top and on bottom, multiple curving
horns (well, maybe two horns and a central crest), and a pair of spikes on
each cheek. It's all brown plastic, with red eyes, silver fangs, and the
pale gold paint on the cheek spikes and a trapezoid on the forehead. The
neck is a ball joint, the jaw is hinged. The neck is dull bronze plastic
with no paint, with a transformation hinge to lift up but unable to go down
far enough to really hide the robot head.

Dragon Mode: This is really just Griffon mode with the middle set of
legs tucked away. Looks better, in my opinion, not just because of the weirdness of the extra legs...folding them into the torso fills it out
nicely. The forelimbs (robot arms) regain full range of motion, although now you have to be careful about positioning the one that's touching down if you want the other lifted. This mode has the same dimensions as griffon mode, it just has the middle set of legs folded up to flesh out the torso.

Overall: It takes some practice to get it to be stable in most of the modes, and the mold does seem to be plagued by random joint issues (same, dude), but if it shoots for the stars and falls short it at least flies.
Hard to recommend a potential QC crapshoot for this price, if your budget is tight you might want to pass on this one.


Dave Van Domelen, has another whole pile of Transformers from Pulse arriving this weekend, so much for making a dent in the To Be Reviewed pile.


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