From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Voyager wave 30

Alpha Trion (Lion-unicorn, TFOne)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/VAlphaTrion

Wavemate is TFtM Thundercracker, a new Seeker mold. This year was kinda weird with two Voyager class Alpha Trions hitting around the same time, the
G1 version in Age of the Primes, and the TF One version in Studio Series. TF One was not the first time Alpha Trion was portrayed as something like a
robot lion, Titans Return gave him a pretty bad triple changer form with a lion-ish robot beast as one mode. Usually he's been a Cybertronian space
ship of some sort, but TF One went with a sort of lion/unicorn hybrid. The only toys this version got previously were a Robot Battler (minimal transformation and articulation) and a Prime Changer (kinda like Warrior
Class) from the movie line. The Studio Series toys from TF One have been trickling out very slowly.
https://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/One/Warrior1-2 for the Prime Changer version's review.
Note, in the TF One continuity, the Thirteen were powerful, but not the near-godlike beings that they are in the G1-aligned continuity. It hews more closely to the first IDW comics continuity, by having a lot of their
legendary status being the result of exaggeration over the long stretches of time.


CAPSULE

$43 price point.

Alpha Trion: Decent representation of the robot mode, although it needs more weathering paint. Transformation is kinda bad both directions, made
worse in my case because I think whoever assembled mine used a hydraulic
press or something. Altmode isn't worth the hassle, or really worth any hassle, much less this much hassle. Very mildly recommended, mostly good for never transforming and using as a painting project.


RANT

Packaging: Same as other 2025-26 Studio Series Voyagers with a plastic window box. The transformation steps cartouche on the upper left corner of
the box front has a sort of panther head for the altmode.
Note, technically there are no Autobots yet during the time shown in the movie, the packaging uses an Autobot symbol anyway to clarify that he's a
Good Guy.


"AUTOBOT": ALPHA TRION
Assortment: G1932
Altmode: Robot lion/unicorn mix
Transformation Difficulty: 26 steps
Previous Name Use: Gen:TR, TFOne, AotP, Cyberverse
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: TF One
Scene: Cave of the Last Stand

ALPHA TRION, the wisest and most noble of the Primes, is awoken by ORION PAX.

Packaging: Six ties hold the robot mode to the inner tray, and a clear rubber hand is wrapped taice around the chest. A plastic bag taped to the lower right of the inner tray holds the tail and energy spikes.
The instructions, loose behind the inner tray, start with how to
assemble all the energy bits into the robot's weapon. The scene on the upper left of the box back shows Orion Pax cautiously approaching the moss-covered inert form of Alpha Trion.

Robot Mode: Before I go into the usual details, I gotta talk about the moss and weathering. I have issues with the core engineering of this mold,
but the surface detailing is great. All kinds of pitting and warping and overgowth of moss...but that's just in the molding. The colors are way too clean, and only the moss on the hunchback and shoulders gets any paint.
There's so much unpainted detail, including places where the molded moss is growing over a painted bit so it ends up looking more like the figure melted instead of there being intentional details there. Like, yes, there's also a few too many parts that look completely clean, as if they planned to do a retool of pre-Quintesson Alpha Trion and didn't want to have to retool
anything but the purple sprues, but there's still more widespread and more consistent aging effects than I'd normally expect from Hasbro. (I might go back and repaint the robot mode later.)
6.75" (17cm) tall at the top of the non-broken helmet crest, which rises
a little above the hunchback. The colors are mostly dark gray, vibrant
purple, and magenta, with accents of pale gold, silver, and green moss. All
of the pieces that show aging, damage, or moss are made of purple plastic: head, shoulderpads, forearm armor, outer faces of the boots. (This suggests they might be planning for a Young Alpha Trion retool that just swaps out the purple sprue with a new purple sprue that lacks all the damage.) Magenta plastic is used for the chestplate, pelvis (except for the tail connection point), the inner faces of the boots, and the chunks that have the heels as well as back cuffs of the boots. The energy whip weapon is clear magenta plastic. Everything else visible in this mode is a slightly metallic dark
gray plastic.
As noted, all of the purple parts have some sort of molded damage or aging, with various cracked off parts or crumpling. The molded moss parts on the shoulderpads and hunchback are mostly painted a slightly glossy medium green, but unpainted on the forearms and boots. The outer surface of the heavily broken hunchback cover is mostly painted very pale gold with a
metallic magenta panel (with several dents) in the very back part. There's pale gold around the 5mm sockets on the shoulderpads and outer faces of the boots, as well as on the front toes and several details on the chestplate.
The face is silver with bright blue eyes. The outside surfaces of the
magenta boot parts are painted metallic purple in a not-great match to the plastic (it's too light), and the paint is also used on the belt buckle. The outer faces of the uppar arms are painted the same metallic magenta as the hunchback hatch.
The neck is a ball joint with the socket in the head and a good range of motion, the waist is a smooth swivel. Pinned hinge and swivel shoulders, swivels right above AND right below the hinge elbows (beast mode needs the
ones below the elbows), no wrist articulation. Pinned hinge and swivel hips, swivels just above (but not below) the hinge knees, the heel hinges have a little useful range of motion but the toe hinges are either stable in flat
foot mode or floppy. An unusual 2020s Voyager in that it lacks the instep hinges. There is one hinge on the butt used for beast mode, it's just the socket for the tail, and I suppose you could store the whip there.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, and there's 5mm sockets on the shoulderpads and the outer faces of the upper boots (in line with the knee hinges), plus
the one on the butt. There's a 3mm socket on the back of the belt, and technically 3mm sockets on the armpit side of each shoulder (the arms attach via peg to the sides in beast mode). There's 3mm studs on posts sticking out the sides of the torso under the armpit that connect to those sockets. I
guess if you have appropriate Fire Blasts you can give him explosive armpit hair or something. No connectors on the undersides of the feet.
The weapon looks like a tail (which it is) made of energon shards and spikes, 4.75" (12cm) long when fully assembled. It has a 5mm peg grip at one end, and the business end has four irregularly spaced 5mm sockets around the end and a fifth pointing out along the length of the tail tip. There's four short clear magneta spikes that plug into the side sockets, and a longer one (the unicorn horn) that goes into the very tip. The short ones are 1.0cm
long including the pegs, while the longer one is 18mm long.

Transformation: Getting the robot fists swapped out for beast claws is difficult, and odds are good the forearm armor pieces will pop off during the process (which at least makes things easier as long as you leave them off
until you're done swapping).
I figured out how to do the limbs (it's your basic "arms become
forelimbs, legs become hindlimbs" design), but I had to give up and look in
the instructions for how to open the torso up, as every single part I tried
to move was stuck so solidly it felt like I was going to just snap a part in two rather than open anything along a hinge. Even knowing what was supposed
to move, I had to risk breaking something anyway because it was attached so tightly.
Be careful removing the smaller spikes, it's hard to get a good grip on them and very easy to make them pop out and fly across the room. At least
they glow REALLY well under UV light, which can help you find them when this happens. Getting them out of the shoulders and hips when going back to robot mode is very difficult, I ended up having to bite them.
Going back to robot mode (where I think it's gonna stay, this transformation just sucks in both directions) the hard part is getting the beast head to stay inside the chest while everything else is forced together around it. It has to fold double around the neck strut, and there's
absolutely NO forgiveness in the alignment. I'll get the lower body core barely closed, then trying to snap the hunchback over it will make it pop
apart again. Putting the shoulders on shoves the chestplate off the tabs
it's supposed to connect to. I even tried removing the beast head entirely, but that didn't help. Eventually I figured out the real problem with BOTH directions of transformation was that someone had used a hydraulic press or something to push things together WAY too hard in order to make a tab on the top of the hunchback go into a slot on the back of the neck root piece, which made it very very hard to separate the first time. Checking the
instructions, those two pieces do not actually touch when correctly
transformed to robot mode, they're a good half centimeter apart. Still not a great design, but whoever put mine together managed to make it worse.

Beast Mode: A common problem with this sort of beast mode is that if there's nothing done to shorten the shins, the legs look all kinds of wrong. This toy has one of the more serious cases of this problem I've seen in some tiume...the robot shins need to lose almost two centimeters of length to make this look like anything but a person in a costume crawling around on hands
and knees. I was hoping that the higher price point would give them the
parts count to do a better job than the Prime Changer, but nope. Actually a little worse in that one regard. It also doesn't help that the head is stuck looking down unless you unpeg the neck, and looking more forwards past the hunchback isn't great either, aesthetically speaking.
Anyway, it's really just the robot on all fours with the head swapped
out, so the colors remain largely the same other than the head being magenta instead of gray. 8.25" (21cm) from horn tip to tail tip, but if you tried standing it up on the hind legs for a werelion mode it's only a little taller than the robot mode that way. The head is magenta plastic with a purple plastic crest that has the same broken horn as the robot head's crest. The forepaws are the same dark gray as the fists, and the revealed shins are also dark gray, as is the neck root piece. The only new paint in this mode is the beast eyes, which are bright blue, and the jaw hinges which are painted dark gunmetal in an attempt (mostly successful) to match the dark gray plastic.
If you leave it pegged in place, the neck is just an up-down hinge that shares a pin with the jaw hinge. However, if you unpeg it, the short strut ends on a ball joint with the socket inside the torso, giving a bit more
range of motion that's hampered by the hunchback. The tail root piece is on
a hinge so the tail can move up and down. Technically all of the limb articulation is retained, although the shoulders are intended to peg onto the sides and lock in place, while the rear legs can't do much other than stay maximally crouched (same issue as the Prime Changer version has). The
forepaws are hinged for transformation, but tabs are meant to lock them in place.
The shoulder and hip (at the knees in robot mode) 5mm sockets are meant
to be filled by short clear magenta spikes that were stored on the tail in robot mode, and there's a 5mm socket on the beast forehead to hold the longer spike as a unicorn-like horn. The tail attaches via the butt 5mm socket, so the only robot mode connection point not spoken for or covered up in this
mode is the 3mm socket which is on top of the butt ahead of the tail connection. The upper jaw has a 5mm arc carved in it so you can snap a 5mm
peg into it, I suppose you can risk losing the small spikes and put them in
the cheeks that way.

Overall: Leaving aside the fact mine seems to have been assembled with Excessive Force, it's just not a fun transformation in either direction, and it's one of the worse feline altmodes to come along in a while as far as proportions are concerned (like, worst since the triple changer Titans Return Alpha Trion, really). The Prime Changer from the movie line is better in general, this is skippable unless you really want a bigger version for
diorama purposes.

Dave Van Domelen, owns moss-texture paint that he mostly uses for miniatures bases, but will probably use it on this.
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