We are a few waves into Age of the Primes now, and it very much seems to have been business as usual. Aside from the Primes themselves, we've been getting a lot of G1 characters, Menasor style combiners, a splattering of other continuities, and a few more repaints than you might like. Yeah, it's basically Legacy again, but not that glorious first wave of Legacy United. The Primes themselves are doing alright, but they were definitely playing things safe. I mean, it's hard to look interesting or cool when you are in the same line as The Fallen, but being an alien carformer with an understated colour scheme wasn't, ahem, gonna set the world alight. Not when The Fallen did that just by standing still too long. Guess which two toys I might be referring to. Anyway. With Onyx Prime that started to change, he's a centaur BTW, and with today's subject we have possibly the most interesting deluxe of recent times. Unfortunately, Micronus gave me a wee case of Buyer’s Remorse, because he simply does not live up to that potential.
Now, Micronus Prime is the god of little guys, and a little guy himself, approximately core class in dimensions and complexity. As the name suggests, his domain is Mini-Cons and any small transformer that partners with another larger one. He's actually the third supernatural entity to have ties to Mini-Cons as a creator, the original being Unicron, although he's the one that's stuck. Micronus appeared in the 2015 Robots in Disguise series, which is now old enough to count as nostalgia, and this toy is very close to that depiction. He's got that very distinctive Prime-era face design, lacking a nose, and his translucent build evoking his look on the show. As a toy, he's somewhat basic, turning into what resembles an Armada style Mini-Con Storage Panel, an Arc Reactor, or less romantically, a hockey puck. The fact the the god of little guys and murder pets transforms into an abstract shape isn’t a shocker. RID2015's Mini-Cons often transformed as such so they could be launched from larger toys, see also cassetteformers, and especially those data disks from Fall of Cybertron. What brings it down is a design/production flaw on my copy that prevents his legs from lining up exactly right in disk mode, but there’s enough give in the plastic to make you think can get there. I would discover during the photoshoot that my attempts to do this seems to have caused stress marks in the knees; I should have known better. Then again, maybe it wasn't me, I've seen a report since that a toy came with that damage.
Anyways, Micronus is otherwise nicely articulated for his size, nicely presented, and has this little Chimera Stone artefact in lieu of a weapon. It plugs in via a 5mm peg, and I honestly kinda forget about it. He’s a lot like that Eject toy from a few years ago, and in isolation, you might wonder where the money is going if he just turns into a shape. The answer is, an exosuit.
If Micronus himself looks like a hockey puck, the exosuit he is packaged within looks like the goalie. This seems to have been created from whole cloth to justify the pricepoint, and my initial thought that this was a new take on the Apex Armour from Transformers: Prime, and while that is a stated influence by the designer, it's not actually named as such. There's apparently a bit of Pretender in there too, but I am reminded of a Prime-era exosuit playset in the chest. Visually, it makes for an interesting contrast between it and Micronus, or indeed Transformers in general. It's got a faintly anonymous head, gun fingers, and perhaps more a piloted mech look than Cybertronians in general. It's got a similar build to Micronus, so it's short for a deluxe, but it's stocky. It's also a lot more functional than Micronus is, because this is not only a deluxe-ish robot mode, it's also a bike for him to ride, and a weaponizer mode for use with other toys. It's the meat of the set. What I did notice though as I came to write this post, is that each mode has a disappointing near-miss quality to it. The robot lacks a waist joint, which I'm inclined to forgive under the circumstances, but the back kibble I'm less fond of. In a stroke of absolute genius, the legs compress into a single big wheel, but the resulting monobike lacks a kickstand and absolutely does not balance by itself. You have to bend the arms down at the elbow for balance, and that's about as involved as the arms get in the transformation. So, while having Micronus ride this is rather adorable, it's flawed. The weaponizer mode meanwhile is simply four chunks, which goes completely unmentioned on the box, and I'm not surprised. I can't be arsed to photograph it. And I can't be arsed to take better photos.
I want to like Micronus Prime more than I do. He's tied to one of my favourite Transformers concepts, and after dozens of routinely competent deluxes, he's actually interesting in concept. He is not, however, that great. Or good at anything in particular. Or interesting in execution. He's passable in lot of things, some of those things being notably unusual, but he doesn't excel at any of them. And its not even failing in any interesting way; I've written about some uneven toys in the past, but at least they sucked in memorable ways or charmed me beyond that. Micronus Prime falls instead into the pit of apathy. There is not some fundamental misunderstanding, a glaring fault, or a lack of creativity. Its a matter of mediocre execution, being neither good enough or bad enough to hold my attention. Mostly alright overall, but wait for a sale, and be careful of the translucent plastic.
