Arcee's motorcycle mode
is definitely recognizable as the motorcycle alt mode she has in the movie,
but there obviously is some sacrifices that had to be made to make a transformable
toy out of that design that was this small. The most obvious is that the
wheels aren't on the same axis-- one's slightly to the left (or the right,
depending on your viewpoint) from the other, so that both can "merge" together
for robot mode. It definitely looks off from any angle that isn't a directly
side-on view, but on the plus side, it means that Arcee can "stand up"
in vehicle mode without a kick stand. The rear third of this mode is also
too small, with a pretty big gap in between the exhaust pipe/seat piece
(which forms one of her robot arms) and the rear wheel-- it's pretty unsightly.
On one side of the motorcycle you can also see Arcee's robot chest details
just sticking out there, and her head can be seen tucked in behind her
windshield, but other than that at least the core body of the vehicle is
fairly solid. Unfortunately the color scheme still has that rather obnoxious
color of pinkish red that's present on all the RotF Arcee toys, and it
doesn't look any better here, though at least the black serves as a nice
contrast color against it. Unlike many Legends, Arcee also has a pretty
decent amount of paint detailing on her-- the "Cyberglyphic" marks on the
sides look nice, as do the silver bits on the headlights, lower section,
and robot mode chest, and the black paint on the handlebars and windshield.
In robot mode, Arcee's
accuracy to her movie design is honestly pretty good for such a small toy--
her wheel-foot is pretty well-done and she has the long snake-like waist,
but her upper body is pretty weak. Her right arm is overly blocky and a
bit cumbersome, and her left arm folds out from her windshield in the wrong
direction, and just looks really weird. My problems with the way her chest
and head are done aren't so much with the design as with the execution--
the mold detailing on Arcee is unusually bad. Even taking into account
all the little "fiddly bits" on the movie toys, her chest and head just
look like a clump of undiscernable details-- I wouldn't ever be able to
make out her face if it wasn't painted, for example, and it looks like
she has clown hair the way it is. Oddly, with all the detailing there,
besides the wheels the rest of her is oddly lacking in mold details-- the
detailing on her waist and lower arms is particularly simplistic, for example.
Arcee is decently articulated in most respects, given her design-- she
can move at the shoulder and elbow on the right arm; side-to-side at the
elbow on the left arm; and three points along her snake-like waist. Most
of those are ball joints, but her left arm is really a sore spot, given
how restricted its movement is. In addition, her "wheel-foot-stand" piece
doesn't work all that well, what with her being a fairly tall and skinny
design, so she can fall over rather easily.
You can tell Hasbro
tried their best to make Arcee doable at the Legends class scale-- her
robot mode, in particular, is quite accurate, even if the details of it
aren't pretty-- but her vehicle mode suffers quite a lot for it, and she
has kibble problems in both modes. Some designs just can not translate
well to this small of a scale; just save up and get the Fast
Action Battler version of the character instead.
Review by Beastbot