Arcee's vehicle mode
is a futuristic sportscar, and is very accurate to her G1 cartoon mode--
yes folks, at long last, there's finally a transformable figure of G1 Arcee.
Given that it's a futuristic car, it's hard exactly to say how "accurate"
the proportions are, but largely they seem pretty good, though the wheels
are a bit tiny-- but hey, that IS futuristic in some respects. The middle
of the car does narrow in a slightly unsightly manner, though, and her
back end is a bit hollow, without any real rear grill or bumper-- you can
see some of her robot bits a bit back there, but it's not a huge deal.
What is a bigger deal is just how easily you can see most of her legs in
this mode; her hips look like the sides of the back portion well enough,
but the skinnier lower legs and knees are quite obvious from anything remotely
approaching a side view (though at least her feet are hidden behind the
front wheels). Otherwise this is a pretty nice mode, with the sweeping
curves you'd expect from her and relatively little mold detailing to emphasize
her more "toon-like" look and her speedy alt mode. There are two little
seats molded in behind her cockpit, though, which is a nice touch. Her
color scheme is primarily pink and white-- definitely very girly and not
at all your typical TF color scheme, though of course it's G1 accurate.
Thankfully the black accents help to give her a bit more contrast, and
the black looks great against both the pink and white (the bits of gray,
not so much against the pink). I LOVE the metallic blue used for Arcee's
headlights, and wish it was used more on the figure. Arcee also has a rather
nice shade of translucent aquamarine for her windshield and sword weapons,
and the blue goes fairly nicely with the color scheme in the bits that
it's used. Speaking of swords, Arcee has quite a lot of weapons for a deluxe--
she's got two translucent swords (likely inspired by her Animated
version), a medium-sized gun, and a small little gun. All of these
weapons have a rectangular peg to fit them in either one of the slots on
each side of this mode, or on the top of the back end (the guns have three
rectangular pegs each, making their storage options a bit more versatile
than the swords). All in all, pretty neat little accessories.
Arcee is quite the "shell-former",
with the robot hips and chest being the only pieces really shared between
both modes. On the plus side, this gives her a rather G1-accurate feminine
figure in robot mode (though the hips are a bit TOO wide, honestly); on
the downside, this means that her entire car mode is folded up behind her
back. The wheel bits poking out behind her shoulders are G1-accurate, but
the rest of the hollow shell of her vehicle mode just doesn't look great
on her back. The core proportions are MOSTLY good on her "core" robot mode
(excepting the aforementioned hips), with rather skinny and small lower
legs and arms, and a more-or-less proportional body-- though how square
her chest is compared to her otherwise curvy form is a bit odd. There's
also a noticeable black gap in between the front and back halves of her
waist, which is a little bit of an eyesore, but not that big of a deal.
Arcee has an excellent and extremely accurate headsculpt, complete with
a little paint on her lips for "lipstick", a kindly look on her face, and
excellent aquamarine light piping for her optics. Her articulation is about
average for a mainline deluxe; she can move at the neck, shoulders (at
two points), elbows, hips (at three points), knees (at two points), and
slightly back-and-forth at the ankles. Her dainty feet are rather small,
though, which can make her a bit more difficult to balance than your usual
deluxe (though given how much of a hollow "shell" it is, the car mode on
her back doesn't make her as back-heavy as you'd think). She still has
the rectangular holes on the sides of her hips for weapon storage, though
she also can hold any of her weapons in her hands or in rectangular holes
on the sides of her lower arms in this mode. There was a running change
made to her hands; the earliest releases had closed hands with fist holes,
whereas the later ones (pictured above) have her hands in a more open position;
however, there's a tiny little plastic nub that prevents one from inserting
the handles all the way in on the latter, which is annoying. She can still
hold them fairly steadily, at least.
Generations Arcee is
a toy that should have come out much, much earlier, but I'm glad it's finally
here for fans so they can have a transformable G1 Arcee toy in their collection.
All this said, although it's not bad by any means, Arcee's curvy robot
mode meant that some definite sacrifices had to be made; particularly in
terms of her odd chest piece, large backpack, and hip width in robot mode,
as well as the obvious robot legs in vehicle mode. She's still a decently
fun toy-- and her weapons help her in this respect immensely-- but as far
as Generations deluxes go, there's a lot of better molds out there.
Review by Beastbot